XXIX
WRITING THE GURNEY MEMOIRS
“O thou wealthy Past,
Thine are our treasures!—thine and ours alone
Through thee: the Present doth in fear rejoice;
The Future, but in fantasy: but thou
Holdest secure for ever and for ever
The bliss that has been ours; nor present woe,
Nor future dread, can touch that heritage
Of joy gone by—the only joy we own.”
—Fanny Anne Kemble.
“The stream bears us on, and our joys and our griefs are alike left behind us: we may be shipwrecked, but we cannot be delayed: whether rough or smooth, the river hastens towards its home, till the roaring of the ocean is in our ears, and the tossing of the waves is beneath our keel, and the lands lessen from our eyes, and the floods are lifted up around us, and the earth loses sight of us, and we take our last leave of earth and its inhabitants, and of our further voyage there is no witness, but the Infinite and the Eternal.”—Reginald Heber, Farewell Sermon at Hodnet.
I HAD frequently been urged by my friend Madame E. de Bunsen to write the lives and edit the letters of her family—the Gurneys of Earlham; but I had long declined. Much as I honoured the life-work and character of the Gurneys, I felt that I was so little in sympathy with their outward forms of religion, with their peculiar expression of it—with their religious talking, in fact—that I doubted if I could do them justice. Others seemed much better fitted for the task.
But towards the close of 1893 it was again urged upon me—urged with great persistency; and when I had taken many of the Gurney journals and letters home, a memoir seemed gradually to unravel itself in my mind, and at length I promised to do my best. I know, however, how true it is that “in a whole imbroglio of capabilities, we go stupidly groping about, to grope which is ours, and very often clutch the wrong one.”[521]
In many respects the work soon brought its own reward—inwardly, in being led to enter into the spiritual life and difficulties of so many holy departed ones: outwardly, in many visits to still living members of the family, whose life is a constant example, and has often an intellectual as well as a spiritual charm. Especially charming were some winter days at Colne House, the delightful home of Catherine, Lady Buxton, second daughter of Samuel Gurney; and a lovely spring day with Mrs. Ripley at Earlham, in the old-fashioned rooms, and on the green lawns, fragrant to the family—but also to thousands of others—with endless sacred memories.