He is a man of letters, a man of nature, and a mystic.
His face bears a strange resemblance to the unforgettable face of that great Unitarian, James Martineau, whom Morley calls "the most brilliant English apologist of our day"; it lacks the marvellous sweetness of Martineau's expression, but has a greater strength; it does not bear witness to so sure a triumph of serenity, but shows the marks of a fiercer battle, and the scars of deeper wounds.

It is the masculine of the other's feminine.
Like Martineau's the head with its crown of white hair is nobly sculptured, and like Martineau's the ivory coloured face is ploughed up and furrowed by mental strife; but whereas Martineau's is eminently the indoors face of a student, this is the face of a man who has lived out of doors, a mountaineer and a seafarer.

Under the dense bone of the forehead which overhangs them like the eave of a roof, the pale blue eyes look out at you with a deep inner radiance of the spirit, but from the midst of a face which has been stricken and has winced.
Something of the resolution, the deliberateness, the stern power, and the enduring strength of his spirit shows itself, I think, in the short thickset body, with its heavy shoulders, its deep chest, its broad firm upright neck, and its slow movements, the movements as it were of a peasant.

Always there is about him the feeling of the fields, the sense of nature's presence in his life, the atmosphere of distances.

Nothing in his appearance suggests either the smear or the burnish of a town existence.
It is not without significance that he has gone farther afield from Oxford City than any other of its academic citizens, building for himself a home on a hill two miles and more from Magdalen Bridge, with a garden about it kept largely wild, and seats placed where the eye can travel farthest.
This man, who is so unpushing and self-effacing, makes a contribution to the Christian religion which deserves, I think, the thoughtful attention of his contemporaries.