“I returned afterwards with the Usedoms to luncheon, and Madame von Usedom talked, as usual, of the great change which is sweeping over religious belief, but of how, in most thinking minds, the great essentials remained untouched. She had told Tholuck that she was troubled about her belief in the Trinity. He replied that in being so she confounded Religion with Theology: that the doctrine of the Trinity was a purely theological question, and not the least necessary to religion.
“In the afternoon the Comtesse de Lützow took me to see Besarel, a very remarkable self-taught genius, and a very good simple man and sculptor in wood and marble: and then we floated peacefully for hours through the labyrinthine streets of this wonderful water-city. In the evening, as I was sitting with the Lützows and Lady Augusta Cadogan at one of the tables in the piazza in front of Florian’s caffè, a table near was occupied by a party in which the conspicuous figures were a lady, not old, but with snow-white hair, and a very beautiful young woman, sipping graniti and listening to the music: they were Queen Mary and Princess Mary of Hanover.
“And all this late evening, as I am sitting up writing, a monotonous song is wafted through the windows from the boats on the canal—
‘One sombre sweet Venetian slumbrous tune,’
as J. A. Symonds calls it.”
I returned to England by way of Nüremberg, which seemed to me strangely smaller and less interesting than when I saw it as a boy, and was more thankful than ever before to find myself again, on the 10th of May, at Holmhurst, where my dear old Lea’s most sweet and beautiful old face welcomed me with a brighter smile than ever, and where I spent a happy month alone with her, going back into our “wealthy past,” and living again in memory many happy scenes in our long-ago.
At Venice a great sorrow had come to me—another blank in the narrowing circle of my beloved ones. It was the sort of sorrow from which “all at once one awakes and finds a whole wing of one’s palace has fallen,” as Emerson says. Dearest Hugh Pearson was dead. He was altogether the most perfectly good man I have ever known, and, strange to say, at the same time the most perfectly charming. He was, from his earliest youth, as free from self-consciousness as he was from selfishness, but rippled over with geniality, cordiality, warmth of interest, affection to all around him. He was really, not nominally, the father of his parish, and I believe there was scarcely one of his parishioners who was not fonder of him than of most of their own nearest relations. To the children of his village he was simply adorable, and his manner to them, his fun, his sympathy, his solicitude, the prettiest and most enchanting thing imaginable. “He was like James amongst the Apostles, who wrote nothing at all, and said nothing we know, and yet was one of the chosen three who were with the Master that day when His glory was revealed, and that night when His soul was exceeding sorrowful, even unto death. Trust came to him; he never sought it. He was at home in the human heart, but he never seemed to probe it.”[373]