[Footnote C:  The words he uses are,—­“To the memory of my mother I consecrate this volume.”]

Mr. Buckle characterized as the sublimest passage in Shakspeare the lines in the “Merchant of Venice,”—­

      “Look how the floor of heaven
  Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold! 
  There’s not the smallest orb which thou behold’st
  But in his motion like an angel sings,
  Still quiring to the young-eyed cherabims: 
  Such harmony is in immortal souls! 
  But whilst this muddy vesture of decay
  Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.”

Mr. Thayer suggested the similarity between the closing part of this passage, about our deafness to the music of the stars, owing to the “muddy vesture,” and the sonnet of Blanco White which speaks of the starry splendors to which our eyes are blinded by the light of day:—­

  “Mysterious Night! when our first parent knew
  Thee, from report divine, and heard thy name,
  Did he not tremble for this lovely frame,
  This glorious canopy of light and blue? 
  Yet ’neath the curtain of translucent dew,
  Bathed in the rays of the great setting flame,
  Hesperus with the host of heaven came,
  And lo! creation widened in man’s view. 
  Who could have thought such darkness lay concealed
  Within thy beams, O Sun? or who could find,
  Whilst fly and leaf and insect stood revealed,
  That to such countless orbs thou mad’st us blind? 
  Why do we, then, shun Death with anxious strife? 
  If Light can thus deceive, wherefore not Life?”

Mr. Buckle seemed to be struck by the comparison.  He proceeded to speak of Blanco White’s memoirs as painfully interesting, and said that he had always liked Archbishop Whately for adhering to White after the desertion of the latter by old friends on account of his change of belief.

* * * * *

The next few days were occupied in preparations for the voyage up the Nile in company with my New York friends.  Mr. Buckle had very kindly taken great interest in our plans, and had earnestly advised me to go.  “You will do very wrong indeed,” he said, “if you do not go.”  On the 19th of February we embarked; and as we saluted his boat, lying just below us in the Nile, while our own shoved off, I little thought that I should never see him again,—­that his brilliant career was so shortly to come to an untimely end.  The serious conversation just recorded was the last in which I took part with him.

Mr. Buckle remained in Cairo until the beginning of March, when he set out with the two boys, and Mr. J.S.  Stuart Glennie, across the Desert, for Sinai and Petra.  Greatly improved in health by the six weeks in the Desert, (according to Mr. Glennie’s letter,) he undertook the more fatiguing travelling on horseback through Palestine.  He fell ill on the 27th of April, but recovered his health, as it seemed, to such an extent that Mr. Glennie parted from him on the 21st of May.  On the 29th of May, at Damascus, Mr. Buckle died.  Among the incoherent utterances of his illness, it was possible to distinguish the exclamation, “Oh, my book, my book, I shall never finish my book!”