My grandfather had travelled abroad but little during his strenuous life. He had, it is true, been to Paris in 1850, accompanied by Mr Charles Macaulay, Dr John Sutherland, and Mr (afterwards Sir Henry) Rawlinson, on business connected with the General Board of Health scheme for extra-mural sepulture, but, except on that occasion, he had not left England.
So that when in 1857 he was asked to join a party of three proceeding to Milan for the purpose of examining the irrigation works of that city, he gladly undertook the journey, which was to lead them viâ Marseilles and along the Cornice Road, then traversed by carriage only. The beauty of Italy thus came before him with full freshness at the age of seventy, and he returned strengthened and invigorated.
The following year my grandfather lost his wife. She died at The Pines, at Weybridge, after a short illness, in the summer of 1858.
Two years later he was able to carry out his cherished hope of returning to Italy, and we went to Florence, where his daughter Emily had been living for some years. She welcomed us to the rooms she had secured in an old palace beyond the Arno—to the artistic Italian surroundings of which she had added something of the atmosphere of an English home.
His delight in the art and nature of Florence and its environs was intense, and the beauty of land and sky seems to make a fitting setting for the end of such a life as his.
He stood on the old jeweller's bridge, one autumn evening late in November, and watched the sun go down behind the western hill of the rushing Arno; and the sunset of his own life came soon after. Perhaps he had lingered too long gazing at this beautiful scene; for a chill, producing rapid bronchitis, took him from us on the 10th December 1861.
Towards the end, when he knew he was passing away, after other gentle loving words, almost his last were—with a sweet triumphant smile—"Draw up the blind and let me see the stars; for I still love the beauty."
At the cemetery at Porta Pinti are some sombre gates with, over them, the words "Ils se reposent de leurs travaux, et leurs oeuvres les suivent." Those black gates opened one sunny December morning and showed a sloping avenue of marble tombs, tangles of pink and of white China roses in full flower falling over them, and at the end a tall white cross shining in the sunlight against the blue Italian sky,—fit type of the black gates of death, which had rolled back to let him pass into the Eternal Light beyond.
There we left him in completest trust, our "Knight Errant," after his life's warfare.
For there is a poem by Adelaide Procter (on whom written I know not) which seems to give, with the full force of poetical presentation, the spirit of the Life I have tried to depict. It even seems to follow the very order of the periods of that life—our hero following the course of hers; and thus fulfilling Mrs Browning's words when she says—
In my extract-book the following lines have lain away for the nearly forty years which have passed since he went from us, and they still remain, to me, the best expression of what he was. I find, in pencil, against the verses the place or date which they symbolise.
If those who have read these pages see their aptness, they will learn from them, more than from any words of mine, what measure of man he was.
A Knight Errant.