To Viscount Halifax.
“Nov. 9.—I have been very ill. It was a bad chill at first, followed by most terrible pains, which I thought were part of the chill, and struggled against, moving about when I ought to have kept perfectly still. When at last I sent for a doctor, he said I had been in most imminent danger for several days, and that I must have died before another forty-eight hours were over if he had not come just then. A slight operation was necessary at once to re-arrange an internal misplacement, and this relieved the agonising pain. I have not often been before so immediately, never so suddenly, face to face with possible death. For some hours no one knew how it would go, yet I have often felt more ill. There was constantly in my mind a text which I believe is in the Old Testament somewhere, ‘Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?’ and I rested upon it somehow. There seems something almost cowardly in the way in which, when very ill, one turns for comfort to texts and hymns and prayers, which one seldom thinks of at other times. But I do find them a comfort, and I suppose it is partly the natural transition from active to contemplative life.... Still I cannot say what my extreme thankfulness was when it was pronounced that all was going on well and that I was likely to recover. I suspect that I shall have to ‘go softly’ for a long time to come, perhaps always, and never be quite as well as I have been: still, in the many mercies which are left to me, I shall never have time to think of the disagreeables.
“How strange it is when one knows, when one is told, that one is almost in the valley of the shadow of death! I felt more surprised than frightened; indeed, I do not think I felt frightened at all, I could leave it so completely in wiser Hands. But I know that I looked very wistfully at all the little familiar pictures on the wall, feeling how sorry I should be to see them for the last time, and to part from all ‘the boys’ and my many interests here, and go into the unknown, of which one knows so little; only that I do, absolutely and entirely, trust in the mercy of God, and know that it will be well somehow; as to the how, God will know best how to settle it.
“Perhaps it may be, as in Michelangelo’s sonnet—
‘Not death indeed, but the dread thought of death saveth and severeth.’
“I may not always go on feeling so; but I feel now as if I had left my long youth on the other side of this illness. Andersen says, ‘The stem of the pine-tree forms knots which betray the age of the tree: human life has also its perceptible rings;’ I suspect this illness will be a perceptible ring to me.”
To the Hon. G. H. Jolliffe.
“Dec. 21, 1892.—You know how ill I was in November, but you do not know all the serious thoughts it awakened. ‘Il est ennuyeux de vivre dans la grâce de Dieu, mais tout le monde veut y mourir;’ is that what you would answer? I have a great deal to say about it, but as you will like facts better, I will only tell you that since I recovered I have been quite a tour of visits, beginning with Lady Beauchamp,[507] and meeting charming Lady Granville and a party of sixteen young men and maidens at Madresfield Court, a moated house with a lovely view of the Malvern Hills, and full of precious collections of every kind—old books, old music, old miniatures, ivories, enamels, &c. In my room, ‘the Stuart Room,’ it was a pleasure to live with portraits inscribed ‘Mary Stewart, Princess of Orange,’ and ‘King James III.’ There is a chapel, where Lady Mary Lygon watches over the musical part of the services, aided by a footman who sings splendidly and plays five instruments well!
“I was several days at Moor Park near Ludlow, the stately house of Mrs. Johnston Foster and her pleasant heiress-daughters. They have built a huge and handsome church near their present home, and another in Yorkshire. Mrs. Foster took me to spend the day at the curious old house of Kyre, where there is a hiding-place in the hall behind a picture on a sliding panel, and an oubliette in the floor beneath a trap-door. Amongst the pictures was a curious portrait of Lady Pytts, whose daughter married Sir Thomas Stanley, the first baronet of Alderley, and planted the Alderley wood with beech-nuts from her old home, for before that ‘there were no beech-trees in Cheshire.’ The lady of the house, Mrs. Childe, has a wonderful power of making slight sketches from all such old portraits in the houses where she visits, and has many volumes of them.
“At Hereford I spent a most pleasant day with kindly Dean Herbert, who showed me all the details of his cathedral, which is beautiful still, though somewhat spoilt by Wyatt. Nothing was more interesting than the slab tombs of a bishop and dean, who were such friends, that their hands are represented as clasping each other from their adjoining gravestones. How seldom this can have been possible!