He took a great deal
of active exercise in the open air; he read much. He taught his
nephew, whom he did not send to school. He regained, in fuller
measure than ever, his old delightful charm of conversation, and
his humour, which had always been predominant in him, took on a
deeper and a richer tinge; but whereas in old days he had been
brilliant and epigrammatic, he was now rather poetical and
suggestive; and whereas he had formerly been reticent about his
emotions and his religion, he now acquired what is to my mind the
profoundest conversational charm--the power of making swift and
natural transitions into matters of what, for want of a better
word, I will call spiritual experience. I remember his once saying
to me that he had learnt, from his intercourse with his village
neighbours, that the one thing in the world in which every one was
interested was religion; "even more," he added, with a smile, "than
is the one subject in which Sir Robert Walpole said that every one
could join."
I do not suppose that his religion was of a particularly orthodox
kind; he was impatient of dogmatic definition and of ecclesiastical
tendencies; but he cared with all his heart for the vital
principles of religion, the love of God and the love of one's
neighbour.
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