To Miss Harris.
Thanks for the letter to Mr. Harrison. I hope to make way in the matter; but it is a little difficult to know how to begin. However Mr. Bond and I are to see the ground on Wednesday; and, on Saturday, Mr. Lefevre, now Chairman of the Commons Preservation Society, the Secretary and the Solicitor are to meet Mr. Bond and me; and then I presume we shall make a formal application to the “Six Weeks’” Meeting. I long to get the ground; but though the Local Board will surrender immediately their seventeen years’ lease, so far as I at present see, there is no chance of the Quakers doing anything, except selling at full value. We may manage the cost; but it points to securing churchyards if possible, which would only entail the cost, very heavy I imagine, of making them beautiful, not the purchase also. However we shall see: at any rate, it is a definite bit of ground in a popular poor neighbourhood to be sold; and the thing is to learn the price, to see whether we can raise it; and if so, whether it is the best expenditure for the money. Perhaps, if the Six Weeks’ Meeting can do nothing in the way of generosity, the application may interest individual members to give. At any rate we must see. I am full of thought about it all. I wonder if you see the Charity Organisation Reporter, and noticed the appointment of Mr. Loch as secretary. Did I tell you that he is engaged to Miss Peters, and so good? I daresay Miranda has told you of Miss Potter,[[78]] who has been staying here. She wants to stay on for, possibly, two or three years. She is very bright and happy here; extremely capable, and has been through a good deal in her life, though she is young. She seems to fit in among us very well.
By the way, dost thou know I have found a motto in George Herbert which I intend to appropriate, as expressive of the way that I get on now, by means of my friends? “A dwarf, on a giant’s shoulder, sees further of the two.”
We have chosen a pretty one for the Girls’ Institute in B. Court—“God hath oft a great share in a little house.”
GREAT DUTIES AND SMALL
14, Nottingham Place,
December 12th, 1875.
To Miss F. Davenport Hill.
... I do love life and all it brings very deeply, and should like to live long too, to see the progress of so many things that I care for; I think a past is as great a help to a life as to an institution. It seems as if one were bound to live up to it. What I always fear about my own life is the tendency to excuse myself from small daily duties; yet I am certain they are the real test of life. I don’t mean that great claims ought to be sacrificed to small ones, nor that the duties remain the same for a woman as for a girl. Many small manual duties pass wholly away; but it is by the small graciousnesses, by the thoroughness of the out-of-sight detail, that God will judge our spirit and our work. My difficulty is always to secure this exquisite thoroughness, which alone seems to make the work true, and yet to delegate it. However, I learn gradually how to overlook and test it better and better; and I gather round me an ever larger, more capable, and more sweetly attached body of fellow-workers.
As to the gracious thoughtfulness for others, and silent self-control and sweet temper, I never had much gift for them; and I do fear that, deeply as I honour them, and hard as I strive to live up to my ideal, I still fail very decidedly,—which is wrong. I used to think that time would soften passionate engrossment, and leave me leisure to perceive the little wants of others; but I think I pant with almost increasing passionate longing for the great things that I see before me.