August 26, 1836
Chiefly unto children, O Lord, do I feel myself called; in them I see Thy image reflected more pure than in anything else in this sinful though beautiful world, and in serving them my love to Thee increases.
Her wish was fulfilled to an unusual degree. One of a large family of brothers and sisters, she was still helping in the education of the younger ones when she married, and her marriage at once brought her the care of a young family; soon, too, children of her own; while her old age brought her the charge of successive grandchildren. During the lifetime of Lord and Lady Amberley their children often spent many months at Pembroke Lodge while their parents were abroad, and when both father and mother had died the two boys came to live with their grandparents. Ten years later her youngest son's boy was brought to her on the day of his mother's death, when he was two months old, and remained with her till her son's second marriage in 1891. The children of her stepdaughters were also loving grandchildren to her, and often came for long visits to Pembroke Lodge.
Lady Russell had sometimes thought that when days of leisure came, she would give some of her time to literary work, and write reminiscences of the many interesting men and women she had known and the stirring events she had lived through; but the unexpected and daily cares and duties which came upon her made this impossible.[97] She was one who would never neglect the living needs of those around her, and she gave her time and thoughts to the care of her grandchildren with glad and loving devotion.
One of her greatest pleasures was to see her own ideals and enthusiasms reflected in the young; and next to the care of her family the prosperity of the village school at Petersham was perhaps nearest her heart. It grew and flourished through her devotion. In 1891 it was generously taken over by the British and Foreign School Society, but the change made no difference to her interest nor to the time she gave to it. The warm affection of the people of Petersham was a great happiness to her; after long illness and enforced absence from the village she wrote to her daughter: "You can't think what good it did me to see a village friend again."
The feeling among the villagers may be gathered from two brief passages in letters written after her death: a gardener in Petersham alluded to her as "our much-loved friend, Countess Russell," and another man--who had been educated at Petersham School--wrote: "She was really like a mother to many of we 'Old Scholars.'"
Lady Russell's letters will show that her interest in politics remained as keen as ever to the end; and she eagerly watched the changes which affected Ireland. To the end of her life she retained the fervour of her youthful Radicalism, and with advancing years her religious opinions became more and more broad. To her there was no infallibility in any Bible, any prophet, any Church. With an ever-deepening reverence for the life and teaching of Jesus, she yet felt that "The highest Revelation is not made by Christ, but comes directly from the Universal Mind to our minds."[98] Her last public appearance in Richmond was at the opening of the new Free Church, on April 16, 1896, which she had joined some years before as being the community holding views nearer to her own than any other.
There is a side of Lady Russell's mind which her letters do not adequately represent. She was a great reader, and in her letters (written off with surprising rapidity) she does not often say much about the books she was so fond of discussing in talk. Among novelists, Sir Walter Scott was perhaps the one she read most often; Jane Austen too was a favourite; but she also much enjoyed many of the later novelists, especially Charles Dickens and George Eliot.
In poetry her taste was in some respects the taste of an earlier generation; she could not join, for instance, in the depreciation of Byron, nor could she sympathize with the unbounded admiration for Keats which she met with among the young. Milton, Cowper, Burns, Byron, and Longfellow were among those oftenest read, but Shakespeare always remained supreme, and as the years went by her wonder and admiration seemed only to grow stronger and deeper with every fresh reading of his greatest plays; and the intervals without some Shakespeare reading, either aloud or to herself, were short and rare. She had not an intimate knowledge of Shelley, but in the later years of her life she became deeply impressed by the beauty and music of his poetry, which she liked best to hear read aloud.