Ecclesfield Vicarage, Sheffield.
Sunday, Oct. 5, 1873.
... It is all over. She is with your Father and Mother, and the dear Bishop, and my two brothers, and many an old friend who has "gone before." Had she been merely a friend she is one of those whose loss cannot but be felt more as years and experience make one realize the value of certain noble qualities, and their rarity; but if God has laid a heavy cross upon us in this blow,—which seems such a blow in spite of long preparing!—He has given us every comfort, every concession to the weaknesses of our love in the accidents of her death.... It was an ideal end. God Who had permitted her to suffer so sorely in body, and to be often visited in old times—by dread of death and of "death-agonies," parted the waves of the last Jordan, and she "went through dryshod!"... The sense of her higher state is so overwhelming, one cannot indulge a common sorrow. For myself I can only say that I feel as if I were a child again in respect of her. She is as much with me now, as with any of her children, even if I am in Jamaica or Ceylon. Now she knows and sees my life, and I have a feeling as if she were an ever-present conscience to me (as a mother's presence makes a child alive to what is right and what is wrong), which I hope by God's grace may never leave me and may make me more worthy of having had such a Mother....
To C.T. Gatty,
R Lines; South Camp. January 4, 1874.
Dearly Beloved,
What would I give to have a visit from you! I fear you did not get home at Xmas! Thank you a thousand times for your card—I think it almost the very prettiest I ever saw!
... As I am not prompt to time with my Xmas Box I may as well be appropriate in kind. Is there any trifle you are "in want" of?
"Price ner object," as Emmanuel Eaton (the old Nursery man) (very appropriately) named his latest Fuchsia, when he saw us children turning down the Wood End Lane in the Donkey Carriage on a birthday, flush of coppers—and bashful about abating prices!
... I was on the border of sending you a nice collection of poetry—and a shadow crossed my brain that you have said you "don't care about poetry"—"Lives there a man with soul so dead"—or does the great commercial whirl weary out the brain?—If I am wrong and you like it—will you have (if you don't possess) Trench's fine collection of poems of all dates?
Your ever devoted