Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton, B. A. Of Trinity College, Cambridge | Page 6

and widely. Thus he would read books on Arctic voyages for ten
days and talk of nothing else, then read novels till he sickened for facts and fact till he
sickened for fiction; biographies, elementary science, poetry, general philosophy,
particularly delighting in any ideal theories of life and discipline in state or association,
but with a unique devotion to "Hamlet" and "As You Like It," the "Pilgrim's Progress,"
and Emerson's "Representative Men." He rarely read the Bible, he told me, and then only
in great masses at a sitting; and the one thing that he disliked with an utter hatred was
theology of a settled and orthodox type, though next to the four books I have mentioned,
"The Christian Year" and "Ecce Homo" were his constant companions.
He did not care for history; he used to lament it. "I have but a languid interest in facts,
qua facts," he said; "and I try to arrive at history through biography. I like to disentangle
the separate strands, one at a time; the fabric is too complex for me."

He had the greatest delight in topography. "That is why," he used to say, "I delight in a
flat country. The idea of space is what I want. I like to see miles at a glance. I like to see
clouds league-long rolling up in great masses from the horizon--cloud perspective. I
rejoice in seeing the fields, hedgerow after hedgerow, farm after farm, push into the blue
distance. It makes me feel the unity and the diversity of life; a city bewilders and
confuses me, but a great tract of placid country gives me a broad glow of satisfaction."
He went for a walking tour in the fens, and returned enchanted. "By Ely," he said, "the
line crosses a gigantic fen--Whittlesea mere in old days--and on a clear day you can see at
least fifteen miles either way. As we crossed it a great skein of starlings rose out of a little
holt, and streamed north; the herons or quiet cattle stood along the huge dykes. You could
see the scattered figures of old labourers in the fields, and then for miles and miles the
squat towers, at which you were making, staring over the flat, giving you a thrill every
time you sighted them, and right away west the low hills that must have been the sandy
downs that blocked the restless plunging sea; they must have looked for centuries over
rollers and salt marsh and lagoon, felt the tread of strange herds and beasts about them till
they have become the quiet slopes of a sunny park or the simple appendages of a remote
hill farm."
But his greatest delight was in music. He knew a smattering of it scientifically, enough to
follow up subjects and to a certain extent to recognize chords. There occurs in one of his
letters to me the following passage, which I venture to quote. He is speaking of the
delight of pure sound as apart from melody:
"I remember once," he writes, "being with a great organist in a cathedral organ-loft,
sitting upon the bench at his side. He was playing a Mass of Schubert's, and close to the
end, at the last chord but two--he was dying to a very soft close, sliding in handles all
over the banks of stops--he nodded with his head to the rows of pedal stops with their red
labels, as though to indicate where danger lay. 'Put your hand on the thirty-two foot,' he
said. There it was '_Double open wood 32 ft._' And just as his fingers slid on to the last
chord, 'Now,' he said.
"Ah! that was it; the great wooden pipe close to my ear began to blow and quiver; and
hark! not sound, but sensation--the great rapturous stir of the air; a drowsy thunder in the
roof of nave and choir; the grim saints stirred and rattled ill their leaded casements, while
the melodious roar died away as softly as it had begun, sinking to silence with many a
murmurous pulsation, many a throb of sighing sound."
Organ-playing, organ music, was the one subject on which I have heard him wax
enthusiastic. His talk and his letters always become rhetorical when he deals with music;
his musical metaphors are always carefully worked out; he compares a man of settled
purpose, in whose life the "motive was very apparent," to "the great lazy horns, that you
can always hear in the orchestra pouring out their notes hollow and sweet, however loud
the violins shiver or the trumpets cry." He often went up to London to hear music. The St.
James's Hall Concerts were his especial delight. I find later a description of the effect
produced on him by Wagner.

"I have just come back from the