Hughenden Manor, Jan. 24, 1873.—Dear Mr. Gladstone,—I am much touched by your kind words in my great sorrow. I trust, I earnestly trust, that you may be spared a similar affliction. Marriage is the greatest earthly happiness, when founded on complete sympathy. That hallowed lot was mine, and for a moiety of my existence; and I know it is yours.—With sincere regard, D.
A last note, with the quavering pen-strokes of old age (Nov. 6, 1888), comes from the hand, soon to grow cold, of one who had led so strange a revolution, and had stood for so much in the movement of things that to Mr. Gladstone were supreme:—
It is a great kindness and compliment your wishing to see me. I have known and admired you so long. But I cannot write nor talk nor walk, and hope you will take my blessing, which I give from my heart.—Yours most truly, John H. Card. Newman.
So the perpetual whirl of life revolves, “by nature an unmanageable sight,” but—
Not wholly so to him who looks
In steadiness; who hath among least things
An under-sense of greatest; sees the parts
As parts, but with a feeling of the whole.[337]
Such steadiness, such under-sense and feeling of the whole, was Mr. Gladstone's gift and inspiration, never expending itself in pensive musings upon the vain ambitions, illusions, cheats, regrets of human life—such moods of half-morbid moralising were not in his temperament—but ever stirring him to duty and manful hope, to intrepid self-denial and iron effort.