Wilson at Windermere, like Wilson at Oxford, was versatile, active, Titanic, mysterious, and fascinating. An immense energy and momentum marked the man; and a strange fitfulness, a lack of concentration, made the sum total of results far too small. There was power; but much of it was power wasted. He overflowed everywhere; his magnificent _physique_ often got the better of him; his boundless animal spirits fairly ran riot with him; his poetic soul made him the fondest and closest of Nature's wooers; his buoyant health lent an untold luxury to the mere fact of existence; his huge muscles and tuneful nerves always hungered for action, and bulged and thrilled joyously when face to face with danger. He was exuberant, extravagant, enthusiastic, reckless, stupendous, fantastic. It is only by the cumulation of epithets that one can characterize a being so colossal in proportion, so many-sided in his phases, so manifold in operation. He was a brilliant of the first water, whose endless facets were forever gleaming, now here, now there, with a gorgeous, but irregular light. No man could tell where to look for the coming splendor. The glory dazzled all eyes, yet few saw their way the clearer by such fitful flashes.
Wilson, in some of his phases, reminds us often of a great glorified child, rejoicing in an eternal boyhood. He had the same impulse, restlessness, glee, zest, and _abandon_. All sport was serious work with him, and serious work was sport. No frolic ever came amiss, whatever its guise. He informed play with the earnestness of childhood and the spirituality of poesy. He could turn everything into a hook on which to hang a frolic. No dark care bestrode the horse behind this perennial youth. No haggard spectre, reflected from a turbid soul, sat moping in the prow of his boat, or kept step with him in the race. Like the Sun-god, he was buoyant and beautiful, careless, free, elastic, unfading. Years never cramped his bounding spirits, or dimmed the lustre of his soul. He was ever ready for prank and pastime, for freak and fun. Of all his loves at Elleray, boating was the chief. He was the Lord-High-Admiral of all the neighboring waters, and had a navy at his beck. He never wearied of the lake: whether she smiled or frowned on her devotee, he worshipped all the same. Time and season and weather were all alike to the sturdy skipper. One howling winter's night he was still at his post, when Billy Balmer brought tidings that "his master was wellnigh frozen to death, and had icicles a finger-length hanging from his hair and beard." Though there was storm without, the great child had his undying sunshine within.