As the
carriage drew up in front of Darwin's pleasant country-house, clad in a
vesture of ivy and embowered in elms, there stepped out to meet me from
the shady porch, overgrown with creeping plants, the great naturalist
himself, a tall and venerable figure with the broad shoulders of an
Atlas supporting a world of thoughts, his Jupiter-like forehead highly
and broadly arched, as in the case of Goethe, and deeply furrowed by
the plow of mental labor: his kindly, mild eyes looking forth under the
shadow of prominent brows; his amiable mouth surrounded by a copious
silver-white beard. The cordial, prepossessing expression of the whole
face, the gentle, mild voice, the slow, deliberate utterance, the
natural and _naive_ train of ideas which marked his conversation,
captivated my whole heart in the first hour of our meeting, just as
his great work had formerly, on my first reading it, taken my whole
understanding by storm. I fancied a lofty world sage out of Hellenic
antiquity--a Socrates or Aristotle--stood alive before me. Our
conversation, of course, turned principally on the subject which lay
nearest the hearts of both--on the progress and prospects of the history
of development.
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