"We had tea with the charming old lady. 'I've just had these cakes made, Lady Waterford,' she said, 'because they were once very weel likit by some very dear to you; so I thought you would like them.'
"Lady Waterford sends you a riddle:—
'Mon premier est un tyran, mon second une horreur,
Mon tout est le diable lui-même.
Mais si mon premier est bon, mon second ne fait rien,
Et mon tout est le bonheur suprême.'"[394]
"Foxhow, Ambleside, Sept. 12, 1869.—How lovely the drive into Foxhow from Windermere; but, after the grand ideas of my childhood, how small everything seems, even the lake and the mountains! We drove in at the well-remembered gate by Rotha Cottage, and along those lovely Swiss pasture-meadows. It was like a dream of the past as one turned into the garden, all so exactly the same and so well remembered, not only from our last brief visit, but from that of twenty-six years ago. Dear Mrs. Arnold is little altered, and is so tenderly affectionate and charming, that it is delightful to be with her. She likes to ask all about you and Holmhurst, and says that her power of producing mind-pictures and dwelling upon them often brings you before her, so that she sees you as before, only older, in your home life. It is quite beautiful to see the intense devotion of her children to their mother and her happiness in them, in Fan especially. All the absent ones write to her at least three times a week.
"We have just been in a covered car to Rydal Church: how beautiful the situation! How well I remembered being sick as a child from the puggy smell of its hideous interior. It was just as puggy to-day, but I was not sick. There was a most extraordinary preacher, who declared that the Woman on the seven mountains was Rome on her seven hills—'allowed to be so by all authorities, Jewish, and even Romanist,'—that the dragon was only the serpent in its worshipped form, and that both were identical with the Beast and represented the pagan religion; that the Woman flying into the wilderness before the Beast was Early Christianity flying from pagan persecution, and that when she came back, to St. John's astonishment she was seated on the Beast, i.e., she had adopted all the pagan attributes, the cross, the mother and child—well-known objects of worship at Babylon, and Purgatory—a tenet of pagan Rome!"
"Foxhow, Sept. 14.—My Mother will have thought of this pouring weather as most unpropitious for the Lake Country, but in reality it has not signified very much, as each day it has cleared for a few hours, and the lights and shadows have been splendid. On Sunday afternoon Edward (Arnold) and I went up Loughrigg. All the little torrents were swollen by the storms, and the colours of the dying fern and the great purple shadows on Helm Crag and Bow Fell were most beautiful. It is a most picturesque bit of mountain, and it all strikes me, as I remember it did in 1859, as more really beautiful than anything in Switzerland, though so contracted.
"Yesterday afternoon we walked to Grasmere, and I stayed looking at the interesting group of Wordsworth tombs, whilst Edward paid a visit. Afterwards the lake looked so tempting, that Edward rowed me down it, sending the boat back by a boy. We landed at the outlet of the Rotha on the other side, and had a beautiful walk home by a high terrace under Loughrigg. If one remained in this country, one could not help becoming fond of Wordsworth, his descriptions are so exact. Edward has repeated many of his poems on the sites to which they apply, and they are quite beautifully pictorial. Mrs. Arnold is very happy in the general revival of interest in his poetry.... Nothing can be more enjoyable and united than the family life here, the children and grandchildren coming and going, and so many interesting visitors. Truly dear Mrs. Arnold's is an ideal old age, so hedged in by the great love and devotion of her descendants."[395]
"Dalton Hall, Lancashire, Sept. 17.—I always enjoy being here with the Hornbys. Yesterday we drove in the morning to Yealand, a pretty village so called from the Quakers who colonised it. In the afternoon we went to Levens. It is a lovely country, just upon the outskirts of the Lake District, with the same rich green meadows, clear streams, and lanes fringed with fern and holly. We passed through Milnthorpe, and how well I remembered your shutting me up and making me learn a Psalm in the inn there, instead of letting me go out to draw! The country is very primitive still. An old clergyman who officiated till lately in the neighbouring church of Burton Moss had only three sermons, one of which was laid in turn on the pulpit desk by his housekeeper every Sunday morning. When he had finished, he used to chuck it down to her out of the pulpit. One of these sermons was on 'Contentment,' and contained—apropos of discontent—the story of the Italian nobleman whose tombstone bore the words, 'I was well, I wished to be better, and now I am here.'"
It was a great pleasure this autumn to see again in London the New Zealand Sir George Grey. I remember his saying how he wished some one would write a poem on Pharaoh pursuing the Israelites to the Red Sea, from the point of view that in pursuing them he was pursuing Christianity; that if the Israelites had perished, and not Pharaoh, there would have been no Redemption.
JOURNAL (The Green Book).