April 30, 1852, 11.30 P.M.

I have just returned from giving my lecture at the Royal Institution, of which I told you in my last letter. ["On Animal Individuality” “Scientific Memoirs” volume 1 page 146 cp. supra.]

I had got very nervous about it, and my poor mother’s death had greatly upset my plans for working it out.

It was the first lecture I had ever given in my life, and to what is considered the best audience in London.  As nothing ever works up my energies but a high flight, I had chosen a very difficult abstract point, in my view of which I stand almost alone.  When I took a glimpse into the theatre and saw it full of faces, I did feel most amazingly uncomfortable.  I can now quite understand what it is to be going to be hanged, and nothing but the necessity of the case prevented me from running away.

However, when the hour struck, in I marched, and began to deliver my discourse.  For ten minutes I did not quite know where I was, but by degrees I got used to it, and gradually gained perfect command of myself and of my subject.  I believe I contrived to interest my audience, and upon the whole I think I may say that this essay was successful.

Thank Heaven I can say so, for though it is no great matter succeeding, failing would have been a bitter annoyance to me.  It has put me comfortably at my ease with regard to all future lecturings.  After the Royal Institution there is no audience I shall ever fear.

May 9.

The foolish state of excitement into which I allowed myself to get the other day completely did for me, and I have hardly done anything since except sleep a great deal.  It is a strange thing that with all my will I cannot control my physical organisation.

[To his sister.]

April 17, 1852.

...I fear nothing will have prepared you to hear that one so active in body and mind as our poor mother was has been taken from us.  But so it is...

It was very strange that before leaving London my mother, possessed by a strange whim, as I thought, distributed to many of us little things belonging to her.  I laughed at her for what I called her “testamentary disposition,” little dreaming that the words were prophetic.

[The summons to those of the family in London reached them late, and their arrival was made still later by inconvenient trains and a midnight drive, so that all had long been over when they came to Barning in Kent, where the elder Huxleys had just settled near their son James.]

Our mother had died at half-past four, falling gradually into a more and more profound insensibility.  She was thus happily spared the pain of fruitlessly wishing us round her, in her last moments; and as the hand of Death was upon her, I know not that it could have fallen more lightly.

I offer you no consolation, my dearest sister; for I know of none.  There are things which each must bear as he best may with the strength that has been allotted to him.  Would that I were near you to soften the blow by the sympathy which we should have in common...