His thoughts were often of death, but not on that account gloomy.  Reading in his Marcus Aurelius, he said to himself that the Stoic Emperor must, after all, have regarded death with some fear:  else, why speak of it so persistently, and with such marshalling of arguments to prove it no matter for dread?  Dymchurch never wished to shorten his life, yet, without other logic than that of a quiet heart, came to think more than resignedly of the end towards which he moved.  He was the last of his family, and no child would ever bear his name.  Without bitterness, he approved this extinction of a line which seemed to have outlived its natural energies.  He, at all events, would bear no responsibility for suffering or wrongdoing in the days to come.

The things which had so much occupied him during the last year or two, the state of the time, its perils and its needs, were now but seldom in his mind:  he felt himself ripening to that “wise passiveness,” which, through all his intellectual disquiet, he had regarded as the unattainable ideal.  When, as a very young man, he exercised himself in versifying, the model he more or less consciously kept in view was Matthew Arnold; it amused him now to recall certain of the compositions he had once been rather proud of, and to recognise how closely he had trodden in Arnold’s footprints; at the same time, he felt glad that the aspiration of his youth seemed likely to become the settled principle of his maturity.  Nowadays he gave much of his thought to Wordsworth, content to study without the desire of imitating.  Whether he could do anything, whether he could bear witness in any open way to what he held the truth, must still remain uncertain; sure it was that a profound distrust of himself in every practical direction, a very humble sense of follies committed and dangers barely escaped, would for a long time make him a silent and solitary man.  He hoped that some way might be shown him, some modest yet clear way, by following which he would live not wholly to himself; but he had done for ever with schemes of social regeneration, with political theories, with all high-sounding words and phrases.  It might well prove that the work appointed him was simply to live as an honest man.  Was that so easy, or such a little thing?

Walking one day a mile or two from home, in one of those high-bowered Somerset lanes which are unsurpassed for rural loveliness, he came within sight of a little cottage, which stood apart from a hamlet hidden beyond a near turning of the road.  Before it moved a man, white-headed, back-bent, so crippled by some ailment that he tottered slowly and painfully with the aid of two sticks.  Just as Dymchurch drew near, the old fellow accidentally let fall his pipe, which he had been smoking as he hobbled along.  For him this incident was a disaster; he stared down helplessly at the pipe and the little curl of smoke which rose from it, utterly unable to stoop for its recovery.  Dymchurch, seeing the state of things, at once stepped to his assistance.