I sought and sought. But O her soul

     Has not since thrown

     Upon my own

One beam! Yes, she is gone, is gone.

—Hardy, “At a Seaside Town in 1869”

And what of Charles? I pity any detective who would have had to dog him through those twenty months. Almost every city in Europe saw him, but rarely for long. The pyramids had seen him; and so had the Holy Land. He saw a thousand sights, and sites, for he spent time also in Greece and Sicily, but unseeingly; they were no more than the thin wall that stood between him and nothingness, an ultimate vacuity, a total purposelessness. Wherever he stopped more than a few days, an intolerable lethargy and melancholia came upon him. He became as dependent on traveling as an addict on his opium. Usually he traveled alone, at most with some dragoman or courier-valet of the country he was in. Very occasionally he took up with other travelers and endured their company for a few days; but they were almost always French or German gentlemen. The English he avoided like the plague; a whole host of friendly fellow countrymen re-ceived a drench of the same freezing reserve when they approached him.

Paleontology, now too emotionally connected with the events of that fatal spring, no longer interested him. When he had closed down the Kensington house, he had allowed the Geological Museum to take the pick of his collection; the rest he had given to students. His furniture had been stored;

Montague was told to offer the lease of the Belgravia house anew when it fell in. Charles would never live in it.

He read much, and kept a journal of his travels; but it was an exterior thing, about places and incidents, not about his own mind—a mere way of filling time in the long evenings in deserted khans and alberghi. His only attempt to express his deeper self was in the way of verse, for he discovered in Tennyson a greatness comparable with that of Darwin in his field. The greatness he found was, to be sure, not the great-ness the age saw in the Poet Laureate. Maud, a poem then almost universally despised—considered quite unworthy of the master—became Charles’s favorite; he must have read it a dozen times, and parts of it a hundred. It was the one book he carried constantly with him. His own verse was feeble in comparison; he would rather have died than show it to anyone else. But here is one brief specimen just to show how he saw himself during his exile.

Oh cruel seas I cross, and mountains harsh, O hundred cities of an alien tongue, To me no more than some accursed marsh Are all your happy scenes I pass among.

Where e’er I go I ask of life the same;

What drove me here? And now what drives me hence?

No more is it at best than flight from shame,

At worst an iron law’s mere consequence?

And to get the taste of that from your mouth, let me quote a far greater poem—one he committed to heart, and one thing he and I could have agreed on: perhaps the noblest short poem of the whole Victorian era.

Yes; in the sea of life enisl’d,

With echoing straits between us thrown,

Dotting the shoreless watery wild,

We mortal millions live alone.

     The islands feel the enclasping flow,

And then their endless bounds they know.

But when the moon their hollows lights And they are swept by balms of spring, And in their glens, on starry nights.  The nightingales divinely sing;

And lovely notes, from shore to shore,

Across the sounds and channels pour,

Oh then a longing like despair

Is to their farthest caverns sent;

For surely once, they feel, we were

Parts of a single continent.

Now round us spreads the watery plain—

Oh might our marges meet again!

Who order’d, that their longing’s fire Should be, as soon as kindled, cool’d?  Who renders vain their deep desire?—

     A God, a God their severance ruled;

And bade betwixt their shores to be

The unplumb’d, salt, estranging sea.*

[*Matthew Arnold, “To Marguerite” (1853).]

Yet through all this self-riddling gloom Charles somehow never entertained thoughts of suicide. When he had had his great vision of himself freed from his age, his ancestry and class and country, he had not realized how much the freedom was embodied in Sarah; in the assumption of a shared exile. He no longer much believed in that freedom; he felt he had merely changed traps, or prisons. But yet there was some-thing in his isolation that he could cling to; he was the outcast, the not like other men, the result of a decision few could have taken, no matter whether it was ultimately foolish or wise. From time to time the sight of some newly wed couple would remind him of Ernestina. He would search his soul then. Did he envy them or pity them? He found that there at least he had few regrets. However bitter his destiny, it was nobler than that one he had rejected.

These European and Mediterranean travels lasted some fifteen months, during which he not once returned to En-gland. He corresponded intimately with no one; most of his few letters were addressed to Montague, and dealt with business, instructions where next to send money and the rest. Montague had been empowered to place from time to time advertisements in the London newspapers: “Would Sarah Emily Woodruff or anyone knowing her present domicile ...” but there was never an answer.

Sir Robert had take............