In the Letter for 1907 she gives it as her belief that the work of agency in the management of properties for others is destined to expand significantly. This, of course, has become a most important part of the work of the Octavia Hill Association.
With each of the Letters there appears a financial balancesheet reduced to simplest terms of receipts and expenditure. Behind these items, she declares, are “trembling hopes and fears about each individual.”
The book “Our Common Land” sets forth chiefly Miss Hill’s views on the vital issue of open spaces,—“open air sitting-rooms” she called them. She yearns to bring the people at large into the air and the light of day. The two great wants in the life of the poor are the want of space and the want of beauty. She has much to say of the mortmain of the city graveyard that keeps the living out of an available breathing space.
The last decade of Miss Hill’s life saw the fruition of the years of anxiety and uncertainty, but there was no cessation of labor. “Up to within three days of her death,” writes her biographer, “she continued to see her friends and fellow-workers, using to the utmost her failing strength, and endeavoring to arrange for the efficient carrying on of the many works in which she took such a keen interest.” When they told her that the end must be, she said, thinking only of her work, “I might have given it a few more touches, but I think it is nearly all planned now, very well.” On the night of August 13, 1912, in the words of her beloved Chaucer, her “spirit changed house.”
“O human soul! as long as thou canst so
Set up a mark of everlasting light
Above the howling senses’ ebb and flow,
To cheer thee, and to right thee if thou roam—
Not with lost toil thou labourest through the night!
Thou mak’st the heaven thou hop’st indeed thy home.”