In private intercourse Beddoes was the least morbid of human beings.  His mind was like one of those Gothic cathedrals of which he was so fond—­mysterious within, and filled with a light at once richer and less real than the light of day; on the outside, firm, and towering, and immediately impressive; and embellished, both inside and out, with grinning gargoyles.  His conversation, Kelsall tells us, was full of humour and vitality, and untouched by any trace of egoism or affectation.  He loved discussion, plunging into it with fire, and carrying it onward with high dexterity and good-humoured force.  His letters are excellent:  simple, spirited, spicy, and as original as his verse; flavoured with that vein of rattling open-air humour which had produced his school-boy novel in the style of Fielding.  He was a man whom it would have been a rare delight to know.  His character, so eminently English, compact of courage, of originality, of imagination, and with something coarse in it as well, puts one in mind of Hamlet:  not the melodramatic sentimentalist of the stage; but the real Hamlet, Horatio’s Hamlet, who called his father’s ghost old truepenny, who forged his uncle’s signature, who fought Laertes, and ranted in a grave, and lugged the guts into the neighbour room.  His tragedy, like Hamlet’s, was the tragedy of an over-powerful will—­a will so strong as to recoil upon itself, and fall into indecision.  It is easy for a weak man to be decided—­there is so much to make him so; but a strong man, who can do anything, sometimes leaves everything undone.  Fortunately Beddoes, though he did far less than he might have done, possessed so rich a genius that what he did, though small in quantity, is in quality beyond price.  ‘I might have been, among other things, a good poet,’ were his last words.  ‘Among other things’!  Aye, there’s the rub.  But, in spite of his own ‘might have been,’ a good poet he was.  Perhaps for him, after all, there was very little to regret; his life was full of high nobility; and what other way of death would have befitted the poet of death?  There is a thought constantly recurring throughout his writings—­in his childish as in his most mature work—­the thought of the beauty and the supernal happiness of soft and quiet death.  He had visions of ‘rosily dying,’ of ‘turning to daisies gently in the grave,’ of a ‘pink reclining death,’ of death coming like a summer cloud over the soul.  ‘Let her deathly life pass into death,’ says one of his earliest characters, ‘like music on the night wind.’  And, in Death’s Jest Book, Sibylla has the same thoughts: 

          O Death!  I am thy friend,
    I struggle not with thee, I love thy state: 
    Thou canst be sweet and gentle, be so now;
    And let me pass praying away into thee,
    As twilight still does into starry night.