TO R. W. CHURCH.
Cambridge, Mass., U. S., February 15, 1870.
My dear Church,—My good wife has just handed me these sheets for Mrs. Church, and if it were not just on post-morning I should gossip with you, I suppose, to the extent of a sheetful, and send you our hearty thanks for your most kind and welcome Christmas letter,—the acknowledgments for which have been deferred too long already.
For myself, I have had three or four delightful weeks out of our short winter vacation, which have been given wholly to botanical work in my study. But this week begins again my round of official duties, to continue till July.
I rather weary of it as I grow older; and still more I grudge the time. I could now, I see, make fair arrangement for relinquishing a large part of my work in the university if there were some one ready to come in as a colleague or suffragan. But the person wanted is not to be found, and it will take a long while to hatch and raise one. We shall see.
I keep up all my lively interest in English affairs. But I do not get the items of news now as early as I used to do when the “Gardener’s Chronicle” had a news-sheet attached. I do well enough in the scientific line, however, as I see both “Nature” and the “Academy.” The former should bear for its motto “Natura non facit saltum;” it does not jump at once to perfection; the articles are many of them rather weak and washy. The “Academy” in its way seems better. The “Athenæum” (which I hope will revive, now that Dixon is out of it), the “Saturday Review,” and the “Pall Mall Budget” come to us in our book club, after a while, in our turn.
So Temple, having carried his point, is now making his over-active opponents look a bit foolish by preaching earnest orthodox sermons. And Gladstone has done a (to me not unexpected) thing which gratifies his friends here, in giving to Mr. Fraser the see of Manchester; I had not heard of the death of the former incumbent when the news of this offer came. What a run Gladstone is having in the way of church patronage! Then the memorial from both universities themselves for the abolition of religious tests! How you are getting on! And how are you to manage to secure proper religious influence at the universities? By moral power and the strength of your cause alone? which may, after all, be more truly effective than statutes. Yet there will be natural anxieties.
Pray give me, now and then, an inside view of what is going on, or better, what is thought.
Why, here is my sheet filled and nothing said. I have nothing to tell you from here—nothing worth sending you. I don’t think much of Lowell’s “Cathedral.” The grotesque bits are not in half as good keeping as the gargoyles and other queer pieces of ornament on the old cathedrals.
Cambridge, April 4, 1870.