Of Browning, Huxley said]:  “He really has music in him.  Read his poem “The Thrush” and you will see it.  Tennyson said to me,” [he added], “that Browning had plenty of music in him, but he could not get it out.”

Eastbourne, October 15, 1892.

My dear Tyndall,

I think you will like to hear that the funeral yesterday lacked nothing to make it worthy of the dead or the living.

Bright sunshine streamed through the windows of the nave, while the choir was in half gloom, and as each shaft of light illuminated the flower-covered bier as it slowly travelled on, one thought of the bright succession of his works between the darkness before and the darkness after.  I am glad to say that the Royal Society was represented by four of its chief officers, and nine of the commonalty, including myself.  Tennyson has a right to that, as the first poet since Lucretius who has understood the drift of science.

We have heard nothing of you and your wife for ages.  Ask her to give us news, good news I hope, of both.

My wife is better than she was, and joins with me in love.

Ever yours affectionately,

T.H.  Huxley.

[On his way home from the funeral in Westminster Abbey, Huxley passed the time in the train by shaping out some lines on the dead poet, the form of them suggested partly by some verses of his wife’s, partly by Schiller’s

Gib diesen Todten mir heraus,
Ich muss ihn wieder haben [Don Carlos, scene 9.],

which came back to his mind in the Abbey.  The lines were published in the “Nineteenth Century” for November 1892.  He declared that he deserved no credit for the verses; they merely came to him in the train.

His own comparison of them with the sheaf of professed poets’ odes which also appeared in the same magazine, comes in a letter to his wife, to whom he sent the poem as soon as it appeared in print.]

I know you want to see the poem, so I have cut it and the rest out of the “Nineteenth” just arrived, and sent it.

If I wore to pass judgment upon it in comparison with the others, I should say, that as to style it is hammered, and as to feeling human.

They are castings of much prettier pattern and of mainly poetico-classical educated-class sentiment.  I do not think there is a line of mine one of my old working-class audience would have boggled over.  I would give a penny for John Burns’ thoughts about it.  (N.B.—­Highly impartial and valuable criticism.)

[He also wrote to Professor Romanes, who had been moved by this new departure to send him a volume of his own poems:—­]

Hodeslea, November 3, 1892.

My dear Romanes,

I must send you a line to thank you very much for your volume of poems.  A swift glance shows me much that has my strong sympathy—­notably “Pater loquitur,” which I shall read to my wife as soon as I get her back.  Against all troubles (and I have had my share) I weigh a wife-comrade “treu und fest” in all emergencies.