Rome,

March 27th, 1879.

To Mrs. Shaen.

Did you see dear Mr. Howitt’s death? We found him dying, when we came here. He was one of my oldest friends. I remember their house as one of the happiest and best I knew as a child. He used to take me for walks, when I was six years old. Mrs. Howitt looks so clearly thro’ to the meeting in the future, and has none but holy and happy recollections and the human grief is so natural, and yet the peace of trust so great. It is beautiful and helpful to me. I was almost a daughter to her, and her son who died in Australia one of my earliest companions; so she lets me slip in there, and there seems more life in the house of death than in all the sunlighted hills, for God seems so near her, and she feels that so.

Verona,

May 9th, 1879.

To Mrs. Edmund Maurice.

I am very sorry you are having so much trouble about the name; perhaps now that the real work is so abundant, and must be so engrossing, this question may die down. I do feel that the name, be it what it may, ought to mark the much larger work you propose to yourselves than the C.P.S. does; else you may hereafter have difficulty in getting all the work recognised as yours; and also people will be puzzled continuously and practically by your not being a branch of the C.P.S. Remind Mr. Haweis that you have to encourage gift and purchase and beautifying as well as “preservation”; that you have to do with private land as well as commons, and that you have to do with Metropolitan as well as rural open spaces. A name never includes all objects; but a narrower one belonging to a somewhat analogous society would be very confusing. So I feel.... Mr. Barnett you have probably seen.[[91]] His letter strikes me as depressed, and I am sorry. I realise what he says about throwing stones, but such practices often die down, after a little; and tar paving is such uninteresting London stuff; you can’t plant, or even have a may-pole in it; nor feel as if it were the earth. I hope they won’t put it, and certainly wouldn’t give a farthing to help; but I’m so sorry the burden of that and the Pensions is on him.... How splendid all the life of the movement you describe is. I have no fear if the people now interested can only be kept working with some result, enough to keep up their hope; if so, the things must grow.

Freshwater Place,

1879 or ’80.