From Janet Browne’s great Charles Darwin: The Power of Place, a description of Darwin’s house at Down that is also a wonderful meditation on the ways action and stillness, circulation and stability, conviviality and solitude, are balanced in creative lives.

The tumble of ideas that had characterized the first half of his existence [gave way]… to the methodical intensity of documenting and reinforcing his notions. His home and garden were his experimental laboratories, his book-lined study was his manufacturory; these were the places where he most liked to be…. [Darwin’s] home and his homelife became an actual part of his intellectual enterprise….

Although his Beagle experiences were still important to him and always carried due weight in his writings, and his particular insight into nature remained undimmed, these home-based researches were the hidden triumph of his theory of evolution. His family setting, his house and garden, the surrounding Kent countryside, and his own sense of himself at the heart of the life he had created and the property he owned provided the finely crafted examples of adaptation in action that lifted his work far out of the ordinary. His thinking path, the path he called the Sandwalk that skirted the edge of a copse at the bottom of the Down House garden, became the private source of his conviction that his theory was true– true, if only he could show it.

Solitude served him well here. But Darwin was not a complete rural recluse. Systematically, he tried his house into the hub of an ever-expanding web of scientific correspondence. Tucked away in his study… Darwin wrote letters to a remarkable number of variety of individuals.