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 LETTERS OF 
 
 EMELIA RUSSELL 
 GURNEY 
 
 EDITED BY HER NIECE 
 
 ELLEN MARY GURNEY 
 
 " lo mi son un che, quando 
 Amore spira, noto, ed a quel modo 
 Che delta dentro, vo significando." 
 
 DANTE, Purgatorio, xxiv. 
 
 ILonfcon 
 
 JAMES NISBET tf CO., LIMITED 
 
 21 BERNERS STREET 
 
 1902
 
 Printed by BALLABTTHI, HAHSOH * Co, 
 At the P.allantyne Press
 
 PREFACE 
 
 THE following letters need little introduction. They 
 have been printed under the impression that they would 
 interest a wider circle than they would otherwise reach, 
 and that, whilst giving pleasure to those who were 
 numbered among the writer's friends, by recalling a 
 voice dear to them, they might also bear a message 
 for others to whom she was unknown. 
 
 The published words of Emelia Russell Gurney are 
 few. But her gifts found their natural channel in cor- 
 respondence, which was a perpetual fountain of enrich- 
 ment to her nearest ones, and was ever widening its 
 circles of blessing as life went on. 
 
 The idea of making public a selection from among 
 these letters has received kind encouragement from 
 several whose opinion is unbiased and valuable. 
 
 The task of selection has met with the difficulty, 
 inevitable when dealing with private correspondence 
 of an intimate kind, that the passages which most 
 breathe the atmosphere of the writer's personality, 
 whether in gay or tender vein, are frequently those in 
 the publication of which there would seem to be some- 
 thing of desecration. It is nevertheless hoped that in 
 the necessary process of pruning, sifting, and refusal, 
 the individual aroma has not been wholly lost, the 
 
 2065742
 
 vi PREFACE 
 
 retaining and giving forth of which is the sole purpose 
 of the endeavour. 
 
 Gratitude should be expressed to the many friends 
 who have been kindly willing to contribute to the store. 
 And it will be seen that letters to Mrs. Russell Gurney 
 as well as from her have in some instances been ad- 
 mitted, thus supplying the interest of mind answering 
 to mind. This is notably the case with regard to the 
 extracts from a correspondence, covering eleven years, 
 between herself and Miss Wedgwood. 
 
 No attempt at a connected biography has been 
 made ; only such linking together of events and periods 
 as may give the letters their due significance. 
 
 E. M. G.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 PART I., 1852-1870 . y- i 
 
 PART II., 1870-1878 68 
 
 PART III., 1878-1896 173 
 
 PART IV., JOURNAL LETTERS FROM JAMAICA, 
 
 1865, AND SICILY, 1889 286 
 
 vii
 
 ERRATA 
 
 Page 129, line I, for 'mind' read 'find.' 
 
 144, line 20, for ' remarkable ' read ' remarkably." 
 
 177, line 16 from foot, omit 'not.' 
 
 196, line 20 and 5 from foot, far ' Kirjith ' read ' Kirjath.' 
 
 ., 196, line 7 from foot, for ' Uzziah ' read ' Uzzah.' 
 
 ,, 207, line 8, for ' semo ' read ' seme.' 
 
 210, line i6,for 'birds' read 'bird.' 
 
 211, line 13, for 'accacias' read 'acacias.' 
 
 216, line 13, for ' Sympneumatic ' read ' Sympneumata.' 
 
 223, line i, for ' piu' read ' piu.' 
 
 268, line 4 from foot, for ' 1883 ' read ' 1893.' 
 
 281, line 13 from foot, for 'for' read 'from.' 
 
 286, for date, ' 1865,' read ' 1866.' 
 
 297, line 4 from foot, for 'lips' read 'limbs.' 
 
 333> l me '5; f or ' Prediga' read ' Predica.' 
 line 19, for ' canoni ' read ' canonici.' 
 
 342, line 13 from foot, for 'Capella' read 'Cappella' (also 
 
 page 345, line 4). 
 
 345, line i,for 'Bonino di Pisa' read 'Bonino da Pisa.' 
 
 347, line 14 from foot, for 'Segestse' read 'Segeste' (also 
 
 page 350, line 19). 
 
 Litters of Emelia Russell Gurney.
 
 LETTERS OF 
 
 EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 PART I 
 
 1852-1870 
 
 THE following brief sketch, by Mrs. Russell Gurney's 
 nephew, the Rev. Alfred Gurney, appeared soon after 
 her death in 1896. 
 
 "Emelia Gurney was born on July 26, 1823. Her 
 father, the Rev. William Batten, an assistant master at 
 Harrow, whose gay and buoyant spirits made him the 
 playfellow of his children, died when she was still a 
 child, and her sister, a year or two younger than herself, 
 passed away in the dawn of womanhood. For many 
 years her mother, a woman of remarkable intelligence 
 and large and generous sympathies, was spared to her, 
 and the affection that knit their hearts together was 
 nothing less than passionate in its tenderness. In 1852 
 she married, and seldom has marriage been the door 
 opening on a happier life than that which was hers 
 for the next twenty-six years. It was one of the 
 marriages less common than one would expect in 
 which husband and wife are really complemental the 
 one to the other. To his balanced judgment, sagacity, 
 
 and knowledge of affairs, she brought the aid of a 
 
 A
 
 2 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 powerful and cultivated imagination, a disciplined en- 
 thusiasm, and the keenest and most penetrating appre- 
 ciation of beauty both in art and nature. Many visits 
 to Italy and Switzerland, and in later years to America, 
 the West Indies, Egypt, and the Holy Land, stimulated 
 and enriched a mind singularly receptive, and added to 
 the ever-enlarging circle of her friends. She was fre- 
 quently an inmate of the house of her venerable uncle, 
 the Rev. John Venn of Hereford, in later years minister- 
 ing with a daughter's tender devotion to the infirmities 
 of old age. After a suffering illness of nearly seven 
 months' duration, on the eve of St. Luke her release 
 came, and very gently and peacefully she faded into life. 
 Among many testimonies of friends who find them- 
 selves denuded and shadowed by her removal, and 
 who have been quick to bear witness to the beauty of 
 her character and the spell that it put upon all who 
 were brought within the sphere of its influence, the 
 following words are, with his permission, quoted from 
 the author of John Inglesant : 
 
 " She cast the glamour of her own purity and genius over the 
 work of others, and attained thereby to an appreciation which 
 they themselves were unable to accept. Her letters always 
 seemed to me to have a peculiar and original charm, a distinct 
 insight, and a clearness of expression when speaking of spiritual 
 feeling, very far indeed beyond the common, in fact unique. 
 Let us thank God that we have known such lives as hers, a 
 knowledge which silences and subdues all the doubts and per- 
 plexities of life." 
 
 Interesting though such would have been, no letters 
 have been received which throw any important light on
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 3 
 
 the circumstances and influences of the early years of 
 Emelia's life. Her childhood was passed, when the 
 Harrow days were ended, with her mother and sister at 
 Pinner, and later at Hereford, after the removal thither 
 of her uncle and aunt, the Rev. John Venn and his sister. 
 In 1842 Mrs. Batten and her two daughters went to Italy, 
 where the younger one, Florence, died in 1843. The 
 subsequent winters were spent abroad, but mother and 
 daughter finally settled together in London until Emelia's 
 marriage in 1852. 
 
 The earliest letters given here are from the pen of 
 Mrs. Batten, about the period of the marriage and some 
 years later. The first of these, though quaint and formal 
 in expression, possesses a certain interest as a record. 
 
 A Letter from Mrs. BATTEN to a Friend, after her Daughter's 
 Marriage to Mr. Russell Gurney, 1852. 
 
 Do you remember our conversation in your carriage the day 
 you took me to Lowndes Street ? I foresaw what was coming, 
 and I acquiesced in it and even desired it. For I knew that 
 Mr. Russell Gurney possessed qualities which I considered 
 indispensable for my Emily's happiness, and which I found by 
 experience to be most rarely met with, united to other essential 
 qualities. He was several years older than I should have chosen 
 to make him, had I been presented with a fairy's wand and told 
 to conjure up a perfect husband. But this is the only defect of 
 which I can tell you. 
 
 I shall just describe him, though I am not now in a good 
 humour with him. My heart is turned against him, for he has 
 robbed me, and I feel a little like a wild animal robbed of its 
 young. But I am consoled by thinking of the truth, and you 
 will like to hear Emily's report confirmed. James Stephen called 
 him a first-class man, and so he is. Not first-rate, but first-class.
 
 4 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 No one could be in his company without seeing that he is a man 
 of fine understanding, well cultivated, and accustomed to inter- 
 course with people of the same stamp. You can introduce no 
 subject with which he is not familiar and able to converse 
 pleasantly and profitably upon. He has quiet, easy, gentlemanly 
 manners, is of middle height, has dark hair, dark intelligent eyes, 
 an aquiline nose, and an air of savoir faire about him which I 
 much admire. He is universally popular in society ; and the 
 lawyer employed to draw up the settlement said, " We are all 
 fully aware that the highest legal honours this country can give 
 are open to him." 
 
 Then, as to more important matters. His religious principles 
 are such as thoroughly to satisfy my brother Henry [the Rev. 
 Henry Venn]. And his own family speak of him as the most 
 generous and affectionate of brothers. He was the most devoted 
 and dutiful of sons. 
 
 Now, do you not think I was right to encourage my sweet 
 Emily to say " Yes " to such a suitor? She did say " Yes," with 
 her whole heart. Never had any misgiving from first to last. 
 Indeed, I can give you no idea of the loveliness of her conduct. 
 Well as I knew her, it astonished me. 
 
 The evening before the marriage she interested herself in 
 every arrangement, put flowers into the vases, packed up her 
 things with Mrs. H., whom she preferred to me, feeling less 
 excited by her, and determined to go bravely forward in the 
 path her heart had chosen and her judgment approved. On the 
 day the same cheerful, solemn, calm continued. 
 
 She was alone until it was time to dress. When I went to her 
 with her breakfast she was in tears, with the Bible in her hand, 
 and said, " Let me read you the lesson of the day." 
 
 Mr. and Mrs. Russell Gurney lived for the first year 
 or two after their marriage in a house in Russell Square 
 which had been his father's. They then took the house 
 in Kensington Palace Gardens which remained their 
 home until Mr. Russell Gurney's death in 1878.
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 5 
 
 From Mrs. BATTEN to E. R. G. 
 
 AYLSTONE HILL, HEREFORD, 1855 or 1856. 
 
 To-day the railroad is opened, and the train is amusing itself 
 with passing up and down. We see the smoke from the windows, 
 and the whistle is constantly blowing, and every now and then 
 they pop a gun. I am rather sorry that in future we shall arrive 
 at the terminus at the foot of Aylstone Hill, and not pass the 
 Yapps' house, where he stands out at the door, and Mrs. Yapp 
 peeps out of one window and the daughters at the other. Another 
 vestige of primitive simplicity and cordiality that is passing away. 
 I fear the railway will sweep away many of the distinctions of 
 Hereford ; it will be like other places, and the past alone will 
 remain in our minds. 
 
 Well, you may be sure that my thoughts are ever hovering 
 over you, and my mind filled with pleasant images of you. A 
 very vivid one is left of dearest Russell at the door of the railway 
 carriage, and all his affection and graceful hospitality, not one 
 atom of which is thrown away upon me, for, alas ! I fear my 
 selfishness makes me too sensible of any marks of kindness and 
 attention. And you, my own dear child, with your smiling face 
 and your pink bows, looking so alive and awake, how fresh and 
 how vivid is your image ! How is this room, too, associated with 
 you, and all my visions about you, and all my sad failures, alas ! 
 alas ! though I do not feel these as I used to do ; the conviction 
 of my own impotency and insignificance nullifies these. God 
 was your Father, and your mother could do little to counteract 
 His plans of love for you. Now I must say farewell, most beloved 
 child. I know you will be glad to hear that Uncle John seems as 
 fresh and happy and vigorous as ever. With tenderest love from 
 all of us to you both. Your own mother, 
 
 C. BATTEN. 
 
 In the spring of 1862 a change came into the lives 
 of Mr. and Mrs. Russell Gurney the guardianship of a 
 large family of nephews and nieces coming to him, on
 
 6 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 the death of his elder brother, John Hampden Gurney, 
 Rector of St. Mary's, Marylebone. 
 
 In the course of the summer a house was taken for 
 them on Mitcham Common. And for three years this 
 home was presided over and shared from time to time 
 with them by their uncle and aunt. 
 
 The intimacy and wealth of affection, only increasing 
 with years, between her and some of these nephews and 
 nieces, who became almost like children to her, had 
 its beginning here. And it would be impossible to try 
 to measure or to put into words the extent or the 
 subtle quality of an influence touching their lives so 
 closely during these impressionable years, the stronger 
 for its very unconsciousness and spontaneity. 
 
 London claims impinged, however, increasingly 
 upon the Mitcham sojourns, and in 1865 the moving 
 of the Hampden Gurney family to Torquay brought 
 this epoch to a close. 
 
 The following letters were written to her elder nieces at 
 the commencement of the new life, soon after their father's 
 death : 
 
 To her Niece, EMILY GURNEY. 
 
 8 PALACE GARDENS, W., April 1862. 
 
 ... I expect you would all feel very, very tired for the first 
 few days of the change of air and absence of excitement, and 
 I hope, therefore, that you rest and sleep a great deal. Then 
 when you are rested you will be able to turn this quiet pause 
 in your life to account. 
 
 You have so much of the past to gather up in your memories 
 and appropriate so much that will be revealed to you in a new 
 light from one marked portion of your life being for ever closed, 
 and from the voice that has spoken with most strength to you 
 during that portion of your life being for ever silent.
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 7 
 
 The future is veiled from you even more than it must 
 always necessarily be. But we know, as I have just now been 
 reminded by re-reading that wonderful sermon of Robertson's, 
 "Sleep on now" and "Rise, let us be going" we know that 
 the manner in which we meet that future, its power upon us 
 for good or ill, is just according to the measure in which we 
 are making use of our present. I have found this by experience 
 in my own life in things great and small. Some particular thing 
 has been presented to me at one time. I have not learnt it as 
 I should. I have passed on to something else, and have found 
 that the very thing I have neglected would have been of im- 
 mense value to me in that next stage of my life ; but the time 
 for it was gone, and I could not go back to it. 
 
 It was not the least a predetermination on my part to preach 
 to you, my dear child ; but as I realise you, parting as you must 
 at this time with much of your easy, care-free childhood, and 
 standing on the threshold of a maturer life, bereaved of him 
 whom you would naturally have looked to still to guide every 
 step and foster every development for some years to come, I 
 yearn over you, and long long not that you may be comforted, 
 but that you may be strengthened. Love to all from Uncle Russell. 
 Your ever affectionate AUNT EMELIA. 
 
 8 PALACE GARDENS, W., April 14, 1862. 
 
 MY DEAR EMILY AND ELLEN, The charge of guardianship 
 now falls into your Uncle Russell's hands, and I feel it is but 
 natural that I should give out to you some of the things that 
 arise in my heart on the occasion of being brought into such a 
 new relationship with you all. It is but little, comparatively, that 
 we have seen of each other hitherto. For the future very much 
 of your happiness and very much of mine must depend on our 
 mutual affection for each other, and our mutual understanding 
 of each other's natures and characters. We have each much to 
 learn in order to come to this full understanding of the other ; 
 but I am thankful that we each have a foundation of affection to 
 start from.
 
 8 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 Dear children, I would not conceal from myself, and I would 
 not conceal from you, that I enter upon this new relationship with 
 much fear and trembling, though by no means without much hope. 
 I have seen too often the difficulties that arise in large families 
 growing up from childhood into youth, and from youth to 
 maturity, and the development of elements of discord that must 
 almost necessarily exist in various minds and characters when 
 brought into contact, to imagine that we as a family can be ex- 
 empted from such difficulties ; especially as the place of real 
 parents can never be supplied by those who come in a measure 
 into the position of parents, without the instincts or associations 
 of the relationship either of parents or children to help them. I 
 tremble also when I realise the contrast which your future life 
 must present in many ways to what it was when you had such a 
 strong, cheerful, intelligent, and truly fatherly heart close at hand 
 to inspire and guide it. I tremble also for myself, lest any of 
 the peace and joy which I have found in my married life alone 
 with my beloved husband should be in any way marred. 
 
 I mention some of these causes of apprehension, not to trouble 
 you, but in order that we may together open our eyes to the con- 
 tingencies that lie before us, and that we may open our eyes to 
 them in order to meet them, and be prepared for others known 
 and unknown, in the best and wisest manner we may, and not 
 with mere vague sensations of affectionate but blind enthusiasm. 
 
 On both sides we have the same ground of confidence. We 
 feel that we are entering on this new path by the appointment of 
 God. We should not have chosen it for ourselves ; but circum- 
 stances have been so ordered that both to you and to us it has 
 plainly appeared to be the Will of God. We may therefore con- 
 fidently ask for the help of God in it and His blessing upon it, 
 and believe that we shall receive it. I trust you all will continue 
 daily to offer a petition for this, as we shall. 
 
 Besides this we need to watch against dangers and temptations 
 that may arise in it. We need also specially to cultivate and 
 cherish all that tends to bind us together, and to remove stum- 
 bling-blocks out of each other's way. We need to keep our eyes
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 9 
 
 open to a delicate apprehension of the tastes and feelings of each, 
 and our hearts warm with a generous confidence in the motives 
 and intentions of each. I feel the chief, the supreme importance 
 of perfect openness and sincerity in our intercourse, that we should 
 freely speak our minds to one another, rather than allow any secret 
 little source of dissatisfaction to fret our mutual complacency. 
 
 You know that we feel that it will be well for you and for us, 
 for a time, and at intervals, to be members of the same household. 
 
 Circumstances may easily arise to make it desirable that our 
 remaining with you should not continue ; and, indeed, I think, 
 under any circumstances, we should look forward to the time 
 when you may be well able to do without us. God has taken 
 away both your parents, and as none can possibly supply their 
 place, it is according to His intention that you should be able to 
 stand alone earlier than those to whom He still continues the 
 support and protection of parents. Our desire will be to help 
 you and strengthen you to stand alone, rather than to induce you 
 to continue leaning on us. 
 
 Dear Emily arid Ellen, will you send this to Fred, Alfred, and 
 Edmund ; for though they will be so much away, that their daily 
 life will be much less affected by this change than yours, yet our 
 home will be theirs also at intervals, and I wish them to consider 
 the subject in the same light, and to promote for all our sakes the 
 bond and law that must exist for the family as it is now to be con- 
 stituted. 
 
 Dear children, I will only add, I love you, and expect I shall 
 love you much more. I think I may say that I sincerely desire to 
 be to each of you just what God designs me to be. And I would 
 pray day by day not to frustrate this design by my own selfish- 
 ness and hardness of heart. Your dear uncle has written to the 
 boys individually. He bids me say he concurs in all that I have 
 said to you collectively. He is so good, and so lovely in his 
 thoughts to others and behaviour to them, that I am sure you 
 will never be tempted to vex him. 
 
 May the Lord help and teach us all ! Your ever affectionate 
 
 AUNT EMELIA.
 
 io LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 To her J\'iece, ELLEN MARY GURNEY. 
 
 (Written after taking the Cedars, Mitcham, as the home for her nephews 
 and nieces.) 
 
 July 1862. 
 
 If you do not like the look of the flat, broad lawn, as 
 smooth as satin, with its cedar a little to the right, and termi- 
 nating indefinitely in the trees in the field beyond, through the 
 wide bay window of the drawing-room, I shall think nothing of 
 your tastes. It looks so peaceful and quiet, and cultivated too ; 
 not shaggy, as some country places do. . . . 
 
 Just now I write to you completely from the upholstery part 
 of my being, but I am conscious of something like earnest desires 
 from a much deeper part, that our true life there may grow and 
 prosper ; that we may more and more seek after realities, after 
 abiding things. Let us not forget to seek after His teaching and 
 training, especially in prospect of this new path opening before 
 us. It is a most solemn charge for all of us. Yet I don't feel 
 that it is out of harmony with the deeper sense of its solemn im- 
 portance, that we should laugh and play with the flowers and 
 pretty creatures that He decks out the surface of almost every 
 path with, because He knows so well our frame. 
 
 To Mrs. FRANCIS GALTON. 
 
 THE CEDARS, MITCHAM, S., 
 April 22, 1863. 
 
 DEAR LOUISA, Where are you this heavenly day? I am 
 sitting out on the lawn writing my letters, and I can't get on 
 for looking into the pure sky and on the green-gold powdered 
 trees; and oh, what a concert there is of larks, and now and 
 then a nightingale preparing its song, and the cuckoo and the 
 wood-pigeon. The white blossoms among the other trees look 
 like incense : the earth is offering up its very best, and my heart 
 wants to aspire too. The promise of spring is better than the 
 fulfilment of summer and autumn. There must be a better 
 fulfilment in the life to which our risen Lord would lead us.
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY n 
 
 Write and tell me you are much better, and unfolding your 
 wings somewhere in the sunshine. Your very affectionate 
 
 EMELIA GURNEY. 
 
 To the same. 
 
 8 PALACE GARDENS, 1863 or 1864. 
 
 I heartily respond to what you say about the old memories 
 being reburnished indeed I quite feel that a new shoot sprang 
 up at Champery from the old root. That old root, how satisfac- 
 tory it is to fall back upon, and how one learns more and more 
 to value such roots as time strengthens them, and also, alas ! as 
 they become fewer and one realises that they cannot be replaced. 
 
 That sweeping away at Harrow is to us, especially to my 
 mother, quite desolating ; so much of the chain that bound us to 
 former days is broken, and so they become almost as if they had 
 not been the old landmarks have disappeared, and the river 
 gets wider and nearer the sea. So let it be. We must venture 
 further and further out, and trust more and more in God Himself. 
 Though the earth be removed, and the mountains cast into the 
 sea, yet, &c. 
 
 Some of the strongest and most abiding of the reli- 
 gious influences which informed and pervaded Emelia 
 Gurney's life had their rise during sojourns of almost 
 yearly occurrence, both before and after her marriage, 
 at Linlathen, with Mr. Thomas Erskine and his sisters. 
 She used to speak of it as " the home of my soul." 
 
 The following sketch of this home and its influences 
 has been kindly contributed by Miss Julia Wedgwood : 
 
 I have been asked to add an account of Linlathen to the 
 glimpses given here. No endeavour could open on a task at 
 once more welcome and more difficult. The memories recalled 
 by that name are the sweetest and purest which life affords, yet 
 when I endeavour to describe the mental scenery which forms 
 their background, I seem confronted with an achievement that
 
 12 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 needs genius. All I would recall is from an external point of 
 view quite commonplace. From the point of view which pre- 
 sents it to me, it is further removed from the commonplace than 
 any sojourn preserved in the long gallery of memory's landscape. 
 The attempt to bridge the chasm thus suggested seems not so 
 much difficult as hopeless, but it shall be made. 
 
 Thomas Erskine, the friend of Carlyle, of Arthur Stanley, and 
 of others distinguished in their own time, was once so well known 
 that it would have been enough to mention his name with no 
 further explanation in any collection of letters published fifty or 
 sixty years ago. He was the author of many works upon religion, 
 but his books are felt, by those who admire them most, to ex- 
 press a very small part of that which he bequeathed to mankind. 
 The extent of the contemporary influence of his writings may be 
 measured by the fact that he had the honour of being attacked 
 by John Henry Newman as a typical specimen of mysticism. 
 
 Of his history there is little to be said. He was a descendant 
 of the Regent Mar, and a great-grandson of a certain well-known 
 Colonel Erskine who took some part in the establishment of 
 William of Orange on the throne. A grandson of this Colonel 
 Erskine, a minister of the Scotch Church, has the enduring 
 distinction of being admitted to the pages of " Guy Mannering." 
 The eulogy there pronounced on this saintly and simple-minded 
 man has an added interest for a few, in the recollection that it 
 was pronounced on an uncle of Thomas Erskine, whose father, 
 from his success at the Scotch bar, was enabled to purchase 
 the estate of Linlathen, inherited successively by his two sons. 
 Thomas, the younger, followed his father's profession till, to his 
 deep and lasting grief, the death, in 1816, of his elder brother 
 made him the master of the grey Scotch house and sylvan sur- 
 roundings described below. 
 
 The deep and full inward life led there leaves some record 
 in the following pages. Of the outward life there is nothing to 
 say, save that it was a centre of friendship and intercourse, 
 marked no less by its profound and lofty range than by an 
 atmosphere of refinement and high breeding, for which the few
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 13 
 
 who recall it feel, at times, that they look elsewhere in 
 vain. 
 
 Linlathen itself had none of the charms which attach to one's 
 notions of a Scotch place. It is a tall stone house in Forfar- 
 shire, quite devoid of architectural impressiveness, surrounded by 
 grassy sweeps and noble trees, which, except for one opening 
 towards the west, where the Sidlaw hills showed blue in the 
 evening light, shut in the view. The walled garden was out of 
 sight of the house, and the only feature in the near view was a 
 little stream, sadly polluted by dye-works, but not thereby losing 
 its blue reflections and silvery gleams, hastening to the sea, which 
 it reached within a mile or so, and always suggestive of that 
 neighbourhood after one had caught the straight horizon line (not 
 visible from the house) in an afternoon's ramble. We used to 
 speak of " the green curtains " which shut us in as of some 
 characteristic feature of the place, warding off an alien world, and 
 enclosing one that needed such shelter. As the hills stand about 
 Jerusalem, so the trees stood about Linlathen. One naturally 
 uses the language of the past ; all that is outward is unchanged 
 now, but I seem, when I would recall it, to speak of something 
 that has passed away. 
 
 When I enter in imagination the square porch facing the 
 sweep of loose grey gravel, and pass along a wide corridor to a 
 library where the walls seem all creamy vellum and mellow russet 
 leather, or enter the neighbouring drawing-room, with its treasure 
 of Italian pictures, or turn the other way to the dining-room, with 
 its circle of past Erskines, who still look down on me with many 
 a suggestion of faces now also passed away, I come upon a life 
 impossible to reproduce except in negatives. Almost everything 
 suggested in the notion of a visit to Scotland was absent. There 
 was no sport, no gaiety, very few neighbours, the drives were 
 mainly to Dundee and Broughty Ferry, " an expedition " was a 
 thing unknown. Nor was the inner life a varied one. Much 
 which makes up the very breath of life to most persons was 
 behind those green curtains as though it did not exist. A casual 
 mention now and then, the question " Is there anything interesting
 
 i 4 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 in the Times ? " which no one asks who reads the newspaper as 
 a part of the day's work this was all the attention I can re- 
 member being given to politics. I was there through that fateful 
 struggle, the Austro-Prussian War of 1866, and used to watch the 
 Times for long mornings untouched on the table, where the butler 
 had laid it after opening and cutting it. Mr. Erskine would 
 listen to it, but rather as a task, laid aside willingly for some 
 book or letter which had no suggestion for the things of 
 Time. 
 
 It cannot be denied that this narrowness was sometimes op- 
 pressive for the moment. Much was there to relieve that feeling. 
 A sense of high breeding and refinement, discernible even by un- 
 sympathetic observers, and still more a completeness of union 
 among the home party which somehow suggested a youthful 
 group even to the last. It is rare at any age to enter a family 
 circle where one never feels a breath of divergence, in old age 
 most rare. Each of Mr. Erskine's widowed sisters seemed to 
 combine with the warm feeling of their actual relation a touch of 
 something closer. Mrs. Paterson, that of the sympathetic wife ; 
 Mrs. Stirling, that of the tender, protecting mother, but indeed 
 her attitude towards him seemed to take in all relations. He 
 was one who specially needed such shelter. In a few words I 
 wrote about him just after his death I said that one remembered 
 his life as the sigh of an exile. After the lapse of a generation 
 I feel that still the most appropriate description of it. The words 
 bring back all that was lacking to him, and all that was abundant 
 in him. He never took root in our world. I cannot think what 
 he would have been if his elder brother had survived, and he had 
 led the life of an Edinburgh lawyer. Perhaps more of a man in 
 some ways, but not the man we knew. " These thoughts that 
 wander through Eternity." How clearly I hear now the tones of 
 his voice in that quotation ! They come back whenever I read it 
 as the melody of a song with the words. 
 
 To him the world and all it contains except human spirits, 
 the whole scenery and circumstances of life, was but a language 
 in which, when rightly interpreted, man might decipher the
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 15 
 
 idiom and accents of a more permanent home. " What does it 
 all mean ? " he would ask, as we passed under the waving boughs, 
 and he looked around with a sort of wondering gaze, as if he 
 were the inhabitant of some distant planet just dropped upon 
 our earth. It was a commonplace scene which evoked the 
 demand overarching foliage, hedgerow blossoms, quiet lanes, 
 green pastures just what most people may see whenever they 
 take a country walk. It had all a language for him, but a 
 language imperfectly understood, listened to with a sort of 
 eager yearning always pressing thirstily towards some hidden 
 spring. He had not much love for particular places. He cared 
 for Linlathen far, far less than I did. I think there was always 
 a dim feeling that it was his brother's place, and had come to 
 him by a kind of mistake. But the feeling I have tried to 
 describe made all nature wondrously, endlessly interesting to 
 him. I remember the deep tones of his voice as he recalled 
 " the shores of the Gareloch " and his early wanderings there 
 at a time when " the invisible seemed pressing into the visible " 
 a time when I know he looked for a revelation of the invisible 
 unmistakable by all the inhabitants of the earth. 
 
 It was a time of which our generation only keeps recollection 
 in the existence of the " Catholic Apostolic Church " (to speak 
 of the Irvingites as they prefer to be described) a memorial 
 in some respects misleading, yet not devoid of a real suggestion 
 when attentively contemplated. It was a period associated with 
 marvellous cures, with awakening to a spiritual life; it was in 
 some respects more like a chapter from the Gospels than any- 
 thing else I ever heard of. Yet it ended in disappointment. 
 The surrender of the definite anticipations it had initiated had 
 less effect upon Mr. Erskine than one would have anticipated. 
 That part of his life gave a keynote to feeling after it had ceased 
 to keep any hold on intellect He always felt that it would be 
 perfectly natural to find the Divine within the world unveiled 
 to the eyes of those who needed to be convinced of the very 
 existence of the Divine, and a mistake as to a particular occasion 
 for this emergence had not for him the revolutionary effect on
 
 1 6 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 all thought which it would have had on most persons. He 
 admitted with a very rare and remarkable candour that he had 
 been mistaken in this anticipation admitted it in what many 
 would have felt its most difficult form, for he stated it distinctly 
 in a note to a later edition of the work containing an equally 
 distinct expression of his participation in it ; and then he turned 
 away, and did not willingly revert to the subject. Certain indi- 
 cations of an abiding readiness for the supernatural which may 
 be found in the letters which follow, and which are indeed very 
 characteristic of them, are, I think, best left in the vagueness in 
 which they stand here. They might be called exaggerated or 
 fanciful. I believe they referred to profound realities. But they 
 implied nothing which would have impressed any one in whose 
 mind a belief in the invisible could be increased or diminished 
 by any event in the visible world. His dearest friend, the 
 Duchesse de Broglie, warned him, when both were young, against 
 what may be called a premature absorbedness in the life of 
 eternity. I, knowing him in his old age, often recalled that 
 warning and lamented its neglect. I do not lament it now. 
 Looking on those years through the vista of more numerous 
 successors, I feel the exclusion a part of the peculiar impression 
 of that home, and realise that we could not have had those 
 limitations removed and keep the Linlathen I remember as a 
 sort of vision of some other world than ours. I remember the 
 feeling as I drove through the lodge gates that something 
 fell away and left one freer and more disentangled from 
 blinding conditions, an anticipation that was never disap- 
 pointed. 
 
 Once, in this journey, to have met a fellow-traveller to whom 
 all the scenery of life, all that most interests ordinary human 
 beings, is but as the furniture of an inn this is an experience 
 which none can wish to exchange for any other except those 
 who do not value it at all. We need not think of the disasters 
 it would bring if it were common. What we have to consider 
 is the memories we should lose if that were removed which 
 is unique. J. W.
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 17 
 
 The letters from Mr. Thomas Erskine which follow 
 embrace a period of many years ; but it is thought 
 best to place them here together, and in their own 
 sequence. 
 
 From Mr. THOMAS ERSKINE, of Linlathen, to 
 Mrs. RUSSELL GURNEY. 
 
 EDINBURGH, July 1855. 
 
 DEAR MRS. GURNEY, I ought to have written to you long 
 ago ; but I have been too much accustomed to consider that I 
 have a share in my sister's letters, and to count upon her regu- 
 larity. I do also count not a little on the perfect certainty that 
 such friends as you cannot impute my not writing to any forget- 
 fulness of kindness, deep, solid, and imperishable. I have been 
 alone in Edinburgh for a week ; though I ought not to say alone, 
 having friends here who keep me from any feeling of loneliness, 
 if I could have such a feeling in a place peopled with memories 
 of all my past. But yet it seems to myself wonderful how much 
 more of the past I have here, than of the present. My contem- 
 poraries are dead, and the friends that I see about me, with few 
 exceptions, do not remember what I remember. We have, how- 
 ever, a great common future, embraced in one common Father, 
 and one common nature. 
 
 I often wish I could see you or your dear mother, to com- 
 mune with on the things which I see and feel. I have just read a 
 dramatic poem, with great pleasure and admiration, by a country- 
 man of mine, settled as an Independent minister in Manchester, 
 where I met him a few days ago, entitled " Within and Without," 
 published by Longmans, which I wish you would get and read 
 attentively. I am sure you would like it. I like it better than 
 any poetry and most prose that I have read for many years. I 
 read it through almost continuously, which is a great deal to say 
 of any book, or at least of myself in relation to any book. Yours 
 ever truly, T. ERSKINE.
 
 1 8 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 From Mr. ERSKINE to Mrs. RUSSELL GURNEY. 
 
 1862. 
 
 We read the sermons on your brother-in-law [the Rev. J. H. 
 Gurney] with exceeding interest. He must have been a noble- 
 hearted man and a true. I regretted in reading them that I had 
 not endeavoured to become intimate with him that I might have im- 
 bibed some of his spirit. I feel that your husband must have loved 
 him and honoured him, and must have felt his human existence 
 much impoverished by his removal. I myself had a most noble- 
 hearted brother, whom I loved and honoured and trusted entirely, 
 and even now the thought of him helps me to realise my relation 
 to the great elder Brother, the loving Head of every man, who is 
 in each one of us, as the head of the natural body is present by 
 the nervous system in every member of the body. He is closer 
 to us than ought else, and is continually seeking to train us into 
 a perfect sympathy with Himself, sympathy with the Father and 
 the Son in every thought and feeling. This is eternal life ; it is 
 a participation in God's own will, and God's will is His life. 
 Ever affectionately yours, T. ERSKINE. 
 
 From Mrs. BATTEN to E. R. G. 
 
 LlNLATHEN, August l6, 1865. 
 
 . . . Mr. Erskine went in the carriage to meet Carlyle and 
 his brother: they arrived to dinner. Carlyle does now look 
 quite an old man, in his walk, and his hand trembles so that 
 he can hardly lift things to his mouth. But he seems as bright 
 and lively in his mind and laughs as heartily as ever. I have 
 not a sufficiently good memory to trace what is the difference 
 in him since we saw him sixteen years ago. What a large piece 
 out of our lives ! Well, he has produced six large volumes since 
 that time. Mr. Erskine told him he wondered that he had not 
 chosen the life of a man like Gustavus Adolphus, whose life 
 was devoted to great things, rather than Frederick, whose 
 aspirations were all of such a limited nature. He said, Yes, 
 he should have liked to take Gustavus, but he did not know
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 19 
 
 Swedish, and that Frederick had very great qualities, and the 
 object of his life for forty-five years had been to do what he 
 clearly felt was his duty, and no selfish considerations inter- 
 fered with it. He evidently did not enter into all Mr. E. 
 said. In the evening Mr. Erskine tried very hard to make him 
 understand that a man could not be made really good by com- 
 pelling him to be so outwardly. . . . 
 
 Mr. Carlyle and Mr. Erskine are the most curious contrasts. 
 Mr. E., thrilling constantly with love to all men and pity 
 for the wicked, feeling quite sure that they will be good one 
 day, and Carlyle longing to take a besom and sweep them all 
 away to destruction. I had much sympathy with him in the 
 abuses he spoke of, you may be sure. 
 
 He seems to have a great dislike to Stuart Mill ; says he is 
 thin in mind and thin in body. At one time he knew him 
 very well. 
 
 Well, the evening passed in a sort of encounter between 
 Mr. Erskine and Mr. Carlyle : and then actually Mr. E. 
 went away to sit in the still-room while they smoked. I 
 thought he need not have carried his hospitality so far as that ; 
 but I have no doubt we should have thought that our blessed 
 Lord carried His forbearance much too far to the people 
 around Him. 
 
 Carlyle is now sitting under that beautiful little ash tree in 
 the front of the house, just as he did sixteen years ago, smoking 
 and reading. I do not feel the enthusiasm for him I then 
 did. 
 
 LINLATHEN, September 1865. 
 
 The tenderness and love of these Linlathen people to 
 
 has been most beautiful. It was a most interesting sight to 
 see dearest Mrs. Paterson talking in her bed to the young 
 S.'s with such heavenly earnestness, that I think it must make 
 an impression through their lives; they were looking up to her 
 with the greatest love and reverence. 
 
 Mr. Erskine's reading of the i45th Psalm this morning was 
 so beautiful, so exquisitely reverential, so filled with tender awe ;
 
 20 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 and then the few words he said afterwards : " What a solemn 
 thing it was to have heard such words and to go away as if we 
 had not heard them;" and then his prayer, that they might 
 remain with us all day. And we all sat in solemn silence for 
 a long time after the servants left the library, feeling pene- 
 trated. 
 
 Dearest Mrs. Stirling looks very tired this morning. I think 
 of Mr. Erskine's words after her illness, " If I lose her, I shall 
 be homeless." Your own tender mother, C. B. 
 
 From Mr. ERSKINE to E. R. G. 
 
 LINLATHEN, November 1865. 
 
 Your letters are always balm to me. The idea that the 
 all-wise Ruler should change His plans or purposes at the cry 
 of His ignorant children seems quite preposterous; yet the lan- 
 guage of our Lord seems quite explicit in favour of such an idea. 
 I do not feel much perplexed about it, although I find it difficult 
 to follow out the steps. My way of understanding it is this. I 
 believe that God's chief purpose in this world is to educate and 
 develop the spirits and minds of men, and that the higher part of 
 this training can only be accomplished by teaching them to know 
 and love Him as a Personal Being. And that this result may be 
 effected, and is intended to be effected, through what are called 
 answers to prayer. When you were here, you may remember 
 that I often spoke to you of what appeared to me the in- 
 sufficiency of mere conscious effort to produce that result on 
 the character which is necessary for its highest Tightness and 
 harmony. Man must learn to love God, in order to love all his 
 unlovable fellow-creatures, and in order to have a right humility, 
 and to love what is right as well as to approve of it. A sense of 
 duty alone cannot produce these things. I have the conviction 
 that if Renan and his friends once came to feel that they cannot 
 be what they ought to be, that they cannot attain true Tightness 
 and true happiness without loving God as a Person, they would 
 be compelled to admit the reasonableness of Christianity, which
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 21 
 
 is just the religion of the personality of God, and of the love of 
 Him as a Person. 
 
 Such a love alone is the law of gravitation for the spiritual 
 world ; for such a personal God is the only centre of gravity 
 possible. 
 
 Man is created capable of this spiritual perfection in goodness 
 and blessedness, but this capacity can only be developed on the 
 condition that God is a personal Being, and that man learns to 
 know Him and love Him as a personal Being. 
 
 My belief about answers to prayer is based upon this higher 
 principle. Nothing can give us such a living sense of the 
 personality of God as His answering our secret desires. 
 
 From Mr. ERSKINE to E. R. G. 
 
 EDINBURGH, 1866. 
 
 Your dear mother has informed us of the important trust 
 committed to your husband, and of his and your acquiescence. 
 What would life be without duty? And what would duty be 
 if we did not know that its seat is the bosom of God ? Doubt- 
 less He will be with you, guiding and strengthening your hus- 
 band for his work, and strengthening you to be a helpmeet for 
 him in his arduous circumstances. 
 
 I am glad that Mr. Gurney has been fixed upon to try this 
 case, and that he has consented to undertake it. The invitation 
 of the Government is not a mere tribute to professional ability, 
 it is an acknowledgment of moral worth, which I feel it good 
 for the country to apprehend and enter into. The moral feelings 
 of the country, in public matters, are generally so mixed up with 
 political faction, that they have no ennobling result, and simply 
 evaporate in noise. I am sure that the treatment of this case 
 will teach them a much-needed lesson. 
 
 You know how much we three love you and prize you, and 
 how deeply we must enter into your feelings, both of thankful- 
 ness and anxiety. We shall pray for you as we are enabled. 
 Ever most affectionately yours, T. ERSKINE.
 
 22 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 From Mr. ERSKINE to E. R. G. 
 
 EDINBURGH, 1866. 
 
 It has pleased God to take my dear sister to Himself. She 
 died this morning, after a week's illness, having been to me for 
 thirty years my constant companion, my faithful, patient, loving 
 friend, my mother, wife, sister, all in one. She was my earthly 
 life. But I did not begin to write to tell you about her. I 
 should like to say a word for your poor friend. Let her try 
 really to live in what she knows and believes of God. I never 
 would think of requiring a sense of sin from any one. We 
 cannot have that by trying to have it. But the very smallest 
 amount of spiritual thought must give us the consciousness of 
 weakness and dependance. God made us to live as receivers 
 out of Him, and as conscious receivers : receivers from a loving 
 Father, who desires to give us His sympathy and to receive ours. 
 And when we are not in that state, even though we may not con- 
 demn ourselves (because we feel that we have conscientiously done 
 our best), yet we must feel unrestful and unsatisfied. We must 
 feel that something is wrong, whether it is our fault or not. If 
 we could believe that our Almighty Father really loved us, as we 
 love the being whom we most love in the world, and that all the 
 love of mother for child that we have known or felt is but a 
 manifestation of His love for every child of man, and that that 
 love is seeking to educate us all into a participation cf His own 
 righteousness and blessedness, with a reality of purpose which 
 will assuredly go on to its fulfilment, we should find our darkness 
 pass away, and sweet light take its place. But things about us 
 look sometimes so unlike love, and so unlike a purpose of educa- 
 tion, that it is difficult to believe that we are the objects of such 
 a love and such a purpose. And yet in my own heart I feel that 
 there is a continued unceasing demand on me that I should be a 
 better man than I am.
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 23 
 
 From Mrs. BATTEN to E. R. G. 
 
 LINLATHEN, October 14, 1867. 
 
 Well, darling, I arrived here ; was shown by a strange servant 
 into the empty drawing-room. There I sat about half-an-hour 
 alone and in dead silence, and felt in a dull foggy dream ; and so 
 I think I have been ever since. There was a mistake about telling 
 Mary Paterson ; however, she came at last, lovely, sweet, cordial. 
 She certainly is like a graceful tree growing up in the place of the 
 familiar magnificent oaks. Then Mr. Erskine came. Of course 
 there would not be much visible change in him ; he could not 
 look much more sorrowful than he used to look. He began at 
 once to speak of his sisters ; he said their deaths were so com- 
 pletely characteristic of their lives, so entirely in keeping with 
 them, as I had always felt. Not one word did the beloved Mrs. 
 Stirling speak to him. When she was first taken ill she said, 
 " This is death," but she had said this before. The doctor left 
 her, saying they expected her to be much better in the morning. 
 At three in the morning she sent for Mr. E. and said, " I like to 
 have you near me," and asked him to pray with her, but said 
 nothing. He sat with her till all was over. Was not this like 
 her? It seemed as if one could so completely understand it, 
 and feel how it accorded with her character. He said, " Never 
 once in the whole course of her life did she appeal to me for 
 sympathy ; she was always giving it out, but never asking to re- 
 ceive it." We spoke for about a quarter of an hour about them, 
 and then other people came in, and I have not seen him alone 
 since. It was a most fortunate thing for me that I had the 
 " Reign of Law," which I had been reading all the journey here 
 with intense interest, and I found he wanted to hear it, and so I 
 read it to him all the evening, and he entered into it, though I 
 do not know that he liked it as much as I did. I think he slept 
 a little, but not much ; and so the first evening passed away, and 
 there was the getting up and lighting of candles at the hall table, 
 that you know so well, and we went to our rooms. Your own 
 most tender mother, C. B.
 
 24 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 LlNLATHEN, 1867. 
 
 An enclosure copied from Miss WEDGWOOD'S recollection of a 
 conversation with Mr. ERSKINE. 
 
 Mr. Erskine's mind seems to have been dwelling so much 
 lately on the analogy between the inward and the outward 
 world. He has spoken so much of the force with which the 
 spectacle of a universe regulated by the law of gravitation weighed 
 upon him, as the token of the one principle which was to keep 
 the spiritual world in order, that of Love. That, as the sun's 
 attraction kept the planets in their right places, not only in 
 regard to the central sun, but in regard to each other, so the 
 love of God was to put us right not only towards God, but 
 towards every human being. 
 
 We have not yet got into this right state, and the true analogy 
 for our present world would be a solar system in which the law 
 of attraction was not yet acting equally, and that, when this moral 
 gravitation was fully established in every minor planet of the 
 system, the spiritual world would present the same spectacle 
 of perfect order as the natural. He seemed to look upon the 
 force of gravitation as it were a sort of parable of the in- 
 fluence of love keeping everything together, keeping every- 
 thing in movement which did not interfere with any other move- 
 ment, keeping everything in its right place. Judaism, he said, 
 he regarded as chiefly occupied with the orbit of the planets ; 
 Christianity as a revelation of their centre. No human being, 
 he said, at one time or another is without lucid intervals, in 
 which he would allow that the only good thing in life is love ; 
 that every drop of sweetness comes from this. Christianity is 
 just the revelation of the fountain-head of all these scattered 
 drops ; it tells us that there is absolutely no other righteous- 
 ness than love. Love is the desire to make righteous. God 
 creates that He may have fellow-workers. 
 
 . . . The greater part of this was said when we were walking 
 to Broughty Ferry, and I shall never forget one moment when 
 he stopped to look up into the blue sky through a break in the
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 25 
 
 cloud, and said, " What a wonderful thing it is that the Light 
 should hide ; there are the stars, why do we not see them ? Why 
 do we not see God? He is here." He was, of course, think- 
 ing of Blanco White's sonnet on Night and Death, of which 
 he spoke. He continued to speak on this, and on the unex- 
 pectedness of the means by which the stars were hidden from 
 us ; the impossibility of our ever guessing that anything was 
 there but blue sky. I think his mind was dwelling on the 
 possible surprise with which it might be that some, who had 
 looked earnestly for God and never found Him, should see Him 
 emerge, as it were, in some other state. 
 
 From Mr. ERSKINE to E. R. G. 
 
 DALHOUSIE CASTLE, November 1867. 
 
 Your kind and welcome letter has followed me to this place. 
 Your visit, yours and dear Mrs. Batten's, is a pleasant memory 
 a joy for life. When I was last here I had just had that vision, 
 and I felt it still present, as always recallable. It is more a matter 
 of memory now ; but I hold it as a reality, giving me the assur- 
 ance that it is not less present because it is less visible. I know 
 that He in whom I live and move and have my being, and 
 without whom a hair falls not from my head, is really caring 
 for me and thinking upon me; that I am not only under a 
 wise and gracious order of things, but that the Orderer Himself 
 knows and meets my needs. I write this to you because I am 
 sure that what is true for me is true for you, and every child of 
 man. Yours affectionately, T. ERSKINE. 
 
 From the same to Mrs. BATTEN and E. R. G. 
 
 BELOVED FRIENDS, MOTHER AND DAUGHTER, Any word 
 from you is always most welcome and refreshing, bringing in- 
 timations of the eternal sympathy, which is also the eternal 
 harmony. I am thankful to find that you have found in one 
 important matter that oneness. I mean, that you have found 
 that in very deed the consent of your will to the will of God, 
 in opposition to all self-seeking, is the true order and the true
 
 26 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 blessedness. Milton speaks of consent as arising out of coruent 
 the C making the musical harmony, the S the harmony of 
 feeling. The Father and the Son, dwelling in the sympathy of 
 one Spirit, are the Fountain of all love, and all goodness, and 
 all blessedness. Wherever we see good, we see the presence 
 of God, for there is no other good. Man can proceed from 
 nothing but love ; so that I am shut in to believe it. And when 
 I look or think on some human beings in whom I have found 
 some trace of that love and that purpose, and have felt how 
 entirely I could trust them, I am confirmed in the assurance 
 that God must be better than they are, and must indeed be 
 the Fountain out of which all their loving purposes flow. Jesus 
 Christ is just the revelation of all that I have been saying. He 
 is the Revealer of the Father, the Revealer that He is the 
 Father of every man, and that He desires our perfect right- 
 ness, and withholds no suffering which may help on that con- 
 clusion. Ever affectionately yours, T. ERSKINE. 
 
 From E. R. G. to ELLEN MARY GURNEY. 
 
 8 PALACE GARDENS, December 1866. 
 
 I am feeling very much now the loss of my beloved Mrs. 
 Stirling, Mr. Erskine's sister; the wise, guiding, loving mother- 
 spirit at the interpreter's house. I do not now expect to see 
 that precious place again. 
 
 From Mrs. BATTEN to E. R. G. 
 
 LINLATHEN, September 27, 1868. 
 
 MOST BELOVED CHILD, Here I am, sitting in this bright 
 and yet sad drawing-room all alone, bright with recollections 
 and sad with recollections. There are the two empty armchairs, 
 and there are the beautiful pictures all round, at which dearest 
 Mr. Erskine now never casts a glance. I think his pleasure in 
 them is entirely gone. And there is the well-chosen library of 
 books, neglected. He is a kind of mournful shadow of his past 
 self. Perhaps that is almost too strong an expression, but it
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 27 
 
 expresses much of what he is. And yet at dinner yesterday, 
 with Jane Mackellar and myself, he talked very cheerfully and 
 much as usual ; but he evidently feels that he is here for a very 
 little time, and that that time is one of very much darkness and 
 suffering. You cannot think what an extraordinary day this is ; 
 there is not a breath to stir the great trees, which are slightly 
 tinged with autumn. Now, though it has been rainy and gloomy, 
 there is such a lovely moonlight sunshine on the landscape. 
 Mr. Erskine came in just as I was writing this, and I said to 
 him, " You never look at your pictures, they look so beautiful ; " he 
 just glanced round them and gave a melancholy smile, and then said, 
 " I shall be blind very soon, but I leave it in the hands of God." 
 
 . . . There's no sunlight to-day. I am not sorry ; the sun- 
 light recalls their spirits more forcibly. Now there is a solemn 
 waiting in the trees, no wind, something of the calm decay which 
 seems suitable to the hour of life that is. 
 
 Farewell. Oh, what memories, what memories we have 
 together. YOUR OWN MOTHER. 
 
 Mrs. Stirling entered into rest, December i, 1866. 
 Mrs. Paterson ,, March 1867. 
 
 Mr. Erskine March 23, 1870. 
 
 In January 1866 Mr. Russell Gurney was appointed 
 one of the Commissioners to Jamaica to investigate 
 matters connected with the late disturbances there under 
 Governor Eyre. His wife accompanied him, and they 
 were there till April. Selections from her journal letters 
 during this time, written to her mother, are given in a 
 later part of this volume. 
 
 From Mrs. BATTEN to E. R. G. (written to Jamaica). 
 
 THURSDAY, January 4, 1866. 
 
 Oh, what a picture is printed on my mind of the great black 
 hull of the Atrato on our horizon and the gloomy stormy sea on
 
 28 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 which she set forth on her voyage, and the forms of you two 
 beloved ones watching us to the last, and the white flags held 
 up by those who seemed as sad almost as ourselves. We saw 
 what a stormy night was setting in. Some men in our boat, 
 who seemed to know about it, said that you would have a most 
 quiet night, for that you would be sure not to set off in such 
 weather ; that you would go to Yarmouth Roads and there wait 
 till it moderated. This was a little comfort; but the whole 
 thing has been one of those never-to-be-forgotten eras in life 
 which cannot often occur, but which leave marks that are never 
 obliterated. 
 
 From Mrs. BATTEN to E. R. G. (written to Jamaica). 
 
 February 22, 1866. 
 
 I had my Sunday at home alone. You may guess where 
 my thoughts were most of the time. I wonder whether I shall 
 learn any of my lessons ! The lesson seems harder and harder 
 as I look more closely at it ; but my conviction of the necessity 
 of its being learnt grows more intense. How is it that I have 
 not learnt it long ago ? How little one's most intimate friends 
 know the aspect things wear to us. Many say to me, " Are you 
 not quite happy now ? " as if there were no unknown climate, 
 no deep Atlantic to cross before I can see my beloved ones. 
 Others say, " I hope you continue to receive good accounts," 
 as if there were a post every day. Others, " Oh, I am sure 
 they will be preserved in health and come safely back; they 
 are gone on such a good errand." There's one secure footing, 
 and one alone, the will of God. Yes, that is it; to feel that 
 the will of God, whatever it may be, is holy, just, and good, 
 and as such well for us. The lesson, then, to learn, is to love 
 His will and not to be so solicitous to know what it may be 
 for the future; to dwell upon the fact that His love is the 
 love of a Father to all, whatever may seem to us inconsistent 
 with it
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 29 
 
 From E. R. G. to Miss WEDGWOOD. 
 
 SPANISH TOWN, JAMAICA, February 8, 1866. 
 I want very much one of your refreshing awakening letters ; 
 because I am in danger of letting my brain get very soft in this 
 heat. We have seen nothing of the so-called beautiful parts of 
 Jamaica, dwelling in this peculiarly dilapidated town. But the 
 drives around I think lovely enough to make any one frantic ; 
 the variety in the trees, all so strange and new, and so extra- 
 ordinarily leafy and full of sap, and so decked with parasites, and 
 the sleepy stream twisting beneath their great thirsty roots, and 
 the bronze statues that bathe and wash there, and the perfumed 
 luscious air, and the delicately pure, deep, distant sky with nearer 
 clouds this is all more than enough. Of the nights I will not 
 begin to rave, or you will know I am mad, and you won't write ; 
 for that is what I most want here letters lest I should become 
 quite a lotus eater, and hear all your voices very thin and far off, 
 and give up returning to you. The blacks and whites are very 
 perplexing here. I feel so much for both. I think the blacks 
 are silly naughty children no, some silly good children, very, and 
 you know the difficulty it is for elders to treat silly children well 
 and wisely. A great amount of evidence is pouring in, of course 
 of a very contradictory kind. The Commissioners work well 
 together, and go at it most diligently. 
 
 From Miss WEDGWOOD to E. R. G. 
 
 March 3, 1866. 
 
 Here is the letter you ask for, though I do not feel adequate 
 to counteract the wonderful lotus-eating spell you describe so 
 well. I should fear, however, that Mr. Gurney's business would 
 prove only too effectual a counteraction to any epicurean longing 
 to rest in your present Paradise, giving such a very unquestionable 
 proof that the spirit of man is not divine there. I should have 
 thought that a very liberal Nature would have only set free the 
 spiritual part of our being from all sordid cares to attain a richer
 
 3 o LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 development, but it does seem as if this was especially what 
 wanted the resistance of material difficulties, in order to exercise 
 itself rightly. Of course it is the negro race, as you say, which 
 plays the part of silly children, but still there seems no virile 
 development anywhere in the tropics. I am disappointed that 
 the evidence seems so unfavourable to us. I would rather have 
 discovered that the negroes had behaved badly than we. But 
 how you will swear at me (if you ever do such a thing) for blow- 
 ing back your own smoke in your face, when what you must long 
 for is a little fresh air. And I must go on about you, for very 
 few people have filled my mind as you have this last January. 
 Your mother came and called upon me just at the worst time ; 
 I was so touched by it ; but when I heard she was in the drawing- 
 room I could hardly bear to go to her. Oh, what she must have 
 undergone all through those storms ! The details of the loss of 
 the London brought it all so vividly before my thoughts. After 
 what you had told me of her, I felt somehow as if such a loss 
 were more likely for her, and I wondered to find myself 
 thinking of myself in it too. For you I think there would 
 have been something enviable in that passage into another 
 world together. 
 
 Your mother said your first letters were to her like a parable 
 of death ; while she had been in such agony, you had been waking 
 up to this new world of magical beauty. You cannot think 
 how that expression, "a parable of death," has haunted me. 
 When all one's grief lies in the past, when once one begins to 
 think of the departed as at home in the new abode, how one 
 does long for some word to come from them ! Oh, I wonder if 
 words do come, and we do not hear them ! if they write to us of 
 a new world a spiritual tropics where the poor wearied spirit 
 expands into a " perfumed, luscious air " like yours, and we can- 
 not read their letters, or mistake them for something different ; 
 or if we do not open them, that would be the worst ! I do feel 
 in that terrible silence such an intense need to treasure up all 
 the hints and suggestions of a future, of which this world seems to 
 me to be full and yet not full enough.
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 31 
 
 I cannot tell you this evening how welcome to me is your 
 bright glimpse of tropical life. I want some escape from the 
 contemplation of dreary, sordid English life as exhibited in a 
 workhouse, which just now oppresses me, and your note gives a 
 suggestion of something so different. 
 
 I am sure I want pulling up to the surface much more than 
 any one else can want pulling down into the depths (but I am 
 afraid the former is much the most laborious occupation), and so 
 my friends ought always to give me as much of their outward 
 impressions as they can. 
 
 I was interested in your expression about the unaffected part 
 of oneself that looks on at all one's physical ills. I think this 
 perplexity is often a real distress in illness, painful as it sounds. 
 One of my cousins, who has suffered greatly for a year, and is so 
 changed no one would know her, was saying she really should 
 not care half so much if she had but a dolorometer that would 
 tell her how bad she was. 
 
 I have often felt that, but did not know it was a part of real 
 serious illness. I think the result might sometimes be very 
 mortifying, however, when the mercury would hardly rise at all 
 after one had clamoured for sympathy as if one had been on the 
 rack. 
 
 I have been enjoying a visit so much to my uncle, Charles 
 Darwin. He has one of the few minds I ever knew that can 
 understand and philosophise upon its own limits ; e.g. he was 
 speaking of his great love of Poetry as a young man, and how 
 completely it had given way to his taste for science, and there 
 was something so very accurate and subtle in his description of 
 his incapacity ; it seemed wonderful to me his keeping the know- 
 ledge of what poetry was, and yet losing his taste for it. He said, 
 " Well, I suppose it is that in reading scientific books one has 
 not properly taken them in unless one could put the meaning into 
 other words, and so I have got into the habit of this attempt, and 
 cannot help making it upon poetry, where it must fail." I was so 
 much struck with any one who had lost the taste for poetry keep- 
 ing the knowledge that this was just the test that marked it off
 
 32 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 from other kinds of truth. It reminded me of a few words Mr. 
 Erskine said to me once at Linlathen about Music, which he 
 does not understand ; and yet it was a nearer attempt to a 
 definition of the pleasure one receives from it than any words 
 I ever heard about it. 
 
 From Mrs. BATTEN to E. R. G. (written to Jamaica). 
 
 March 5, 1866. 
 
 How earnestly I hope that this letter may find you still at 
 Jamaica; that you will not leave without having enjoyed with 
 dearest Russell some tours in that wonderful place. Oh, my 
 Emily, what a magical effect has your most charming of all and 
 delightful and satisfactory letter had upon me. I think I felt 
 almost as anxious about this letter (what I might hear) as 
 before the last, and now again my sunbeam has shone brightly 
 upon me ! 
 
 Now, my anxiety is that you may not come away too quickly. 
 Why dear Russell should hurry away immediately after finishing 
 his work, without going to see those wonders of beauty which he 
 will never have another opportunity of seeing, I cannot imagine. 
 Oh, I feel so impatient at having no post to send off an earnest 
 entreaty that you will stay. I trust and hope no idea of my 
 being unhappy will for a moment come into your minds to weigh 
 a feather in the scale; indeed, I think you know too well my 
 earnest desire that you should see everything and have every 
 advantage for that. I have been reading to-day in the Times 
 such a description of a day spent in the country by their corre- 
 spondent in Jamaica. It makes me most earnestly long that you 
 should see it. However, this is not what you want to hear, and 
 so I shall not fill any more of my letter with it, but go on in my 
 journal style, as you like that the best 
 
 . . . You say you pity us so much for not seeing tropical 
 regions. Well, I do not feel any very ardent desire. I often 
 think of your simile of the photographs. Do you remember when 
 I said (with regret), " I shall see so few more springs," and you
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 33 
 
 said it was like a person in a dungeon that had only looked at 
 photographs of the outside world, regretting that he must go out 
 of his dungeon and leave them. Well, I really feel that as I 
 never, never did before. So you are always helping me ! 
 
 To Mrs. FRANCIS GALTON. 
 
 8 PALACE GARDENS, 1866. 
 
 It was delightful to get your note. I have sadly missed you 
 and Mr. Gallon on our return. I find my mother so well. The 
 arrival at Southampton, finding her, Uncle J., and Aunt E. to 
 greet us where we had parted in such sorrow to go into a dark 
 unknown future seemed like a glimpse of what a meeting again 
 must be at the other end of the valley of the shadow of death. 
 I hardly knew till I got home what a time of trembling one had 
 gone through. 
 
 It is such an unspeakable mercy that dear Russell keeps so 
 well after such very hard, trying work, and now so immersed in 
 various things. He is exceedingly interested in his parliament 
 life, and so far it has not the least knocked him up. I must tell 
 you I am more than ever satisfied with him. I do not see a 
 trace of self-seeking in him, or the slightest hankering after the 
 honour that comes from man. Watts has painted the most 
 perfect portrait of him I ever saw " the form and colour of his 
 mind and life." Strong and rigidly dutiful, but softened into 
 loving-kindness by all the tints of years and experience. 
 
 ... I cannot understand, year after year keeping in such a 
 sunny sheltered spot as we do. I often say how will it feel when 
 the sun goes in. I do not anticipate evil, but I want to make 
 sure of the Centre Sun that goes not down. 
 
 In 1866 Mrs. Russell Gurney's portrait was painted 
 by Mr. Watts, and is alluded to in the following letter. 
 A smaller portrait of Mr. Russell Gurney was also 
 painted shortly afterwards by the same artist. This 
 she wrote of at the time as " a miracle of Russell." 
 It is now in the National Gallery.
 
 34 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 To ELLEN MARY GURNEY. 
 
 8 PALACE GARDENS, 1866. 
 
 Watts is painting Russell, to my joy, and in his velvet coat ; 
 but only head and half a shoulder. / grow lovelier and lovelier 
 every day. It is very funny to hear the different remarks. H. F. 
 thinks my forehead very dirty, and that my eyes are red with 
 crying. Mrs. P. thinks me an engaging young creature, without 
 that maturity of thought and character for which she loves me. 
 M. B. says, " It is Emily when I dream of her." Mrs. H. bursts 
 into tears before it, and says, " Oh, how pitying ! and with the 
 dear little hands praying. It is like you, but you are purified." 
 Miss T. says, " It is an affected attitude, and not good-looking 
 enough ! " Miss S. says the painting is very rough and patchy, 
 she can't get over it. 
 
 From a Friend to E. R. G., giving a recollection of some words of 
 Mr. WATTS, in speaking of his portrait of Mr. RUSSELL 
 GURNEY. 
 
 Mr. Watts said that he always found great difficulty in portrait 
 painting, because he never rested satisfied with reproducing what 
 was merely apparent to the outer eye ; that he always studied the 
 character until he could work out the inner self as much as 
 possible : he spoke of the difficulty of this in a face like Mr. 
 Jowett's. But he said in the instance of your beloved one, 
 there was first such great beauty of feature, " but the beauty 
 of mind and soul was such that I frequently forgot my work in 
 the delight of studying it ; that picture was an immense pleasure 
 to paint." 
 
 To ELLEN MARY GURNEY. 
 
 LlNLATHEN, l866. 
 
 Your letter has come here to me in fog and far northness 
 altogether ; but we have had a delightful visit near the Equator 
 of the moral atmosphere, where the curtain is so thin between 
 the inhabitants and the invisible world that their faces get re- 
 flections from the angels, and we hear voices in the air and
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 35 
 
 get visions just as the pilgrims did in the land of Beulah, and 
 you cannot think how sweet that is. 
 
 Tall beeches, with feathering branches sweeping to the 
 smooth banks, keep guard around, and between them one sees 
 in the distance below white sheep feeding in green pastures 
 beside a stream. Inside the great drawing-room the walls are 
 covered with real old Italian pictures, solemnly grand. But this 
 is only the outward scenery. It is the spirit of the inhabitants 
 which is so strangely beautiful and unlike workaday world 
 spirits. 
 
 You will know I mean Mr. Erskine and his two sisters. 
 They are all delicate instruments, who have responded to the 
 voice of the Lord all the years of their life. And this makes 
 their tunes, both of joy and sorrow, so rarely elevated and ten- 
 derly full of grace. 
 
 The letters here given between Mrs. Russell Gurney 
 and Lady Mount Temple (at this period Mrs. Cowper 
 Temple) give only a faint reflection of the friendship 
 and close bond of affection which existed and increased 
 between them through all the latter half of Mrs. Russell 
 Gurney's life. 
 
 Her own impressions of the Broadlands " Confer- 
 ences," in which it was her delight to take part each 
 year, is given later on. 
 
 To the Honble. Mrs. COWPER TEMPLE. 
 
 LINLATHEN, September 1866. 
 
 I do not think the beloved circle of three here will remain 
 much longer unbroken. There is a great increase of feebleness 
 in all ; but I need not say that all are abiding in love, and the 
 atmosphere around them is that of a tender, ripe autumn day. 
 Mr. Erskine often repeats a sentence of Jacob Boehmen : " The 
 element of the bird is the air, the element of the fish is the water, 
 the element of the salamander is the fire, and the element of
 
 36 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 Jacob Boehmen is the Heart of God." He is dwelling much on 
 the thought that God has made us to educate us, in opposition 
 to the idea that He has placed us in a state of probation. That 
 He would have us partakers of His Nature, and that He will 
 not fail nor be discouraged in His work of drawing our wills to 
 consent to this, nor be interrupted by death. 
 
 To ELLEN MARY GURNEY. 
 
 BRIGHTON, 1866. 
 
 Last Sunday we had a fine Advent sermon from Mr. Vaughan 
 [Rev. James Vaughan of Christ Church]. I liked his saying we 
 must always be having an Advent Sunday, again and again ex- 
 pecting our Lord to come to us, and again and again going to 
 Him. We are always wanting a fresh start a beginning again to 
 do better ; a reawakening out of our sleep ; a raising again of 
 claims, of relationships, duties, that we have let die. Christ must 
 come and renew everything for us. Oh, that we may not shut 
 the door against Him or leave Him no room with our crowd 
 of vain thoughts ! 
 
 To the same. 
 
 PALACE GARDENS, 1867. 
 
 At the water-colour exhibition a Cupid and Psyche by Burne- 
 Jones pleased me more than any picture I have seen this year. 
 I would hang it with A. Hughes's one of the lady proud to be 
 guarded by her knight, of a year or two ago. Cupid had a scarf 
 and wings to match of such glorious ruddy purple ; and the sky 
 was deep, deep, solemn grey-blue, like Psyche's eyes, all fitted 
 to receive His glory. There was about the whole picture the 
 grand infinite solemn tone that ought to accompany passionate 
 love in order that it may not be of the earth earthy. . . . You 
 cannot think how many interesting people there are about, rich 
 and poor. One does so long for a wider, deeper nature to 
 contain all the sights and sounds that vibrate on ear and eye. 
 
 I would say, " Grow, grow ! " to all. And I believe a right 
 growth can only come from maintaining the constant attitude of
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 37 
 
 receiving, the child spirit before the Heavenly Father, which is the 
 growing up into the Son in all things. Oh ! to keep up our 
 aspirations for this is hard, but not impossible. 
 
 To the same. 
 
 1868. 
 
 I did mean to have sent you a line for your birthday. In 
 truth, I feel how infinitely more valuable human beings become 
 every year they live, and far more interesting as they get " some 
 relish of the saltness of time," as Falstaff called it. There is, 
 of course, a poetical beauty about buds and early morning, and 
 a beauty of skin and texture, and a winning attraction in the 
 simplicity and uncertainty of youthful creatures. But we may 
 gain more valuable things than these. A strength, which infinitely 
 enhances the value of tenderness ; a largeness of heart and 
 mind, which grows out of experience ; and, above all, an in- 
 creased knowledge of God and His dealings with ourselves and 
 mankind, which increases our loving confidence in Him im- 
 mensely beyond the early confidence of inherited belief in Him. 
 Go on; grow large, wise, strong, tender, helpful to others, faith- 
 ful to the high and holy calling, as you appreciate it more and 
 more ! There are far-reaching birthday wishes. 
 
 During the fortnight at Linlathen we had lovely weather 
 also. Golden autumn beauties, and my blessed old beloved 
 Mr. Erskine vanishing away into Eternal Life. I felt it such a 
 gate of heaven to be there. Such an opportunity for a quick- 
 ening of faith, for which I thank God. It is always my 
 Sabbath there. From early youth to mature age I have been 
 permitted to refresh myself there, and now I must expect it to 
 be hidden out of sight, and must all the more try and drink 
 at the Fountain.
 
 38 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 CORRESPONDENCE WITH MISS WEDGWOOD 
 FROM 1865 TO 1869. 
 
 From Miss WEDGWOOD to Mrs. RUSSELL GURNEY. 
 
 December %, 1865. 
 
 DEAREST MRS. GURNEY, I was thinking of you so much 
 this morning ; I went in to Mr. Maurice for a little while, and 
 he was talking so characteristically of those Pall Mall letters on 
 Prayer. I said I had not much sympathy with the special 
 prayers. He said, "I don't think I should have much either, 
 but those letters of Tyndall's have converted me to that side." 
 And he went on so very emphatically, "When any one says 
 disorder is a part of order, I feel that, at all events, the argument 
 which leads to that must be wrong." I never can quite make 
 out what Mr. M. ultimately means; he was arguing in favour 
 of the prayers against the cattle plague, yet he said he entirely 
 sympathised with my feeling that it was unwise to bring wishes 
 about events into that influence of prayer (so that we might ever 
 feel that God had disappointed us), and I cannot see the con- 
 sistency of these two views. There is something in his mind 
 which curiously does not see that if a thing is true the contrary 
 of it must be false. I cannot quite make up my mind whether it 
 is because he sees further than most people or (in this direction) 
 not so far, for it is something quite distinct from Robertson's 
 feeling about opposite truths, which always seems to me the car- 
 dinal point of all truth. 
 
 From Mrs. RUSSELL GURNEY to Miss WEDGWOOD. 
 
 BRIGHTON, December 15, 1865. 
 
 DEAREST Miss WEDGWOOD, What you said of Mr. M. in- 
 terested me very much. I am always questioning as to whether 
 he sees deeper than others or less deep. I think, though, he 
 looks quite in a different direction from those who are gener- 
 ally discussing such subjects as that of Prayer. He neither 
 looks at it from the religious world point nor from the logical.
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 39 
 
 What you said to me about the subject at Palace Gardens gave 
 me more light than I have had about the region that you ex- 
 pected to be influenced by prayer, not physical nature, but 
 spiritual nature; and perhaps through spiritual nature the phy- 
 sical may be affected, the cattle plague, for instance, by the minds 
 of men being instructed to deal with it. 
 
 Again a week has passed since I began this. Visitors have 
 
 only just left us the . He is most interesting ; he seems 
 
 closely allied to all the chain of animal life, and describes their 
 ways and nature with an entertaining sympathy. His joy in 
 natural science is beautiful and childlike ; but it is the joy of a 
 child who has found a rare and complicated machine, that he 
 is becoming acquainted with. Alas ! the machine does not seem 
 to him set going by a Father, and pervaded by a Father's love. 
 
 I don't like Carlyle's bit about illusive hope. I should say 
 the hope he sets forth as a blessing is delusive hope ; if we are 
 hurrying to a black Erebus, let us have our eyes open. The 
 only illusion I would accept is, when the end and purpose is 
 Light, the being lured on to it by the beams that come up from 
 the Central Light, and seem till we get up to them the Central 
 Light itself; and they are types of it, or even parts of it. 
 
 I liked your letter very much, and I feel as if your mind 
 could help mine very much indeed. I want to dive a deal 
 more, but it seems I am not likely to do so very soon. We 
 are probably to take a flight to Jamaica very soon. It seems 
 such a suddenly new slide in our magic lantern. Russell has 
 been so pressed to go by the Colonial Office that he feels he 
 cannot refuse, to be on the Commission of Enquiry. We should 
 probably be absent three months. The leaving dearest mother 
 is the thorn, and she feels it so much and will feel it. But in 
 other ways (except that my husband says he shall feel it anxious 
 and painful work) I rejoice. I long to see something of tropics 
 and blacks, and expect to be highly entertained. 
 
 Will you promise to write me an immense letter if we do go ? 
 I am thankful for the gain of your friendship. Believe me ever, 
 very affectionately yours, EMELIA GURNEY.
 
 4 o LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 From E. R. G. to Miss WEDGWOOD. 
 
 8 PALACE GARDENS,/**/? 1866. 
 
 . . . The great press of things has passed, but my mind feels 
 frayed out sadly. I have no excuse for being bewildered, for 
 really I have not half the claims of society, &c., that most 
 London people have. I did not know you were still at Lin- 
 lathen ; it must be delightful in this hot weather. I should like 
 to sit with you in the Beech Walk. I should like to know how 
 Mr. E. is getting on with what he is about, and whether you feel 
 you can help him. When you leave Linlathen, if you come to 
 London next, will you make a point of coming quite fresh to me. 
 I should enjoy beyond anything getting you with the dew still 
 upon you, for here it is very dusty. There are very beautiful 
 sweet things about, only we want minds more at leisure fully to 
 taste them. 
 
 My true love to you and to the spiritual beings you are with. 
 Your very affectionate EMELIA GURNEY. 
 
 From Miss WEDGWOOD to E. R. G. 
 
 LINLATHEN, July 1866. 
 
 I send you, as you ask, a few recollections of Mr. E.'s con- 
 versation (or rather monologue) with me. It was interesting to 
 me from its sharp contrast with the conventional point of view, 
 which is what I have also differed from so strongly, that Justice is 
 a coarse, rude virtue which is embodied in our legal dealings with 
 each other, while Mercy (as we call it in God) or generosity (as 
 among ourselves) is something both more extensive and delicate, 
 so that it includes Justice and much besides. It always seems to 
 me that there could not be more appropriate words to describe 
 the exact opposite of the truth. Generosity is the half-way house 
 to justice, that we must aim at before proceeding further on our 
 journey ; and laws do not even get, or attempt to get, so far as 
 this : they stop at a coarse kind of honesty that undertakes to 
 supply remedies for the worst inconveniences of our wrong-doings, 
 and have absolutely no regard to anything ultimate. So that it is
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 41 
 
 justice which seems to me the subtle and delicate quality that 
 comes into play in our more perfect relations, while generosity is 
 what we are bound to show towards all. 
 
 A recollection 0/"Mr. ERSKINE'S conversation. 
 
 The relation of man to God has suffered in our imagination 
 by being compared to that between a judge and a criminal. All 
 analogies taken from the legal relations between human beings 
 are misleading, as applied to the divine attitude towards us. 
 
 The judge has not to consider justice towards the criminal at 
 all. He has nothing to do with the question of the deserts of 
 a particular person. All he has to think of is his own duty 
 towards his country, his fidelity to a particular decision which 
 that country has embodied in a law, which law may or may not 
 be a just one. As man to man, he might act towards the accused 
 person in a manner diametrically opposite to that which he has 
 no excuse for evading as a judge, not that as the man he would 
 show mercy and as the judge he must observe justice, but that as 
 the judge he must not observe justice ; that as filling that office 
 he must put out of his mind that estimate of individual claims 
 which is of the essence of justice. 
 
 Now it is plain that this, which is of the very essence of the 
 right condition of a judge, can find nothing at all analogous to 
 it in the dealings of God with the soul. He must act to that 
 soul as if it were the only recipient of His care in the universe. 
 He has nothing at all to consider which can form a parallel to 
 those claims of the country which for a judge are paramount ; 
 that subordination of the one to the many, which is of the very 
 essence of our laws, is the first thing to put aside in apprehending 
 our position towards God. 
 
 From E. R. G. to Miss WEDGWOOD. 
 
 BIRNAM HOTEL, DUNKEI.D, September 18, 1866. 
 DEAREST SNOW, I quite believe that now and then old 
 friends may grow in a very short time. I think that some friend-
 
 42 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 ships derive almost all their value from the length of time they 
 have endured and proved themselves, but just a few have nothing 
 at all to do with time. Now I feel I need you so much ; you 
 have the qualities that I do crave for to stimulate me and make 
 me feel well, so that I must lay hold of you and keep you. The 
 look of your handwriting always makes me feel thirsty, and when I 
 have read your letter twice it has given me the satisfied sensation 
 of a drink of fresh water. I hope on your side there is some satis- 
 faction in giving me to drink. Never think / shall say, " Not a 
 word of your philosophy I beg." On the contrary, my voice 
 would always be going into your ear if it could, saying, " Tell me 
 some more." " Give me some of your oil, for my lamp is gone 
 out," is my motto, I am ashamed to say ; such a hankering after 
 feeding it from others, rather than going to those that sell. And 
 you have no idea how wickedly intolerant this makes me feel to 
 those who have a still more feebly burning lamp than my own. 
 I feel they have no right to exist at all ! 
 
 We have been a long walk in this lovely place, by the side of 
 a true Scotch stream of transparent brown water, interrupted by 
 mossy tumbled-about stones, and small rocks, making white foam 
 between the shelves, where the golden water lies quite still, and 
 the banks are daintily decked with green and gold ferns and tufts 
 of heather. It is more engaging than a glacier stream which 
 foams and boils so that little leaves can't grow peacefully by it, 
 besides that is soapy instead of transparent. A tropical stream is 
 better than either ; it is not so joyous and innocent as a Scotch 
 one, nor is it rough and rude like a Swiss one, but grand and 
 delicate too, as if meant for nobler beings to be soothed by into 
 nobler visions. The great feathery bamboos set themselves in 
 aisles beside it and roof it in ; and the phosphorescent green 
 light that is netted about it by them makes it gleam wondrously, 
 and where it sleeps in great wide pools the large white Datura 
 bells crowd round, casting long pearl reflections midst the green 
 depths.
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 43 
 
 From E. R. G. to Miss WEDGWOOD. 
 
 BEDFORD HOTEL, BRIGHTON, 
 December 27, 1866. 
 
 MY DEAREST SNOW, It was so good of you to send me 
 beloved Mr. Erskine's note : it seems wonderful to be reminded 
 that he is in the land of the living. I think of him as cur- 
 tained in somewhere like Hades. 
 
 No, even I, sitting in the sunshine, can't say anything seems 
 " merry " : that word will not do for any one but children, I 
 think ; for those whose eyes have never been opened to see a 
 breaking heart. Shall we ever feel merry again, in a new stage 
 of existence? Is anything like childhood renewed? I hope it 
 may be, and that we may dance and sing, however utterly im- 
 possible it now seems. 
 
 I have felt the death of a dear old coachman we have had 
 for thirteen years very much. I could not bear him to die. 
 Less, I mean, than some one I might have loved better. I 
 think the touching, grievous thing seemed that one so familiar, 
 so externally interwoven with the brightest parts of our every- 
 day lives, should vanish out of them so unknown; that he 
 should just have lived to serve us faithfully and then vanish 
 whither? One does not feel as if one could ever find him 
 again. 
 
 Now I am interrupted by watching the long line of the waves 
 as it comes up spoiling and fraying out, sooner or later, all along 
 the curve ; and my thoughts seem like that, never forming them- 
 selves properly or concentrating, but going nohow. Being here 
 again, as we were at this time last year, with the thought of going 
 to Jamaica, makes one recall very vividly the impression one had 
 of going forward as one did into the dark, and how pleasantly we 
 were led by the hand and surprised with good things, and came 
 back and joined on with our dear ones where we had left off.
 
 44 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 From Miss WEDGWOOD to E. R. G. 
 
 i CUMBERLAND PLACE, N.W., 
 December 30, 1 866. 
 
 DEAREST EMILY, I am glad to think of you at Brighton 
 this delicious October weather, for one can hardly believe we 
 have not miscalculated two months this year. The autumn 
 seems lingering to meet the spring, but I fear winter will con- 
 trive to elbow them asunder with the New Year. 
 
 The sea breezes must be very refreshing this weather, though 
 rather too strong, I should think, and your description of the 
 "fraying out" line of breakers brought the whole scene very 
 vividly before me; one is never tired of watching that rhyth- 
 mical motion, though the waves never get their white trimming 
 quite neatly finished off. I always look at the waves with a 
 sense of gratitude to Ruskin ; there are so many details in that 
 picture that I never should have seen without his magnifying- 
 glass ; and when one has once looked through it, one can see 
 them without it. I think the man who has taught us to look at 
 the waves and the clouds ought to be allowed to talk a little 
 folly without being sneered at. I care much less for his inter- 
 pretation of the exceptional aspects of nature; but when one 
 thinks that clouds are everywhere, and waves always accessible, 
 and that he has really taught us to see them, I do think we 
 ought to be merciful to our benefactor when he gets upon that 
 human ground, where I think he is almost always unfortunate. 
 
 ... I think I have often quoted to you Mr. Watts's speech, 
 which I heard at second-hand, about the need of painting not 
 forgetting its relationship to music (not that those were the 
 words) ; and I am reminded of it whenever I look at that picture 
 of you and of Mr. R. G., for there is something musical in both, 
 something effective without detail, and untranslatable into words. 
 I think that is the test. 
 
 I was looking at Orion last night through the shifting clouds, 
 and the two seemed to me such a symbol of the things of 
 eternity and the things of time, and then I thought how much
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 45 
 
 more one estimated the stationary objects when one contem- 
 plated them through that changing medium, and how much 
 truer a value might be gained of the everlasting when we had 
 gone through all the changes of time. 
 
 But one is very weary sometimes of the region of hopes 
 and fears that come before those great certainties, and some- 
 times quite shut them out. 
 
 I hope this coming year will leave you as you are, dear 
 Emily, and it is a great comfort to me that there is one of 
 my friends for whom that is my New Year's wish. There is 
 a growth that it does not exclude; but how much besides 
 forms part of any hope for most of those one loves ! Some 
 impossible subtraction or addition that seems so necessary, no 
 rationalism will silence the craving for it. 
 
 From E. R. G. to Miss WEDGWOOD. 
 
 8 PALACE GARDENS, February 6, 1867. 
 
 I am so thankful to you for telling me it was your birthday, 
 and so my first thoughts this morning rushed to you, and up for 
 you. You are a blessed creature, Snow, because you are rich 
 enough to give so much to others; so much love and tender, 
 fine sympathy, and so much mind, all warm and alive from your 
 heart. 
 
 from Miss WEDGWOOD to E. R. G. 
 
 CUMBERLAND PLACE, February 1867. 
 
 . . . Why should you find the dining-out world "a vain 
 show"? They are all human souls, but yet, as you say, it is 
 like passing places on the railroad. I often think one wants 
 two lives. I should like a whole one for my friends. One 
 wonders sometimes why there is so much waste in life; why 
 one piles the fire so often, and cannot find a match ; and what 
 is the meaning of the continual mysterious hindrance that comes 
 in when pleasure, if not joy, seems at one's feet, and one does 
 not taste it. The infinite desire and the finite capacity seem
 
 46 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 to manifest themselves in such small things. I feel society 
 specially perplexing, for I am sure the net result in the way of 
 enjoyment is wonderfully small in proportion to all that is 
 expended upon it. 
 
 I had a charming evening with the Maurices on Sunday to 
 bid good-bye ; it was one of those rare times when he seemed 
 quite at ease. I wonder why that is so seldom, with all his 
 humility and trust, which I should have thought the conditions 
 of ease. 
 
 From Mr. THOMAS ERSKINE to Miss WEDGWOOD. 
 
 13 SHANDWICK PLACE, June 5, 1867. 
 
 So your beloved aunt, my old well-tried friend, has got a touch 
 which separates her from us till the mortal is put off. No pain 
 or anguish separates us from any one ; but when you look in a 
 face, where you have always found a ready perception or even an 
 anticipation of your meaning, and find no response, you must for 
 comfort go back to the great Fountain of spiritual life, assured 
 that the full personality of your friend is there in safe keeping, 
 and will at the right time reappear. 
 
 I have had much loving intercourse with her, and I have 
 always found good in her and faithfulness. I never had a cold or 
 indifferent look or sound from her. Yours ever affectionately, 
 
 T. ERSKINE. 
 
 From E. R. G. to Miss WEDGWOOD. 
 
 8 PALACE GARDENS, July n, 1867. 
 
 DEAREST SNOW, I thought of you often on Monday, and 
 then of the arrival on Tuesday. I knew so well how every inch 
 of the place looked. The shadow of the house on that loose grey 
 gravel, that long passage and the pictures, and the beloved 
 man in his library. The drawing-room must look desolate. I 
 bless you for being there. I only hope your spirits are not too 
 depressed. 
 
 I can't join with those who call Linlathen so ugly, though I 
 know what they mean. It strikes me so much more as being a
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 47 
 
 place not in the flesh, but that one has known in some other phase 
 of existence, a place built for seeing visions and hearing voices. 
 
 E. C. has been staying two days with me, a farewell visit 
 before going to India. She has kept whiter, more utterly un- 
 stained garments than any human being I ever saw; the only 
 thing I don't like about her is, that she makes all others seem 
 made of clay after one has gazed at her, because she is of seraph 
 material. I thought of what you repeated of the pathos of reti- 
 cence ; there is that about her greatly. It is an aggravating quality, 
 though, in a friend whose heart you yearn to have unfolded to 
 you. The kind of music she makes has not a wide range, but it 
 is strangely distinct and fine and pure. It does not lure one to 
 any new paths, or kindle thoughts or aspirations, and she can't 
 write letters ; so when she is gone to India it will be pretty much 
 as if she were in heaven, where one naturally imagines her if she 
 is out of sight. 
 
 I wish I could make a right message to send to Mr. Erskine, 
 but he knows how I love and honour and would fain be near 
 him. 
 
 From Miss WEDGWOOD to E. R. G. 
 
 LINLATHBN, Summer of 1867 . 
 
 I do so long in this house for a little vista towards the world. 
 The eternal principles seem to me somewhat impoverished by 
 being contemplated so exclusively apart from all illustration in the 
 things of time. While we are changing our king, electing a new 
 sovereign by lot, as the Spectator puts it ; while we watch such a 
 tragedy as the Mexican issue; and while all the thought that 
 connects itself with the physical world is so active and so potent 
 it is to me almost stifling to recede into this little nook where 
 there is no glimpse of these things. 
 
 Do you think me very wicked to feel all this on the second 
 day of my stay? But the fact is one feels this most at first. 
 After a long time, indeed, one comes back to it, but it is the first 
 taste of life without so many of its intellectual condiments that is 
 unpalatable, even when the bread of life is a large part of one's fare.
 
 48 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 From E. R. G. to Miss WEDGWOOD. 
 
 August 12, 1867. 
 
 Good measure, pressed down and running over, dearest Snow, 
 you give into my bosom in return for a poor word. How de- 
 lightful the certainty of a response is ! I rejoice in such an 
 immovable conviction that I shall never look to you in vain. 
 You have quite let me see how Mr. Erskine and you are going 
 on, and the beeches and sunsets too. I think you might expect 
 the book to take an outward form a little more than you 
 do. ... 
 
 I can appreciate your distinction between indecision from 
 feebleness of wishes and complexity of wishes. In drawing and 
 in looking at sketches lately, I have been so struck with the 
 power that some have of seizing on and emphasizing the leading 
 lines in the midst of complexity of lines ; the power of choice 
 of these, and seeing their relative value amongst so many, must 
 arise from a healthy instinct more than from any process of 
 reasoning, I should think. 
 
 From E. R. G. to Miss WEDGWOOD. 
 
 1867. 
 
 It seemed just like a Linlathen flower that came to me this 
 morning, all perfumed with that peculiar scent, and evolved 
 in that distinctive form, which no other atmosphere or soil could 
 have grown. 
 
 Did you read about the " white stone " that no man knows, 
 in Mr. MacDonald's sermons ? I liked some of it very much. 
 He makes it out to be the peculiar individuality of each person 
 which enables him to reflect one ray of God's character that 
 no one else can. Your letter reminded me of that, because 
 it gave me a peculiar joy in a glimpse of Mr. Erskine and of 
 you intrinsically. Sometimes a little touch of humour does that 
 more than anything ; the kind of play showing what the creature 
 is, as different from every other.
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 49 
 From Miss WEDGWOOD to E. R. G. 
 
 LlNLATHEN, August 24, 1867. 
 
 Any word from you about Switzerland, &c., I am sure would 
 be a great interest to Mr. Erskine. Sometimes I glean a scrap 
 from a newspaper, but that is rare, which I am sorry for, for I 
 think where the old keep their tastes for them they supply a 
 good deal of the kind of light mental exercise of fiction with 
 something of the kind of value one gets from other books. I 
 feel as if I had been gliding on so peacefully through this time, 
 resting on my oars, and borne through peaceful landscape. 
 
 From E. R. G. to Miss WEDGWOOD. 
 
 8 PALACE GARDENS, 1867. 
 
 I have been delighting to think that the Stanleys and Mr. 
 Campbell were at Linlathen while you are. I shall like to 
 hear some time or other your impression of Mr. Campbell ; he 
 seemed to me quite an ideal saint, and yet so reasonable ! I 
 wonder whether you would find him so. Probably the Dean 
 will not leave you the opportunity of coming into very close 
 quarters with Mr. Campbell. Your last letter was full of living, 
 kindling thoughts to me. I think you have been given to me 
 to help me against the comfortable, deadening, sleepy atmosphere 
 of middle age. I assure you I have felt the fatness of forty 
 creeping over my spirit. 
 
 ... I had finished my note to you, came down, and found 
 the postman at the door giving in your dear letter. You were 
 filling my mind, and it seemed such a quick flash from you. 
 Oh, how thankful I am to be counted in that Linlathen circle ! 
 
 From Miss WEDGWOOD to E. R. G. 
 
 LINLATHEN, 1867. 
 
 I wanted to tell you of Mr. Campbell's visit, which has been 
 a great delight to me. We had several most interesting talks.
 
 50 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 I think your description of him peculiarly appropriate, and it is 
 brought out here by his contrast to the Saint, who, whatever else 
 he is, is certainly not reasonable. I think the epithet saintly 
 applies more exactly to Mr. Campbell than to any other of those 
 in connection with whom it suggests itself so far, at least, as 
 one can form an opinion from mere demeanour, which I think 
 is the largest element of one's opinion in any case. There is 
 the look of calm patience in his face, that is more to me the 
 saintly quality than the spiritual insight in which Mr. Erskine 
 goes beyond him. It is curious, and it ought to be instructive 
 as to tolerance, to see three men whose goodness is so mutually 
 exclusive. I think the characteristic quality in each of them 
 is peculiar to himself; neither Mr. E. nor Mr. C. have Stanley's 
 breadth of view, and they have much more that ^he has not. 
 But he is really a delightful little man, and here he, as indeed 
 everybody else, shows off to great advantage in sharing that 
 bond of common love that brings out all sympathy and obli- 
 terates all divergence. He has just been at breakfast quoting 
 a saying of Faraday, that came to me so wonderfully, and yet 
 the words are very commonplace as one writes them down. Dr. 
 Acland, talking to him (Faraday) of a future state, " What do 
 you suppose we shall be, Mr. F. ? " " Eye hath not seen nor 
 ear heard what He hath prepared for them that love Him, but 
 I know that we shall be with Jesus Christ." Now it seems 
 stupid to have written that, since I cannot write down the Dean's 
 voice in telling it; and somehow those words and tones come 
 more home to me from mundane men (I don't want to use the 
 word worldly) than from this beloved one [Mr. E.], who so often 
 seems to think light is made to see, not to see by. 
 
 The Stanleys are just going. I grieve to lose the crisp, cool 
 brightness of the little Dean, so alien to all gloom ; but I think 
 I feel this more than Mr. E. does. I am spiritually writing 
 advice to the aged all my time, but it is true that this must all 
 be prospective to the thirties and forties.
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 51 
 
 From E. R. G. to Miss WEDGWOOD. 
 
 ENGELBERG, September 16, 1867. 
 
 ... I need not tell you how you brought Linlathen to me 
 up above a pine forest, on a platform straight above that blue- 
 green smiling Lucerne lake ; everything in brilliant rejoicing, the 
 dragon-flies dancing and flashing about seemed the spirits of the 
 place. The " crisp, cool brightness " of the little Dean would 
 do very well amongst them ; but the great shadows of those two 
 sad seers would fade the colours out of their wings. Can any feel 
 as deeply as they do God's purpose for man and man's failure 
 in reaching that purpose, and yet fully rejoice in the sunshine 
 with sunshiny things ? I was so glad you told me that about 
 dear old Faraday. How blessed for him fully to know we should 
 be with Jesus Christ, and to have a glimpse of the fulness to be 
 found in Him ! Calling the stars by their names and binding 
 up the broken hearts ! What an infinite distance there seems 
 between these two things to us ! 
 
 From E. R. G. to Miss WEDGWOOD. 
 
 LINLATHEN, October 24, 1867. 
 
 In this room you wrote to me and remembered the time 
 when we had met in it ; and here I find your spirit haunting, 
 and I must speak to you. 
 
 I wish you could see these trees slowly burning away in 
 such rich loveliness ; it is such a fit framework for these last 
 Linlathen days, and accords so well with the tone in which I 
 find Mr. Erskine. I never saw him so sweet, and still, and 
 content, and finished. In the dusk on Monday he came out 
 half-way to the lodge and met the fly, and I walked with him 
 up to the door. He spoke of them directly, and how he felt 
 sometimes as if he had no business there, but that he must 
 go and find them ; and then of them and their love as being 
 witnesses for God. And you know all he would say, and you 
 know so much more than what he would say. You know how 
 one sees his spirit responding to a call and finding itself at home
 
 52 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 in listening to a Father's voice. It is so well to be here. I did 
 not know how much more contentedly I could see this winding 
 up and completion than hear of it and fancy it. I am constantly 
 reminded of Mrs. Paterson's words, " All one life the life here 
 and the life there." There was a special unity about their life, 
 and it seems going on still in an undertone, veiled only ; one 
 does not seem to wonder where they are or what they are doing ; 
 one has only to think of them continuing. " Are we all down ? " 
 he said, when he took me in to dinner, and then repeated the 
 words " all down," with his emphasis and look ; and I felt they 
 were just waiting upstairs till we had done with our eating and 
 drinking. 
 
 From Miss WEDGWOOD to E. R. G. 
 
 RAVENSBOURNE, BROMLEY, October 26, 1867. 
 
 I must thank you, my E., for your Linlathen waft of this 
 morning, rich with the fragrance of many different memories to 
 me, besides what is essential to itself. How well I imagine 
 that dark meeting in the drive and your slow walk up, and then 
 the dinner. I think it is so true what you say, that one can 
 better bear to see than to hear of any finishing. 
 
 I cannot help longing to keep him a little longer, he is so 
 very precious to me. And I should be sorry for my own sake if 
 the book were done, and we had nothing to fiddle-faddle over 
 together. 
 
 Yours is a more unselfish kind of intercourse ; you have not 
 that craving for somebody to look after that I have. Indeed, 
 your craving must be rather for more time and power to give to 
 the many who need you. I feel as if I had got to the edge of 
 all my best bit of life, and should soon be left all forlorn with 
 nobody to lean upon me, which, paradoxically, is the only thing 
 that keeps me upright. 
 
 From E. R. G. to Miss WEDGWOOD. 
 
 February 5, 1868. 
 
 I have so very much enjoyed Mr. Maurice's four sermons, 
 " The Ground and Object of Hope for Mankind." You know I
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 53 
 
 have not much cared for his lately; but these seem sung, not 
 said, and have lifted me up with his aspiring harmonies. Do 
 tell me if you like them too. One sentence about St. Paul seems 
 to express what I fancy Mr. Maurice feels about himself, " that 
 sense of personal insignificance which is most exquisitely painful 
 when it is accompanied with burning zeal and the certainty of a 
 grand vocation." 
 
 I thought over what you said about conscience being to the 
 spiritual world like sensation to the material. I should very 
 much like to have that sentence from Scott's letter you showed 
 me, if you did not mind copying it for me. 
 
 From Miss WEDGWOOD to E. R. G. 
 
 1868. 
 
 . . . When was saying it did not seem to her very 
 
 different whether one said, "It is a mystery," or, " we can't be 
 quite certain about it," I felt so overwhelmingly that it was all 
 the difference that I could not make any reply at all. 
 
 The thing always perplexing to me is that those who look 
 upon the existence of God and the future world as a matter of 
 inference, who do not believe in Him just as they believe in one 
 another, can think there is any ground for a strong opinion in the 
 matter. I think, apart from that conviction which answers to the 
 touch of the material world, I should believe that there was some 
 probability of a mind at work in this vast framework. But the 
 love that lets no sparrow fall unnoticed to the ground ! where 
 would one see any trace of it? Where could one see any- 
 thing that looked like any accurate justice, or any power of 
 regulating the minutiae of a life's history, and apart from this 
 what should we mean by God ? On the one hand, there might 
 be some great unseen King who had more power than human 
 beings ; on the other, some subtle force like electricity. But that 
 on which we rest in turning to God, that which comes into our 
 souls like a purifying stream, would be blotted out of existence. 
 
 In writing to M. it flashed upon me that the world of nature, 
 being wholly God's work, could not show any trace of God. Is it
 
 54 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 that men's thoughts are so riveted on this picture, where no touch 
 can be distinguished as divine because all are divine, that they 
 forget the artist altogether ? Or is it some actual subtraction .of 
 something that former ages possessed, and is He trying whether 
 we can esteem the hope of Him above all other certainty ? 
 
 from Miss WEDGWOOD to E. R. G. 
 
 TENBY,/* 1868. 
 
 . . . My dear little hostess (aged 87) is the survivor of a family 
 brought up under a terrible regime such as one never hears the 
 like of now, and she was made of the stuff that was only braced 
 by it, and in her clear bright evening her society is very reposing 
 after the kind of sick-room atmosphere I have been living in. It 
 is not an ideal old age ; she is a little too independent, but I 
 hardly know any one who so much gives me the sense of health 
 as she. There is a curious deposit of evangelical sympathy in 
 her mind, which is one utterly alien to evangelicism ; her affec- 
 tion for a much-loved nephew, lately dead (that among other 
 things), makes her mind an interesting study to me. At one 
 moment I take up a tract, and fancy myself at Milton [the home 
 of her friend Miss Thornton], the next I hear her declare with 
 much unction, "I don't object to heresy," and Milton recedes 
 into the remotest distance. How curious are the intellectual 
 traces of love ! I should be at such utter loss to understand the 
 presence of these tracts, if my cousin's photograph were not still 
 benignly looking down upon them. How often, I fancy, some 
 such image might explain much that is for us inexplicable. 
 
 I could not but be highly amused on hearing that one of 
 these tracts, highly prized by my poor cousin, had been sent off 
 as fitting medicine for an obstreperous Eton nephew. That fact 
 gives you an utterly wrong idea of my little eighteenth century aunt, 
 and shows how much actions are worth as witness to character. 
 
 Light and heat go together ; what is the strange dislocation of 
 their spiritual correlatives ? 
 
 I was thinking of it to-day when I was drawing, and remem-
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 55 
 
 bered that to give the effect of the sunlight I saw I must oniy 
 put in half the shadows. Perhaps in the same way to give the 
 effect of the good one sees, one should only express half the evil, 
 and I in uttering the whole of my protest or criticism, positively 
 misrepresent it. 
 
 From E. R. G. to Miss WEDGWOOD. 
 
 8 PALACE GARDENS, June ir, 1868. 
 
 Your letter was full of gold to my poverty-stricken mental 
 condition. I am ashamed of living a life of busy nothingness ; 
 is not a sick-room atmosphere better than that? Not that we 
 are going out much, but it seems a perpetual rush with notes, and 
 one little stupidity after another. 
 
 How delightful that fairy of eighty-seven must be. I suppose 
 you have now left her, but I began to write to you fancying you 
 beneath her roof. 
 
 Yes, I see how much the affections influence the intellect; 
 almost hopelessly so sometimes. But I cannot understand it for 
 myself, for I don't think I feel a bit more inclined to follow the 
 creed of one I love than of one I hate. . . . 
 
 I have been thinking over your words " the great momentum 
 of life." I want to realise that more ; something to prevent its all 
 going off in scattered spray. And it seems to me if this were 
 more realised one would be so much less confused and giddy 
 with it. But C. E. S. feels it the other way, that it is so tremen- 
 dous and awful that we must turn away our eyes. 
 
 From E. R. G. to Miss WEDGWOOD. 
 
 June, 1868. 
 
 Oh, what a gift you are to me ! How little did I think in 
 middle age to have such a new friend, suddenly born to me with 
 no end of unexpected, unimagined qualities ; but more wonderful 
 than anything the kind of sympathy and affection that I always 
 thought could only ripen by long, slow degrees. How can it be ? 
 except that the friendship began in a sort of spiritual tropics
 
 56 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 where wonder flowers bud and blossom and come to ripe glowing 
 maturity independently of the usual succession of seasons. 
 
 Your letter did not look like yours, and was such a delightful 
 surprise when I opened it ; and then came such a rich, living 
 stream of precious sympathy. How various is the value of that 
 article according to the nature it comes from. . . . 
 
 No, I did not feel the " rapture snatched from great peril." l 
 I am afraid to let myself feel it ; the peril is present to me every 
 day. I dare not cling passionately to the thread I hold by. I 
 am constantly trying to feel I will be ready to let it go. It is, it 
 has been so exquisitely precious that it must be enough for me 
 however soon it goes out of sight. No, that wife could not tell 
 you what made her husband so beautiful to her, any more than 
 you could describe the colour that there is in a glacier chasm to 
 a blind man. I feel as if I had looked into his soul and seen 
 that kind of reflection of heaven there. I have had time to look 
 and see ; that is enough. Yet day by day it is indeed bliss to 
 have the joy and charm and light and exercise of life continued 
 by his visible presence and his visible need of me. 
 
 From E. R. G. to Miss WEDGWOOD. 
 
 8 PALACE GARDENS, 1868. 
 
 . . . Then to luncheon with dearest mother, who is particu- 
 larly well ; the two Hereford saints with her. They are so 
 exquisitely good, I always feel inclined to cry when I think of 
 them ; and they cherish me, and think no evil of me, though 
 silently I so diverge from their principles, and in outward life 
 too, yet the blessed ones never condemn. 
 
 From E. R. G. to Miss WEDGWOOD. 
 
 SOUTHAMPTON, 1868. 
 
 And are you alone, just you two at Linlathen? And that 
 other one abiding under a dark cloud. I am surprised that you 
 
 1 After an illness of her husband.
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 57 
 
 think suffering without an external tangible cause less distressing 
 to behold. Certainly it is less bad for you than having to stand 
 by St. Lorenzo on his gridiron, or St. Sebastian thickly studded 
 with arrows ; but then those sufferings are comparatively short, 
 and your whole being is concentrated to support them. But the 
 dragging through the petty details of everyday life unuplifted by 
 a great emergency, with this slow anguish poisoning all life at 
 its spring, is very horrible and desolate ! I never shall forget a 
 week with dearest uncle J. S. while he was under such a cloud. 
 I never could persuade myself that it was morbid. It was so 
 completely realising what one had been brought up to think a 
 real condition of soul, the being shut out from the light of that 
 countenance in whose favour is life and health. I don't know 
 whether it is disease or not that brings some souls into absorb- 
 ing consciousness of the infinite light and the infinite darkness 
 that are round about us. How vividly Mr. Erskine last year 
 described to me the sense of joy in God that flowed into his 
 spirit two or three weeks before I saw him. What you say I 
 am sure is so true, that the light is intended to see by, and not 
 to see. Yet I think there may be exceptional spirits that may 
 stand apart and gaze towards the sunrise, and weary and moan 
 when it seems so long coming. It is the evangelical error to 
 shut the spirit up by force to contemplate what that school 
 considers the "one thing needful," and most pernicious and 
 dwarfing is such a system, I am sure ; yet I cannot doubt that 
 a few have such a sense of a mysterious claim upon them, and 
 such a hungering and thirsting after direct intercourse with the 
 Father of their spirits, that they are starved without it, and that 
 they can perceive no beauty or meaning in anything around 
 them while this sense is unsatisfied. I think it is well for us 
 that there are some such ardent, though perhaps (I was going 
 to say) narrow souls, only that word seems so utterly inappro- 
 priate to the blessed man; but circumscribed, in as far as it 
 does not spread itself out to receive more of the widely mani- 
 fold reflected rays of light. How your letter has made me long 
 to be with you ! It is true enough I could be of no avail ; but
 
 58 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 only satisfy my own longing to be near one so blessed and so 
 long beloved while he is sitting in the Valley of the Shadow of 
 Death. I fancy I hear the words said to him, "O tarry thou 
 the Lord's leisure; be strong, and He shall comfort thine 
 heart." It does seem sometimes as if He would break the 
 bruised reed, and as if He did not know our frame, or pity 
 us half enough. If He has not some very great design for us, 
 He is cruel to have called us into being. 
 
 ... I was reading your letter to myself this morning with 
 
 sitting at my side. Oh, the incalculable gulf between 
 
 that man and the image you brought before me at Linlathen! 
 We hear of light taking a million years to travel from some 
 star on the outskirts of our universe to us, but that calculation 
 shuts out the idea of the distance being infinite; but the chasm 
 between such a spirit as Mr. Erskine's, with all its hopes and 
 fears and needs, and this man's, cannot be bridged over. No 
 sane person could even try to make them understand each other. 
 It is very tiring to try and come in contact with spirits that are 
 so infinitely wide apart I suppose George Eliot could talk with 
 each his own language on his own topics; but I feel utterly 
 aghast at these chasms. 
 
 Beloved Mr. Erskine! I have been looking and looking at 
 his photograph. He looks as if so many waves and storms had 
 passed over him ; as if he needed to be landed on a tropical 
 shore. There must be a region nearer to the sun of righteous- 
 ness where the trees are full of sap, and where they flush into 
 blossom in a day. I never shall forget the sensation of that 
 first walk in Jamaica. Why, here is what I have been longing 
 for and yearning for from my earliest infancy to this moment ; 
 it was like waking and being satisfied. Will it be so in one 
 of the many mansions? 
 
 Did you read that bit of Tyndall's address in the Times? 
 I lost it again directly, but it gave me the feeling of the curtain 
 being about to rise up, and the spiritual world to become 
 apparent ! We do want it so dismally !
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 59 
 
 From E. R. G. to Miss WEDGWOOD. 
 
 MARINE HOTEL, WORTHING, 
 August 7, 1868. 
 
 There is no intellectual life about me to tell you of. The 
 glory of the weather since we came here has lifted this ordinary 
 little place into something ideal. It has just uninterruptedly 
 impressed upon one the unity of effect of all pervading sun- 
 shine wide, wide, pale blue sky above, wide, wide, pale blue 
 sea beneath. Free space, and sunshine all through it. Does 
 that seem to you too glaring? To me it is very sweet, with 
 the sound of water, and no faces we know ; no sights of squalid 
 misery, no external claims of any kind ; it is very restful. We 
 are close to the nice pier. We go there half-an-hour before 
 breakfast and read our psalms together. And then again sit 
 there under an awning and read to ourselves till 11.30. The 
 water splashes up and down against the supports of the pier, 
 and little boats curtsey about, making light emerald green spaces 
 in their shade. I am reading there Lacordaire's Life by the 
 Abbe Chocarne very interesting; the language and the R. C. 
 ideas taking me into another horizon I like. Then we come 
 into a nice green-blinded room, and I draw, and R. reads me 
 Shakespeare; then come letters and answering them till 4.30, 
 when we drive till dinner. And afterwards, oh ! the moonlights 
 that we have had over the sea; the reflections sometimes so 
 large and slippery, and then all crinkled, and then a long path- 
 way to the abrupt edge of the "under-world." I do not feel 
 "cet inexorable ennui qui fait le fond de la vie" so much (in 
 fact, not at all) in this monotonous life, as in our holidays where 
 we have more exciting natural beauties, and more mixture with 
 dull human beings. 
 
 Dear Russell has all kinds of bothers about Southampton, 
 but he is very good about not worrying. He is gone to town 
 to-day, and I have time to realise how much the presence of 
 his dear, even, generous nature helps me to enjoy the space 
 and the sunshine.
 
 60 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 I hear from dear mother out of a very different region, every 
 day. She is much alone and she broods over the state of the 
 country almost with despair. The election speeches are bitter 
 wormwood to her, or rather poisonous lies which will extinguish 
 the truth throughout this generation. The Irish Church will 
 go, the English Church' and Popery will come in like a flood, 
 and no one holds up a banner. In order to comfort herself 
 she reads Mr. Elliott's Horce Apocalyptica, and thinks she be- 
 lieves that Christ's coming and Antichrist's destruction are 
 near. Such ingenious schemes as his seem to me infinitely 
 little. But I venerate dear mother's intense feeling for her 
 country, and apprehension of the evil days she sees approaching, 
 and earnest desire to do something against error and for the 
 Truth. Could one agree with Matthew Arnold and yet be 
 energetic and in earnest at the same time? 
 
 Have you read Caroline Stephen's " Thoughtfulness in 
 Dress " and Miss Garrett's " Women Physicians " in Macmillan ? 
 I saw them both in MS. and liked them. 
 
 From Miss WEDGWOOD to E. R. G. 
 
 LlNLATHEN, l868. 
 
 I was talking to an acquaintance the other day about the old 
 and new geology the one with its " cataclysms," its sudden 
 effervescence of force, the other with its enormous periods of 
 time. I was saying the impulse of one's mind was rather to 
 believe in the older, as one saw so much in the rocks one could 
 not imagine as the result of any kind of gradual agency, and he 
 urged that in all cases the results of time would look to us like 
 the results of force ; and I thought how in one's inward life the 
 illusion was precisely inverted, how sudden moments copied the 
 effects of years, so that all we imply by " an old friendship " 
 might be achieved in a few days ! 
 
 From E. R. G. to Miss WEDGWOOD. 
 
 August 1868. 
 
 Your letter came to me just when I was full of the impression 
 of Lacordaire, and had been musing over his morbid love of
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 61 
 
 crucifixion, a thirst to be scourged and trampled on and despised 
 by his brother monks. There was something so real and wise 
 about the man, and yet this seemed to me so unreal ; I wondered 
 what the true root could be of the excesses he practised. Your 
 speaking of a kind of self-abhorrence and consciousness of 
 hypocrisy in Mr. Erskine seemed to throw a certain amount of 
 light upon it. I feel so much your view of our being poor, in- 
 firm, pitiable creatures, who will be tenderly dealt with and helped 
 onward by degrees, and that they can hardly have need to groan 
 and agonise for themselves and others that they have fallen so 
 short of a standard it was not in them to attain. Yet, no doubt, 
 some of the holier and most exalted spirits have felt this, and it 
 seems like a sharing of the mind of Christ. Perhaps some are to 
 walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death all the way up- 
 ward. There is to be such a fulness of experience in that com- 
 plete Man, which is to be composed of members made from all 
 people and kindreds and tongues. There are so many notes in 
 the wide scale ; who shall respond completely to the minors and 
 majors ! When I think of this compass and of this intricacy, I 
 feel with the Yorkshire man who said, " What with the fuzzing 
 and buzzing, and what with the earth a-going round the sun, and 
 what with Faath, I am well-nigh muddled and doited." 
 
 The seagulls opposite are in such perfect harmony with the 
 waves ; they know exactly what influences to respond to. 
 
 From E. R. G. to Miss WEDGWOOD. 
 
 BASSET HEATH, SOUTHAMPTON, 
 November 1868. 
 
 I can't think why I let the days pass without sending just 
 a scrap at least. Just now I feel so far away from you and 
 Linlathen, and the little world that surrounds me cannot be 
 taken to you. Yet I have had such near glimpses of you 
 through mother, and she sent me your dear tender note to her 
 after she left, about which she told me that as to any use or 
 comfort she could have been to you, you took quite an exag- 
 gerated view. But I am sure her absence must have been a 
 large gap. There is something impressive in her I fancy that
 
 62 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 makes her presence felt. She has such a very strong, decided 
 outline. 
 
 Your letter has brought that closing autumn before me in- 
 deed! I had lately not thought about his fading quite away 
 from us ; the other fear had put this out. How dear and blessed 
 of you to stay on and on with him ; all through the evening and 
 almost night. I could wish that you might be with him quite to 
 the end. But you must fix a limit to your time ; I shall think of 
 you going this day fortnight. I suppose I have seen Linlathen 
 for the last time. Do you know what it is to put things bye for 
 weighing duly at another time ? When it will be I know not, 
 but I feel as if some time I must sit and realise Linlathen and 
 those beloved ones and their message to me, and their pathetic 
 beauty, and muse and weep over it for about a year. But to 
 have ministered to him lovingly and faithfully as you have done 
 I should like to think I could have done it, but I doubt it. 
 All you say to me about mother interests me so much. I could 
 not have fancied your coloured glasses resembled each other's. 
 That you both see things more distinctly than I do, and less 
 generalised, I know. 
 
 It is true mother has no self-pity, next to none. She has 
 a good strong sense of resentment against the offender, and then 
 magnanimously forgives, I think. 
 
 8 PALACE GARDENS, Christmas Day, 1868. 
 
 Christmas Day has never much stirred me ; and my early 
 associations with it are so uncomfortable. A second Sunday in 
 one week, and an unnecessary one, when the worldly people 
 (envied creatures !) amused themselves all the more, and without 
 breaking one of the ten commandments either. Now I always 
 think of so many lonely ones, the widows especially. I do look 
 out aghast from my ark at the widespread desolation. 
 
 From Miss WEDGWOOD to E. R. G. 
 
 CAMBRIDGE, March 1869. 
 
 ... I believe his (Mr. Maurice's) is one of the most saintly 
 natures that ever were condemned to sojourn in this world. . . .
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 63 
 
 Yet there is something in what I should call (but how angry he 
 would be if he heard me) the rhetorical character of his mind 
 that so jars against me; the pouring out of his indefinite, and 
 yet vehement ideas, as it were, over all the difficulties that they 
 do not touch, which always stirs in me an almost bitter sense of 
 all the difficulties. And yet, every now and then one comes in 
 contact with such a beautiful soul, one feels as if there must be 
 something in his most rhetorical flights. 
 
 He spoke yesterday of his own love of arguing in such a 
 beautiful spirit. He said his whole life had been punishment 
 for the indulgence of this tendency in early life. I said I should 
 not mind any punishment if it did not always make me worse ; 
 and he said all changes, whether of adversity or prosperity, made 
 us worse at first : somehow there was something in the words 
 that comforted me under a sense of strange wickedness that was 
 stirred up in me. But perhaps you both know you would have 
 attained goals that I do not see, which you would have felt 
 more completing and perfecting. 
 
 Did you read Huxley's "Protoplasm"? It has filled me 
 with thoughts. I could not understand how it strikes at the 
 root of the Creating Spirit, or how these discoveries should 
 make us throw away any book, as Hume said, that does not 
 treat of numbers or ascertainable facts. It has given me new 
 sensations about a spiritual protoplasm, which pervades the whole 
 kingdom of God, and flows from Him who has ascended and 
 descended and fills all things. 
 
 From E. R. G. to Miss WEDGWOOD. 
 
 8 PALACE GARDENS, March 23. 
 
 I long to get from you some of the waves that have touched 
 you, stirred by that blessed old angel (F. D. Maurice). I do 
 think we shall see him one day with a great many crowns. I 
 suppose there will be nothing like triumph there, or else it would 
 be sweet to see some adored Record pastors having to do him 
 homage, and to fetch and carry for him in the eyes of their 
 congregations ! Perhaps a voice will be heard like that saying,
 
 64 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 " Ye have not spoken the thing that is right concerning Me as 
 My servant Job hath." 
 
 From Miss WEDGWOOD to E. R. G. 
 
 April 21, 1869. 
 
 We had the Maurices here for three days, and it was such 
 an anxious time to me that though all went on velvet, and there 
 was not a jar anywhere, I could not help a sense of relief when 
 the poor, dear people drove off. It was all outside intercourse, 
 but nothing could be more satisfactory. I rather withdraw my 
 dictum about the cold parlour, for we sat spiritually in the 
 parlour all the time, and were not at all cold. I should not 
 have been afraid altogether of getting into the inner chamber, 
 but illness turns the key, and though one can unlock it, one 
 thinks thrice before doing it. I think everybody felt his 
 goodness. I wonder what it is. I have nothing to quote, and 
 yet those two days gave me so strongly the feeling of coming 
 near a good man. I suppose some souls are allowed to manifest 
 that directly. 
 
 From E. R. G. to Miss WEDGWOOD. 
 
 8 PALACE GARDENS, 1869. 
 
 When your dear handwriting greeted me this morning, I felt 
 very glad to think that yesterday I was stretching out towards 
 you at the same time that you were speaking to me ! And yet 
 I remember, as I wrote, I had a doubting feeling come across 
 me, for I had just finished reading your Essay, which made me 
 realise the higher region in which you dwell, and I thought, it 
 could only be accidentally that for a short time she could hold 
 communication with me; she must go up higher and higher 
 out of my ken. . . . Well, it seems to me that your unselfish 
 love is to be fully developed. " He that hath, to him shall be 
 given." This is peculiarly the quality of your love, I think, and 
 it is to be polished to the very last degree. Love is so wonder- 
 fully intermixed with self; what we get in return from the 
 beloved is such a present and sustaining return that I can hardly
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 65 
 
 fancy doing without it ; and I wonder how much of my love 
 would remain for my dear ones if no enjoyment of them was 
 felt, and if there were no framework about them to help one's 
 services to them. I fancy when we are spirits, unveiled by the 
 flesh, the nature of our love will show forth by its kind of flame, 
 and then mine will be all dingy and smoky with self, and yours, 
 that has been tried and sifted, will burn up in a long, pointed, 
 spiral flame, blue and transparent. 
 
 I wonder if I at all, really and substantially in my inmost 
 heart, feel the least like you in longing for " more of God." I 
 go so fully with you in knowing how human love can lift the 
 soul above all things harsh and jarring, setting all questions at 
 rest, and also in feeling certain that the source of all that is 
 precious and love-worthy in His creatures must be so much 
 deeper and wider and fuller ; and I think I hunger to know more 
 and see more in Him that may stir me to more love to Him ; 
 yet I feel I have not half enough of this inward hunger to 
 authorise me to expect to be more filled. Alas ! I feel so like 
 the child of a poor woman I knew, who was often in want of 
 food, and prayed for it with her hungry little daughter. Once, 
 when they had been given a provision of six loaves, the child said, 
 "Now we won't say our prayers for many nights, for we have 
 six loaves in the cupboard." And so I have more in my little 
 cupboard, and your large, large one is left emptier, and you wait 
 a.n&Jravail, I believe, for the manifestation of the sons of God. 
 
 From Miss WEDGWOOD to E. R. G. 
 
 CAERDEON, October 23, 1869. 
 
 The Dean must be an agreeable acquaintance in Rome ; he 
 is such a thoroughly topographical man. I am a little ashamed 
 that I don't the least envy you. My sisters mourn over the 
 utter want of topography in me, and I think it is a want. I 
 hope " in a future state " that I shall find leisure to travel and 
 cultivate a love for mountains and scenery, but in this short life 
 I want every moment for personal interests, and can only admit 
 
 E*
 
 66 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 the outer world as a background ; there I do fully delight in it. 
 Here, for instance, pacing on the terrace with E. and H., I have 
 worshipped the mountains even to their satisfaction. They (the 
 mountains) have been so beautifully explained lately by the snow, 
 that has pointed out all their turns and bends with its soft white 
 fingers, and made one see how much meaning there was in the 
 rugged forms ; more, I think, even than sunshine, which hurries 
 on and will not emphasize a ridge or crevice like the patient 
 snow. It is curious how nature gets at the same result through 
 such opposite means : it was quite the effect of sunshine. 
 
 I see nothing in nature but some parable, that brings me 
 round again to the souls of men, like the snow on Cader, hint- 
 ing at so many unexplained souls, with all their latent beauty 
 hidden. 
 
 . . . Ah no, keen-eyed criticism is a mistake ! It does not 
 matter so much for friendship as for kindred, and, strange to 
 say, I think it matters less for old than young ; but the willing- 
 ness to give one's body to be burned for one's friend (and I 
 stop a good way short of that) does not make up for any tiny 
 injustice of estimate, if that is apparent. I am so sure love 
 should be without partiality, but I am equally sure it should be 
 without severity. I think you do attain this, for you do not 
 think your beloved ones better than they are (I don't, of course, 
 mean that I can measure, but you don't found your love on 
 that), and yet I don't believe their mistakes or faults sautent 
 aux yeux to you as they do to me. 
 
 from E. R. G. to Miss WEDGWOOD. 
 
 8 PALACE GARDENS, December 28, 1869. 
 
 I really know not when I wrote last ; a dream has been 
 over me lately. I don't know even whether I told you of such 
 a fright on Sunday week about my beloved ; seeing him faint 
 from me, and not being able to get at anything to restore him. 
 He has been getting quite well gradually, and I don't think I 
 have any cause for uneasiness, but a shadow came in then, and
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 67 
 
 seems always saying to me, " These moments are precious ; let 
 your love lavish itself upon him to the utmost." The danger 
 did not seem to me that I was going to feel that I had loved 
 him too well, but, on the contrary, not enough, not largely, not 
 unselfishly enough. I like Mr. MacDonald's line, " If we love 
 not truly at death, we shall part." It is only a kind of infinitude 
 of love, it seems to me, that can hold us together, and I thirst to 
 grow in the capacity for a height, and depth, and length, and 
 breadth of love. I thirst for that more than to pin myself to 
 his side.
 
 PART II 
 
 1870-1878 
 
 IN January 1870 Mrs. Batten died, while paying a short 
 visit at 8 Palace Gardens. 
 
 E. R. G.'s account of Mrs. BATTEN'S last days. 
 
 On the 28th of December (1869) dearest mother came to us 
 for her usual New Year's visit. She was particularly well. She 
 would not come to us for Christmas Day, for she wished to 
 remain at home, to make it pleasant for the servants : she read 
 with them in the evening. 
 
 On New Year's Eve, when it struck twelve, she came from 
 her room to ours. She knelt with me, and read the prayer 
 from Ephesians iii. 14-21. 
 
 The intense earnestness and solemnity of her tones, which 
 seemed to bear up our souls with hers, are never to be for- 
 gotten. 
 
 " For this cause we bow our knees unto the Father of our 
 Lord Jesus Christ, of whom the whole family in heaven and 
 earth is named, that He would grant us according to the riches 
 of His glory, to be strengthened with might by His Spirit in 
 the inner man ; that Christ may dwell in our hearts by faith, 
 that we, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to 
 comprehend with all saints what is the breadth, and length, and 
 depth, and height ; and to know the love of Christ, which passeth 
 knowledge, that we might be filled with all the fulness of God. 
 
 " Now unto Him that is able to do exceedingly abundantly 
 above all that we can ask or think, according to the power that 
 worketh in us, unto Him be glory in the Church by Christ Jesus 
 throughout all ages, world without end. Amen."
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 69 
 
 On New Year's morning Russell read the goth Psalm, and we 
 gave her a photograph of Giotto's fresco of the Ascension. 
 
 On Sunday the 2nd we all three received the Communion at 
 St. James's. That week was spent as so many other delightful 
 weeks had been spent when she was with us. I hardly took 
 account of the sunshine of her presence, it seemed such an 
 accustomed and natural blessing. 
 
 She read to me with great enjoyment "The Holy Grail," 
 while I drew. In the afternoons we went together to friends, 
 or to shop for Aunt Emelia's bazaar. On the Qth we once 
 more all three walked together to church and back again. On 
 Monday the loth she was busy seeing the Hereford Bazaar 
 things packed. In the afternoon we went together to the 
 Exhibition of Old Masters, which she greatly enjoyed ; she 
 seemed peculiarly absorbed with some of them. She said she 
 felt everything fuller of meaning and of interest each year. 
 Flowers affected her too much, she said : she must strive against 
 the weakness she felt of an inclination to shed tears whenever 
 she looked at their beauty ; and her tenderness to animals had 
 increased so much, that she was painfully burdened by a sense 
 of their ills. 
 
 On Tuesday the i ith we went out for the last time together. 
 I left her at Aunt Jane's for an hour : she writes in her diary of 
 her and Milly's sweetness and affection, and says, " Oh, that love 
 may grow stronger this year than ever." On Thursday the i3th 
 she acknowledged she had a slight cold. On Monday the i7th 
 she evidently had fever and bronchitis. I think during this day 
 and the next she felt as if her summons might be come. She 
 was more solemn and abstracted than usual. I felt as if she were 
 gathering together the recollections of her past life, as she had 
 been, indeed, so much during our last journey in Italy ; she had 
 been also reviving again several old friendships, and completing 
 so many little acts of kindness to different people. 
 
 By Wednesday morning, the igth, all my anxiety was over, 
 and on the 2ist she writes in her diary that she is making great 
 progress towards recovery. On Sunday the 23rd I had a head-
 
 yo LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 ache and stayed from church, and we read the service together. 
 She said, " Emily, I feel as if Mrs. Paterson (her beloved Lin- 
 lathen friend) had been here. I never had such communion with 
 her since she died." We had some talk afterwards about death, 
 and how differently she felt about it, how much less of an awful 
 unknown it was. . . . On the morning of the 26th she was more 
 uncomfortable, and we put off a visit to Broadlands, where we 
 were to have gone that day, though she was against our putting 
 it off, and the doctor said there was no cause for uneasiness. I 
 went down to write the telegram and to answer some notes. In 
 half-an-hour they called me up. She was on the bed, her eyes 
 just closing. There was not a sound, not a sigh, her hand was 
 quite warm in mine ; but that wonderful abundance of peace that 
 more and more mantled over the beloved face could only be the 
 reflection from the everlasting Peace; and I could not, as I 
 looked on her, even wish to drag her back from it. Her last 
 words were to her maid, "Why, I think I have been asleep, 
 such a blessed sleep ! " 
 
 From E. R. G. to Miss WEDGWOOD (after Mrs. BATTEN'S death). 
 8 PALACE GARDENS, January 1870. 
 
 Your deep, tender heart will ache with mine and for mine ; 
 but just now I feel such a sense of all I have had and have 
 in her, and such a thankfulness that that noble, tender heart, 
 with such capacity for pain, has been spared all pangs in parting 
 or in apprehension, and all sense of gradual decay. And I seem 
 to see so plainly written on her brow the peace of God that 
 passes all understanding, that my pain is not bitter or hard to 
 bear. You know what a magnificent abundance of love she 
 clothed me with, and how she was ever longing to pour out her 
 pfe-blood for me. 
 
 What a blessed mercy that we were not gone away. I was 
 beside her, but not even a last look. The eyes closed, and that 
 peace came more and more. YOUR E.
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 71 
 
 From Mr. ERSKINE. 
 
 EDINBURGH, January 1870. 
 
 " And so shall they ever be with the Lord." This you believe 
 to be the condition of your dearest mother, and to be the con- 
 dition which fills up all your desires for her. Ought you not, 
 then, to bless the Lord for His loving, fatherly dealing with her ? 
 I feel unworthy to speak of this great consolation, but His mercy 
 endureth for ever. 
 
 I feel that in giving me such friends as your mother and 
 yourself, He has given me the assurance of a love which desires 
 my salvation, the same love which gave the unspeakable gift of 
 Christ ; and yet my heart is troubled. Pray for me that I may 
 know that love aright, and find in it the peace which passeth 
 understanding. 
 
 In the Spring of 1870 Mr. and Mrs. Russell Gurney 
 took a cottage at Woolhampton, near Reading, which was 
 filled with Mrs. Batten's possessions, as a little " chapel 
 of memories." And here they much enjoyed spending 
 many quiet weeks during the succeeding summers. 
 
 To ELLEN MARY GURNEY (sent to Villars, Switzerland}. 
 
 1870. 
 
 Your long, welcome letter takes me wonderfully into the days 
 that are gone. Those green platforms how well I know them ! 
 the pine-woods, the early morning view of the Rhone valley 
 towards Mont Blanc. 
 
 Oh, this magic-lantern world ! You are seeing some of the 
 slides that I saw ; yet even the foregrounds of these are altered, 
 and how different is the subjective foreground with each ! 
 
 ... I am now gathering together the last relics to go to her 
 cottage. And you cannot think how strange it feels on looking 
 back on so many milestones to feel that there must be many 
 fewer before me, and that the indefinite tracts of country that
 
 72 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 always seemed before have been chiefly passed through and 
 gathered up into reality behind me, and that there remain but 
 little short paths to explore which do not much excite my curi- 
 osity, for experience has taught me pretty much what to expect. 
 And now all my curiosity and all my anticipations go across 
 Jordan, to that world of which we know so little. But I must 
 not babble of such things to those setting out on their journey, 
 for it sounds very flat and tame, as I well remember. And how 
 I used to pity those who, when we were setting out on our travels, 
 used to be waiting to cross the Channel homewards. 
 
 I would say to you, live, fully in the present. You know what 
 I mean. Let the everlasting, the spiritual, come to you through 
 your present experiences, and not through further on people's. 
 It is your best preparation for the future, I believe, to take root 
 well. 
 
 To the same. 
 
 1870. 
 
 I wonder whether you have read " The Legend of Jubal " ? 
 It is most magnificent, and pathetic, and full of subtle sugges- 
 tions ; and all through there is the beating of a heart that has 
 resigned itself to breaking, because it cannot find God. And 
 yet it is a temple built, prepared for Him, and Him alone. It 
 is one of the great mysteries to me. We went for three days last 
 week to I , and there I read that poem. How strange it 
 seemed to me to contrast the souls I met there, in their appro- 
 priate setting, with poor George Eliot. Everything was over- 
 flowing with rich prosperity, and the proprietor full of amiable 
 goodness and kindness, and anxious to help souls and bodies of 
 friends and dependents, and successful in this, and satisfied and 
 certain. And that other great, large, empty, hungering soul 
 longing to give its whole self unto death, without recognition by 
 others, and yet with blind eyes towards the Christian heavens. 
 And I cannot feel that the words " revealed unto babes " throw 
 any light upon the mystery ; for though the narrow rich man 
 has but slender intelligence, I do not feel his nature is more 
 on that account, but less childlike than that other's, which is full
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 73 
 
 of longing, trusting humility. So I think from her writings and 
 I hear from her friends, who say they never knew what humility 
 was till they knew her. Well, she has not finished her course, 
 and she may yet find the Holy Grail. And of that vision her 
 eyes must behold more than the eyes of the easily satisfied and 
 narrowly ranging ones. 
 
 7o the Honble. Mrs. COWPER-TEMPLE. 
 
 Atril or May 1870. 
 
 Did you read the paragraph at the end of the notice of 
 beloved Mr. Erskine in the Spectator 1 It is to my mind per- 
 fect in the truthfulness of the impressions it conveys, and very 
 beautiful, all but one sentence, which says that he liked a bad 
 joke as well as a good one. As I think refinement and delicacy 
 of apprehension belonged to his nature, I don't think this was 
 true. Though he did sometimes savourer with great delight 
 some words or anecdotes that seemed to him to reveal character, 
 which to most would appear poor jokes perhaps. 
 
 How one's heart bounds towards that in a fellow-creature 
 which makes him just what he is in distinction from all the rest 
 of his fellows ! And yet, too, how one loves the touches which 
 make him akin to all the world ! The unity and the fellowship. 
 What mysteries do these touch upon ! 
 
 How are we to take up the torches that have fallen from 
 their hands ? All who have walked in their light should in some 
 little measure do this. 
 
 You are to me one who stands and beckons to the land of 
 Beulah, where it was observed that the pilgrims spoke often in 
 their sleep, and saw visions. Would that I could follow ! 
 
 To the same. 
 
 June 1870. 
 
 Alas ! so tantalisingly things come ; we have really no Whit- 
 sun holiday, and seem therefore shut out from the privilege of
 
 74 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 enjoying that dear Broadlands and its large white abundant stars. 
 No, they do not look less beautiful this year than before. But I 
 think more so, and the birds' voices are even sweeter than ever. I 
 can hardly understand how it is that all outward things are not 
 more damaged by the withdrawing of her sunshine of love. 
 Sometimes it makes me fear lest my heart is terribly hardened. 
 Sometimes I think it is because that sunshine of love is not 
 withdrawn. 
 
 Our Cottage, where we have been for two days, seemed all 
 prepared and lined by her, her things fitting in wondrously, and 
 it seeming so completely " a quiet place, made green for wearied 
 eyes." Green pastures slope up and down all round, and it 
 seems found for us and given to us. 
 
 To Mrs. FRANCIS GALTON. 
 
 THE COTTAGE, WOOLHAMPTON, READING, 
 August 20, 1871. 
 
 It was very soothing and sweet that summer's afternoon at 
 Harrow. I love to see those words over that archway just above 
 the beloved grave, "We wait for Thy loving-kindness in the 
 midst of Thy Temple, O Lord." 
 
 What a history of loving-kindness I could think over, mani- 
 fested to her, and to me, connected with that place. It came 
 with a flood of memories as I walked up to Julian Hill and sat 
 beside your dear mother on that well-known lawn. At such 
 moments the sense of a Guiding Hand seems more palpable than 
 the sense of the external world, and so much more uniform and 
 more abiding, and what confidence it gives one for the future. 
 Surely loving-kindness and mercy hath followed us and we learn 
 to feel must continue to follow us though in some sense, in the 
 fullest sense, one feels one must still wait for it; for there is 
 much that seems unlike loving-kindness in the order or disorder 
 around, and how much in the separation of death that needs our 
 firmest filial trust to hope through.
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 75 
 
 CORRESPONDENCE WITH MISS WEDGWOOD 
 FROM FEBRUARY 1870 TO JULY 1871 
 
 From E. R. G. to Miss WEDGWOOD. 
 
 8 PALACE GARDENS, February 3, 1870. 
 
 Yes, I think I will let you go to Hitchin without begging you 
 to once more come to me first. You know about all, only you 
 don't know how full and beautiful her life was in this condition. 
 It came to me so as a whole, when I heard the Harrow bell toll 
 which had riven her heart so, as she has often told me, when she 
 became a widow nearly forty years ago. Since then she strove 
 and fought upwards, and I saw the sweet sleep as a crown to this, 
 that comes after a day of good work, a sleep in which she looked 
 almost like a bride again, only more ennobled and deepened and 
 filled, as one that takes his armour off rather than as one that 
 puts it on. But I feel with you more than with those who would 
 overwhelm me with her joy. I think there must be dints and 
 marks of pain there still, and sensitiveness to the pain of the still 
 unredeemed humanity. And if her soul is her soul still, she must 
 long after me, and be sorry for my great poverty. And I hope 
 she feels that my sins and negligences and ignorances towards her 
 make me ache and only long to ache more and more. 
 
 For your love and thought and understanding of things I am 
 so grateful. Your loving EMILY. 
 
 From Miss WEDGWOOD to E. R. G. 
 
 HITCHIN, February 20, 1870. 
 
 I cannot refrain from pouring out the thoughts that constantly 
 hover around you. So often I cannot believe that she is gone. 
 I think of her in the full daylight of mature power. There is 
 nothing in what I either remembered or heard of her to suggest 
 her departure from this world ; but_y0#rdesolateness has stamped 
 itself upon my heart, and in thinking of that I feel that she must 
 be far away not oblivious of you for one moment, but, in that
 
 76 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 exceeding rush of joy which she feels herself, and anticipates for 
 you, able to keep herself from rushing to comfort you. Oh, do 
 not think that God is separate from her even in the same way 
 that she was from you, or that in thinking only of her you 
 are forgetting Him. She is His utterance to you as the child is 
 only dimly and feebly the utterance of the parents, and you are 
 drawing near to Him whenever you peruse that life which He 
 gave as the truest expression of His own love to you, and which 
 is now spread before you in its completeness. Would it have 
 been forgetting her, if you had been so absorbed in her letters 
 that you had not felt her absence ? I am sure it is no more than 
 this when we are absorbed in human love. I do not say it may 
 not be idolatry, but that is different from what you are feeling 
 now. I am sure that the mothers love is, in a wonderful manner, 
 the revelation of God's love to us, but in the human type it is so 
 associated with partiality, that we can hardly conceive a love as 
 tender as the mother's and yet severe. And all the more for 
 this incapacity we need to take hold of the conviction that it is 
 the type, and that so far as it has been pure and true we have to 
 look to it as the gateway of the Divine Love. 
 
 How long it will be before the world ceases to grow more 
 dreary to you ! What months and years must pass before your 
 sorrow ceases to expand ! It soothes me to think of the other 
 love that will go with you through it all. 
 
 How well I remember the way she used to go to look for your 
 letter just after prayers at Linlathen, what a thirst and what 
 security there was in her expectation. Can it be that she has 
 any utterance from you now ? I cannot fancy her happy without 
 it, even in the full fruition of that communion with God she so 
 yearned after, and the reunion to her lost treasures. No, I am 
 sure she must possess something from you even there ! 
 
 That 1865 visit (at Linlathen) is so clear to me, and her image 
 stands out so vividly in it. I remember so well the first evening 
 when I sat by her side on the green sofa with its back to the 
 door, and we talked about illness, and she seemed so fully to 
 enter into my horror of any prolonged experience of it ; and then
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 77 
 
 we talked of my sisters, and I was so drawn to her by her ex- 
 pressions about them. I can't tell what it was in all those talks 
 with her at that time which fill me, as I remember them, with 
 such a sense of consolation. I had such a sense of coming on a 
 rich, strong nature. Afterwards I felt more the strenuous eager- 
 ness and heroic impulsiveness of her spirit, but at that time there 
 was a wonderful sense of rest in her presence. 
 
 Some of my walks with her are fixed in my mind with such a 
 wonderful sense of reality of the unseen and the fleetingness of 
 the seen, such as I think one never has except in company with 
 one who lives in the light of the unseen. How wonderfully con- 
 tagious that sense is ! One walk through the wood comes back 
 to me slanting evening light on corn-sheaves, and she and I 
 stopping to look at the beautiful gleam, and such a wonderful 
 sense of the beauty of earth being a veil that was almost being 
 drawn aside. I don't remember any words ; I only know there 
 are not many with whom I could have felt that. 
 
 " Helas ! que les choses passent, et les souvenirs demeurent ! " 
 Now those three are gone. 
 
 Ah yes, those days were sweet and they will return. I do not 
 think he [Mr. Erskine] feels that as much as I do. I think his 
 misery arises from his having tried to get from the love of God 
 what we were meant to get from the love of man. One sees 
 many who are the opposite. But I am so glad to think he 
 did appreciate her. 
 
 From E. R. G. to Miss WEDGWOOD. 
 
 8 PALACE GARDENS, February 1870. 
 
 Your letter was like balm to me. Your memories of her at 
 Linlathen seemed to console me so much. I hardly know why, 
 but I wanted a living voice to tell me they had not quite gone 
 from everywhere except me. Also the way in which you con- 
 nected them with scenes in nature, sunsets, sheaves of ripe corn, 
 all those veils, and yet in a measure revealers of the spiritual 
 world, led me into a soothing region. It is such a real pleasure 
 to me, too, that you saw her so much as she really was. Those
 
 78 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 two phases in her were both so impressive. When she had come 
 out of her moods of strenuous exertion, one often felt a wonder- 
 ful rest in her, and she seemed to authorise one to rest. 
 
 From E. R. G. to Miss WEDGWOOD. 
 
 8 PALACE GARDENS, 1870. 
 
 I have had some little experiences lately. I would tell you, 
 but as I think of putting them in words they evaporate like an 
 odour of primroses on the breeze. 
 
 I long to feel more the sense that my mother lives rather than 
 that she has lived ; and I do now and then think perhaps a 
 thought comes from her. I think that Swedenborg's belief must 
 be a true one, that the inner man, the spirit, is raised at once 
 out of the corruption in which it was sown, into the Incorruptible. 
 And that in the process it is not unclothed, but clothed upon, by 
 the spiritual organisation, or limitation, as it were, which preserves 
 its personality. 
 
 From Miss WEDGWOOD to E. R. G. 
 
 1870. 
 
 I remember being much interested in Mrs. S.'s account of her 
 watching the escape of some butterflies from the chrysalis, and 
 being so struck with the great difference there was in the ease 
 with which they disentangled themselves, some taking half the 
 day to get clear, like him. Oh, if some word would come to say 
 the burden was laid aside, but we can wait for it. I was reading 
 over some of your dear one's (Mrs. Batten's) Irish letters the 
 other day. How coolly we set aside all the experience as fancy 
 which has no symbol in the visible world. I can fancy that what 
 we call dying may be an awakening to the reality of all that 
 mysterious spiritual scenery, like the breaking of some painted 
 car that we had been travelling in unawares. 
 
 From Miss WEDGWOOD to E. R. G. 
 
 EDINBURGH, March 1870. 
 
 I cannot describe to you, and perhaps even you could hardly 
 understand the intense longing I have that the precious past should
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 79 
 
 not fade. In some ways it might seem an almost morbid longing. 
 One does not wish that the far-off hills should not look blue, and 
 there is a change in the receding experiences of life which is as little 
 to be fought against. The softness and tender beauty of that first 
 visit at Linlathen, when those three dear ones were here, is some- 
 thing better than any actual experience of those moments ; there 
 were little misfits and disappointments which have evaporated now, 
 and the whole is more beautiful than it was. But the fading of 
 the past which I dread is something different from this mere 
 sifting away of what was temporary and this mellowing of the 
 whole; it is that the hurry of life shall come between, and 
 actually rob me of something. This makes me clutch at every- 
 thing that can fix the pictures to my soul, even pain. 
 
 from E. R. G. to Miss WEDGWOOD (referring to a sketch of 
 Mr. ERSKINE written by her). 
 
 8 PALACE GARDENS, April 5, 1870. 
 
 I cannot find words to tell you what I think of it It is 
 absolutely perfect in what it attempts to portray, in the very best, 
 and highest, and most real marks that his nature has left upon 
 those who loved him. How can I be thankful enough that he 
 reflected himself in your clear mirror. 
 
 HASTINGS, Easier Day, 1870. 
 
 You should not apologise for sending your MS. to us. The 
 only thing one feels is, would that we were more able to help. 
 It is written with such a grasp of mind, especially, I think, the 
 sketch of his Christian philosophy, that it seems presumptuous 
 to make any criticisms ; and, indeed, we have none but petty 
 ones to make. ... I did not feel anything the least jarring in 
 your speaking of the narrow range of the objects which inte- 
 rested him. 
 
 In the winding up of the paragraph of his views, I feel as if 
 he thought more that the becoming acquainted with that law 
 of gravitation of the spiritual world, the opening the eyes to the 
 loving purpose for each one, kindled the responsive love in the
 
 8o LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 perceiving heart. You seem to me rather to put it that the know- 
 ledge of a law led us to conform to that law ; it seemed more to 
 me as if he taught that the perception of the light and heat 
 brought us within its action. The " sigh of an exile ! " how 
 that does describe him ! 
 
 From E. R. G. to Miss WEDGWOOD. 
 
 8 PALACE GARDENS, February or March. 
 
 You are sick and weary at heart, and just now I am feeling 
 full of hope and hearing the song of a dear canary with a sense 
 of harmony. 
 
 The wind blows as it lists ; but these refreshing breezes that 
 come, though they go also, are very sweet. They come from 
 the mountain of God. When the veil of the flesh is removed 
 more and more we shall catch of them. 
 
 From Miss WEDGWOOD to E. R. G. 
 
 June 7, 1870. 
 
 I do not think we can divide our love of God from our love 
 of our beloved ones, and all that comes through them comes 
 from Him ; yet they cannot make us see God. No human spirit 
 can say to another, Stand where I stand and you will see what I 
 see, not in this world, nor in the world to come. It is not the 
 accidents of flesh and blood that cut us off from giving that kind 
 of help to each other ; it is the eternal law that only God can 
 reveal God. Oh, how I felt it when I sat by that wonderful 
 creature, George Eliot, and heard her shrinking modesty of voice 
 as she limited all her assertions to a confession of ignorance, and 
 felt in my soul at the same time a sort of flood of conviction that 
 an invisible person was in the room with us, and yet felt silenced 
 by the sense that the words which rose in my heart as knowledge 
 turned to opinion as they met her ears. And what is there in 
 the experience of death to change this impotence ? We think 
 that any voice coming across that gulf would mean an assurance 
 of what we crave to know ; but what would it be apart from the 
 impression of an inward influx of hope and faith, which might 
 exist without it ?
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 81 
 
 From E. R. G. to Miss WEDGWOOD. 
 
 8 PALACE GARDENS, June 1870. 
 
 I wish you could have a conviction, a real and adequate one, 
 of how good I feel your words to be. This is what I need to 
 stand on tiptoes to get a glimpse of. Would that I could grow 
 to behold the reality that you do, of what it is to trust God. 
 Mine has been such a superficial, fancied trust. One cannot 
 make another see what he sees, but his assurance of seeing 
 encourages others to look. 
 
 I suppose I have been too much seeking for signs. A vision 
 of unseen things seems to imply faith; but perhaps it has been 
 rather things seen after all, only pushed up a little higher. 
 
 How God does help me, and comfort me, and keep me living 
 through you ! I could not have believed beforehand that in my 
 time of need I could have had two such blessed palm-trees to 
 spread over me and to give me of their fruits as you and 
 Mrs. Cowper-Temple have done in this new bereaved region on 
 which I have entered. I almost grudge myself such rich gifts ; 
 indeed, I have been treated like a spoilt child. Your words are 
 indeed true : "a soul may mirror the infinite to us," and fellow- 
 ship with it may flood our life with supernatural joy. It is a 
 manifestation of God. Perhaps we are gaining a glimpse of a 
 coming fuller revelation in the recognition of His offspring, as 
 you seem to expect. 
 
 From E. R. G. to Miss WEDGWOOD. 
 
 THE COTTAGE, WOOLHAMPTON, August 29, 1870. 
 . . . You want to know that it is the will of God that you 
 are suffering and doing. What does the barrier consist of in 
 these days that prevents this knowledge ? Is it more or less 
 light than they had in olden times when no doubt was felt about 
 it ? There has been such difficulty here in getting water. A man 
 we employed to bore below the well gave us such an animated 
 account of their work for seventeen days. All the water there 
 
 F
 
 82 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 was vanished during the deeper boring, and then it seemed 
 impossible they should ever get through rock after rock. After 
 the third rock was pierced they came to pebbles, then to sand, 
 and then the water sprang up just as it seemed hopeless. Five 
 minutes before it came it seemed as far off and further off than it 
 had seemed in their first half-hour's work. The man described 
 so vividly his despair and all kinds of impediments, and then his 
 joy, with tears in his eyes, that it has remained with me as a 
 parable. But they could work more certainly than we can, and 
 do not feel they are beating the air. Still there are things that 
 we must work at which we are certain tend to the spring from 
 whence the waters flow. 
 
 Your extract from Mme. de Broglie is in strange opposition 
 to Mrs. Fletcher and all the R. C. saints. By shutting out 
 other thoughts they believed they approached so much nearer 
 to God, and certainly they felt His joy and His strength ; they 
 bored deep, though it was a very small channel. Your loving, 
 grateful E. 
 
 From Miss WEDGWOOD to E. R. G. 
 
 DOWN, September i, 1870. 
 
 I will not pass this beautiful threshold of September without 
 a word with my dearest E. I had intended to write before 
 your dear letter arrived, for since I came here a change seemed 
 to come over my atmosphere, and I felt that influx of hope 
 that always makes me desire communion with you. I seemed 
 to have come through the hard stratum, and the spring bubbled 
 up through the sand. I felt it in church, when the village 
 organist sat practising "Sound the loud timbrel" after evening 
 service, and I lingered on in the dark till I saw the lights put 
 out in the organ loft; and though I think it a most trumpery 
 tune, and though, of course, the performance was mediocre, there 
 was something in it that so chimed in with my feeling, I seem 
 to recall it like a sympathising human voice. There came such 
 a sudden flood of hope into my heart. I walked back through 
 the little garden trying to find words for it, that it might not
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 83 
 
 all evaporate from recollection, but the organ notes hold it best 
 for me now. I felt, we want nothing but our Father, one gleam 
 of hope sets all right, fills the empty reservoirs of love, makes 
 the barriers between estranged hearts transparent, and so welds 
 us one with another that I is lost in We, But what infinitely 
 different states of mind one means by belief. I suppose I always 
 believe whatever it is which is the intellectual correlative of that 
 sudden joy, and yet I could count almost the moments when I 
 have felt it as any force in my life. 
 
 The next day the kitten caught a bird ; I ran after her to 
 try to make her kill it at once, and the fluttering, the faint cry 
 of the creature made a pain in my heart that seemed to spread 
 out and darken the thought of love. 
 
 I said to myself, How weak and unreasoning ! When I know 
 of men dying by thousands in agonies that do not by any means 
 always purify, and yet somehow carry through the spectacle of 
 the battlefields my trust in God, how is it that this tiny presenta- 
 tion of the strife and woe of Nature is a barrier to me? The 
 two disproportionate things show one what different mental acts 
 one may make in what one calls knowledge. I suppose one 
 knows the love of God generally like these far-off rumours of 
 battle, and it is only in faint gleams that it really touches one's 
 life. But when it does, how vividly one feels that hope is a 
 common possession. 
 
 I so dread that this mysterious spiritual life, that flows on in 
 an underground current beneath what is visible to others, should 
 become a thing apart. I want to let it fertilise the other. I 
 see it does not always do so, even where it is true and deep. 
 One needs just as much to pray that the waters shall be carried 
 over the meadows as that they shall pass through them. Surely 
 we shall not seek for this in vain ! I do not think all are led 
 to seek for it. For some mysterious reason this seventy years 
 here is not the time when God lets the force of right conviction 
 show itself on character.
 
 84 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 From E. R. G. to Miss WEDGWOOD. 
 
 THE COTTAGE, WOOLHAMPTON, 
 September 5, 1870. 
 
 It was dear to me that you should have thought of writing to 
 me on the threshold of September. To me such an eventful day 
 eighteen years ago my marriage day and now the first ungreeted 
 by beloved mother, who then gave me up with sore pain, but who, 
 since then, on each anniversary has so rejoiced with and for us. 
 Oh, how every date of the years as they go is marked with 
 blood and tears, and joys of poor human beings, and how 
 does the Father of our spirits disentangle them all? As I 
 was feeling a sense of the withdrawing of that mother's love 
 that morning, and of its wonderful fulness, that I had in my 
 sense of abundance slighted sometimes, which thought brought 
 with it such a peculiarly sharp aching . . . the poor Emperor 
 was going through the agony of his fall from such a strange 
 height to a corresponding depth ; and all the crushed bodies 
 were sending up their cries too to God . . . and the little birds 
 caught by the cats ! As I write the wind moans, and there 
 seem echoes everywhere of the whole creation groaning and 
 travailing. Yet I know it has often seemed to me as if all 
 were rejoicing, and "Sound the loud timbrel" has been the 
 song that everything was joining in. One can only fully believe 
 in the one thing that one's soul vibrates to at the moment, I 
 think. It is as you say, as if that which receded to the far 
 horizon was only partially believed in ; and the nearer, smaller 
 thing that one feels quickens one's belief into quite a different 
 kind of mental act. How strangely the details of the war seem 
 to blend with one's life ; fainter in hue than the foreground, and 
 yet so tremendous in size, and preventing one, I think, from fully 
 giving one's mind to much besides. 
 
 The O'Mearas escaped away last Monday. General Trochu 
 sent to them and said, " Do not delay leaving Paris more than forty- 
 eight hours." They had already got a fright from a sergeant de ville 
 who half implied that he thought them spies; and they were
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 85 
 
 having such speculations as to what might ensue if the Prussian 
 soldiers came into Paris, that they said they became quite 
 feverish and unable to eat or sleep for the last five days. They 
 are now resting at Boulogne; they will come to us in a few 
 days. 
 
 September 7. 
 
 I am just come in from a lonely walk ; R. in town ; the dark 
 clouds all round. The autumnal look of the festal summer being 
 past everywhere, the kind of day that mother used to feel so 
 unspeakably, and on which we used to talk together of life's 
 closing ; but I never would respond to her deep feeling of it. 
 Now how I stretched out my hands to her ! Now I feel how 
 inexplicable, how astonishing it is that we are as tolerant of 
 death as we are. How can such a separation be the order of 
 things ? 
 
 From Miss WEDGWOOD to E. R. G. 
 
 BEDFORD SQUARE, September n, 1870. 
 
 I have had two delightful hours since I came here, one with 
 George Eliot, which, though keenly delightful to me, leaves 
 very little to say of it. 
 
 We talked of the war, and I think all that it enforces is so 
 broad and patent that anything original about it would be 
 shallow, so that one is not inclined to repeat the remarks of 
 a great mind any more than of a small. She responded with 
 a peculiar heartiness to my lament over the French readiness 
 to accept wish as an agent of fact, which meant, I knew Ah 
 yes, there is the root of Christianity. I hardly know how to 
 explain to myself the immense gulf I felt between things which 
 seem to her identical the sense that a profound need common 
 to humanity was the prophecy of its own fulfilment, and the 
 belief that vehement reiteration of desirable opinion would con- 
 vert it to fact. Then she began to say that I had mistaken her 
 about the " egoistic mind," that what she meant was an allusion 
 I had made to the embittering effect of "a sense of sharing" 
 apart from God on a particular mind, and that her meaning 
 was, one must test nothing by its effect on an egoistic and
 
 86 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 rebellious mind "for such a mind there is no help." I felt 
 a sort of triumph as she said the words, for it immediately came 
 to me, Christ said, "Whoever cometh unto me;" there is a 
 broader creed than hers. 
 
 From E. R. G. to Miss WEDGWOOD. 
 
 WOOLHAMPTON, September 20, 1870. 
 
 When I received your note I was just thinking, as I looked 
 over some of my beloved mother's books and tracts, how com- 
 pletely I had left off any thought of aiming to do good to people. 
 It was rather comforting to hear you say this was such an unsafe 
 aim, and I agree with you that it is apt to make people dis- 
 agreeable. Yet, if it sprang from a burning love to them, and 
 from an earnest desire to share what has seemed good to our 
 spirits with theirs, it seems as if it must be right. Only, every 
 spirit is in such a different state, and requires such different 
 food. It is rash to proffer one's own rice, milk, or marengue 
 when beefsteak is needed. 
 
 I have just read "Tyndall at the British Association." I 
 dare say it is badly given, for it does not seem to fulfil its title 
 at all. I could find no definition of Imagination's office in 
 science. Only he seemed to speculate as an example of what 
 it might do. I felt in reading it that we have too much looked 
 upon Matter as apart from Spirit, and an unholy thing. I don't 
 see how it can be cut apart from Spirit. I do think it must 
 have been all breathed into by the Spirit, and that it may rise 
 higher and higher into an approach toward God. What makes 
 one's heart ache so is the declaration that one's attitude should 
 be equally distant from the atheist, who says, "A God could 
 not have done this," and the deist who pretends to know any- 
 thing of the mind of God. Tyndall seems to lead one into a 
 contemplation of infinitude and immensity such as one can 
 rarely get a glimpse of, till one can hardly dare even say, " Oh, 
 that I knew where I might find Him ! " The universe without 
 love, without a purpose does he not paint this before one? 
 And this is what G. E. lives in, I suppose.
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 87 
 From Miss WEDGWOOD to E. R. G. 
 
 September 24, 1870. 
 
 . . . You are the only one with whom I look for a pro- 
 longation of the Linlathen luxury ; but one must not count upon 
 it with any one. Love is not love if it refuses all partnership 
 with pain. Mme. Bodichon was saying, when she was here, 
 what an entirely generic difference there seemed to be between 
 the love of a mother and a father, and it struck me what a 
 wonderfully deep meaning there was in that difference the love 
 that begins in pain sending its roots so far below the love that 
 begins in pleasure. 
 
 . . . Sometimes it seems as if one human being could be 
 the keynote to another, but I do not think we are intended 
 for this ; we can only form that incomplete minor till we find 
 ourselves a portion of the chord that starts from God. I think 
 this has been our bond, and do not fear that jar while it remains. 
 And I have such an intense conviction of the return of all real 
 love that has been interrupted. The joy of love seems to me 
 a prophecy of its own eternity. 
 
 From E. R. G. to Miss WEDGWOOD. 
 
 THE COTTAGE, WOOLHAMPTON, 
 October 10, 1870. 
 
 Yes, it was Friday morning, the date of your letter, when I 
 also felt something like the beginning of a stone being rolled 
 away. There was a great wind among the trees. I knelt at 
 my window, and saw the sighing and the swaying, and gleams 
 of sunshine struggling through the morning clouds ; and then I 
 came away and opened my Bible to read, and the first words 
 that caught my eye were, "Prophesy to the four winds, and 
 say, O breath, breathe upon these slain that they may live ! " 
 Don't say that your words are accumulated and monotonous, 
 and that their meaning is evaporated. To me they image so 
 much; these shinings through that beckon one on and lift 
 one up seem when just gone only tantalising, one so longs that
 
 88 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 they may be permanent : they are apparently so useless when 
 they are not permanent. Does any one now " live in the Spirit " ? 
 Is it possible ? But I don't know that I quite respond to what 
 Mr. Erskine says that the flesh is not made better, and St. Paul 
 says the same, no doubt ; but I feel as if every atom of matter 
 should be redeemed and permeated with spirit. Flesh helps 
 soul as much as soul helps flesh, does not Rabbi Ben Ezra 
 say? And the Son of Man's flesh could not see corruption. 
 Cannot the flesh come into the glorious liberty of the Son- 
 ship ? But we seem " slain," body and soul and spirit, I think, 
 and only now and then get moved for a few moments by the 
 breath moving over us. 
 
 In reading over her letters of so many past years, and mine, 
 I long so to know whether all those past eager emotions have 
 left a due mark on her. She had almost forgotten, before she 
 left, many things which had made her heart beat with joy and ache 
 with pain. And as I read the past eager expressions of what 
 she felt, I ask, Was this worth while when it was so soon to 
 pass? Is there not something very perplexing in the thought 
 of this evanescence, and very melancholy this want of unity 
 and permanence ? 
 
 How terrible it is to think that we may go on and on through 
 new regions, with new friends and new hopes and new anxieties, 
 and with a dim sense of having far in the past lost the memory 
 of those that once so moved our hearts. Yet we believe, we 
 hope, that God does retain us all, down to the sparrows that fall. 
 So we may hope that, as we are drawn inwards nearer to our 
 Centre, we may foretaste more and more of this capaciousness. 
 
 How welcome has your letter been to me this morning ; how 
 refreshing and inspiring for the rest of my day ! Each day comes 
 to me with a sense of fresh hope generally, and if, as I come in 
 to breakfast, a beloved writing greets me, the promise seems half- 
 fulfilled. 
 
 It will be wonderful to her friends when dear M. A. vanishes ; 
 however old she may be, she seems to dwell so in the midst 
 of us. Yes, her character is a very rare, indescribable one
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 89 
 
 certainly eminently undull. Russell delights in her; so must 
 every one, I should think, as one out of many friends. It startled 
 me when you used the word superficial, even though combined 
 with solid ; yet (though not in its ordinary sense) I see its appli- 
 cability. The amount of things she gets through is astonish- 
 ing ; and everything is done so w ell, and the subjects she is 
 interested in she knows so thoroughly, that one would say there 
 was nothing superficial about her ! Yet her own roots are not 
 deep, I see. 
 
 How I like what you say about long curves, and our being 
 able to tell so little about them from the fraction one can see. 
 Somehow one does not realise with M. A. that her life is a long 
 curve : it seems so complete now. 
 
 from E. R. G. to Miss WEDGWOOD. 
 
 THE COTTAGE, October 19, 1870. 
 
 Do write an essay on Truth and Wishes. It wants disen- 
 tangling much. Start from the French and their ideal victories, 
 and branch from that into wishes in relation to abstract truths. 
 
 . . . One may like to see bits of a map fit in, but may choose 
 the piece to fit on other grounds than to gratify this taste. 
 
 Then, surely, there is a perception of truth, which is a per- 
 ception of its fitness and beauty, as well as its reasonableness, 
 and this may be expressed by an utterance of pleasure. 
 
 If one's wish inclines one to believe a thing, it also makes 
 one afraid to believe it. 
 
 From E. R. G. to Miss WEDGWOOD. 
 
 November 1870. 
 
 How welcome are your dear words of sympathy. Not to be 
 able to hold a sorrow because it began a short time ago, and to 
 grow easier and easier because one is longer and longer without 
 the beloved, makes one indeed doubt whether one is worthy of 
 eternal life ! 
 
 One thing, though, I can say about these nine months, that she
 
 90 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 has been more continually in my mind and in my deepest affections 
 than she ever was in any former period of my life. 
 
 Yesterday year, the last Sunday in October, she and I walked 
 alone together to church at Rome over the Pincian. And we 
 talked of the former years there together, and remembered often 
 joining Mr. Erskine on the way. And we summed up and 
 seemed to fold away that part of our life. 
 
 In thinking over what time does, though in one way of look- 
 ing at it, it seems such an accident of our condition here, yet 
 what a colour and what a different nature does it give to an 
 affection. It seems now as I look back on that walk, and re- 
 member how we reached back together then to the past years 
 that we had shared, as if her being went into a larger region of 
 my being than Russell's does, just, I mean, because we had 
 travelled together over a larger tract of country. 
 
 From E. R. G. to Miss WEDGWOOD. 
 
 8 PALACE GARDENS, December 10, 1870. 
 
 I so thought of you travelling northwards early that bitter 
 morning after our cheerful, warming evening together. How 
 pleasant it was to see you in that genial atmosphere. What a 
 glow is sometimes left by that kind of meeting, though indivi- 
 duals have hardly perhaps come into inner contact. There is 
 need of a kind of external fellowship, as well as of deep inner 
 communion ; and the gift of promoting that sense of external fel- 
 lowship is certainly greatly to be desired. 
 
 From Miss WEDGWOOD to E. R. G. 
 
 MIDDLE-TON LODGE, RICHMOND, YORKSHIRE. 
 Though it is very delightful here, I put off my return with 
 some reluctance, there are so many things I want to be doing in 
 London ; but in this casting out of one's precious things to ease 
 the ship, which begins after middle age, and which by the time 
 we reach our port will, I suppose, have sunk the largest part of 
 once cherished aims and schemes beneath the waters of oblivion,
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 91 
 
 I hold to intercourse with those I love as the one jewel that is 
 not to go overboard, come what may. 
 
 From Miss WEDGWOOD to E. R. G. 
 
 January 1871. 
 
 What shall I wish for this New Year for thee ? that it may 
 not impoverish thee. But oh, what cross currents rise in one's 
 soul at any forward glance ; for the one desire for a nearer union 
 with God seems tangled with fears of what means may be 
 needed to bring that about, and one shudders and trembles at 
 the thought. 
 
 What a wide gulf separates the knowledge of God from the 
 knowledge that we may, as it were, carry about with us. The 
 opticians do not need to keep their eyes to the spectroscope to 
 feel assured of those wonderful dark lines that so fill out the 
 words " whatsoever doth make manifest is light." They can 
 bring this knowledge with them away from its source it will 
 carry in intellectual vessels. But we we cannot even remember 
 that intuition of God when it is withdrawn from us ; when some 
 earthly breath dims the glass we can hardly believe that anything 
 lies beyond. I seem with you to enter into an atmosphere which 
 I know I could not long breathe, and the feelings and thoughts 
 which are perfectly real and true as I utter them, make me yet 
 sometimes tremble with a sense of hypocrisy, knowing that I 
 could not bear to have my life judged by them. This is not 
 hypocrisy, but yet I know that the feeling which makes me 
 tremble is from God. 
 
 From E. R. G. to Miss WEDGWOOD. 
 
 8 PALACE GARDENS, January 1871. 
 (Just a year after her mother's death.) 
 
 How slothful of me to miss so much good by not answering 
 your dear last. It was partly owing to little distractions, partly to 
 dumbness, partly to sloth. Yet I have been wanting you all the 
 time. 
 
 And all the time that great cold shadow of an absence a
 
 92 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 veil at the very spring of one's being. Only once was that re- 
 moved, in a wonderfully vivid dream, by a sense of joy which 
 waked me ; as I said, looking at her face, " Why, never did I see 
 you looking so beautifully, radiantly well as you do." And I 
 just glanced above her head and saw we were out of doors, and 
 the sky brilliantly blue ; but as I spoke a grey cloud came over half. 
 How true I feel what you say about the complicated thoughts 
 that arise when we wish our friends good things for the future 
 the highest and best then comes, Can ye drink of my cup? 
 Still, wish me the highest I am capable of. 
 
 From Miss WEDGWOOD to E. R. G., when the latter was at 
 Hereford nursing her uncle, Mr. JOHN VENN. 
 
 [Her dream, here alluded to, was of awakening from death in 
 some chaotic world, which filled her with dismay, until she 
 perceived that her uncle was near her, and of his saying, 
 in answer to her exclamation of disappointment, "I see 
 that we need faith here as much as on earth."] 
 
 i CUMBERLAND PLACE, REGENT'S PARK, N.W., 
 February 4, 1871. 
 
 How thankful for you I am that you have the great con- 
 solation of nursing him ! It must almost seem like a scrap of 
 the precious past. I wish I had seen him, that I might the 
 more enter into your anxiety, but that dream of yours recurs 
 with a wonderful force to illustrate the kind of impression he 
 must have made upon you. 
 
 I should so have liked to show you some of Mr. E.'s early 
 letters I have been reading. I would not describe them as 
 specially interesting to one who did not care for him, but the 
 perfume of his character came out so strongly. One sentence 
 struck me : " When a maker of instruments has finished one 
 he lays it aside, and an ignorant beholder might think he threw 
 it away; but the secret is, that his workshop is the place for 
 making, not for using it." It expresses so forcibly the one idea 
 of his life.
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 93 
 
 From E. R. G. to Miss WEDGWOOD. 
 
 HEREFORD, February 1871. 
 
 This morning I begin to breathe decidedly more freely about 
 my dear angelical Uncle John. We have had many alter- 
 nations, but for twenty-four hours he has kept better than at 
 all, and I begin to feel almost a remorse, as the barque that 
 one felt might be nearing the desired haven seems putting out 
 to sea again ! Though I have looked upon him all my life as 
 absolute perfection as to sweetness and unselfishness, I could 
 hardly have fancied anything so lovely, I may say, as he has 
 been in this illness. In the tossing of his fever, and thirst, 
 and weariness always ready with a smile, or a playful word, to 
 respond to anything done for him "just what he wanted," 
 " exactly right." He has seemed to me so completely to have 
 entered into his rest now. Not a groan over his past failings 
 (which used to be a propensity), not a wish to be, or do, or 
 say anything improving, but void of care as a child or a bird. 
 
 From Miss WEDGWOOD to E. R. G. 
 
 February 19, 1871. 
 
 It seems a long time that I have not written ; the first 
 time, I think, a word from you was ever left so long. I felt 
 so satisfied by it, that there seemed nothing to say. Oh, why 
 is it so rare, that purifying of all the details of life that you 
 are permitted to witness? 
 
 I do believe it is an exceptional blessing to be able to 
 trace the influence of Christianity as one traces a stream, by 
 the verdure of its banks. Perhaps even your present experi- 
 ence is not so much of an exception as I am supposing it, for 
 the intellectual form of that Christianity has no proportion to 
 the moral perfection of the life, and it is just this misfit that 
 is my perplexity. I think illness tests this so much. The will 
 is so paralysed then, one sees the habitual direction of ten- 
 dencies so nakedly. No doubt one sees much that is accidental, 
 but the thoughtfulness and grateful appreciation of love you 
 speak of certainly have nothing of that character.
 
 94 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 How thankful I am for you that the first return of all those 
 days most loaded with memories of sorrow should find you thus 
 occupied, their barbs sheathed in this atmosphere of love. Oh, 
 how it seems at times as if days bristling with recollections that 
 tear one's heart can never subside into a mere framework for 
 any other experience ! And yet they do thus subside, and a 
 chance date awakens recollections, which, while one realises their 
 poignancy, one can scarcely believe have slumbered. Yet it is 
 best that they should slumber ; we cannot receive their message 
 while we are overwhelmed with their weight. We shall learn 
 most from our past when emotion has gone out from it, and 
 we can contemplate it in the calm of a perfect acquiescence in 
 all the decisions of God, not only for ourselves, but for others. 
 Till then I feel grateful for the gradual fading of these memorial 
 characters on one's mental calendar, knowing eternity must have 
 the power of reviving them under that light we shall be able to 
 read without being blinded, as we are here. 
 
 . . . Oh, Emily, I cannot tell you how thankful I feel for 
 such books as my uncle's, 1 that drive us from the miserable 
 little corner where we seek to shut up all divine energy, and 
 force us to listen for the voice at our ear. If not now and 
 here, then never and nowhere. That alternative, far from alarm- 
 ing me, is what I rejoice at, for I cannot think that when men 
 once awaken to it, they will be satisfied with this deaf, dead, 
 mechanical sound, that seemed not so unnatural while people 
 thought God was less occupying Himself with us than He 
 used to do. I think then the thirst must awaken for the living 
 waters that are close at hand, though sometimes one feels " we 
 have nothing to draw with, and the well is deep." 
 
 I know there is no tendency towards this at all among 
 scientific men, but the reverse. But I think, in the conviction 
 that they are deepening in all minds, of the unity of nature, 
 they are preparing the way for our reception of it as a parable, 
 though meanwhile their refusal to see it as this tells hurtfully on 
 them. 
 
 1 Charles Darwin.
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 95 
 
 From Miss WEDGWOOD to E. R. G. 
 
 i CUMBERLAND PLACE, REGENT'S PARK, 
 June 12, 1871. 
 
 I feel such a longing for a word with you, I must yield to it. 
 Your forget-me-nots are still beside me. All the rich turquoise 
 blossoms which caught your eye have withered away, but other 
 buds, diminished and colourless mere ghosts of flowers have 
 had strength just to open, and show a faded and shrunken sug- 
 gestion of what the ideal is, when it draws sap from its own root 
 in the far-off country streams, and not from mere stalks stuck 
 into artificial reservoirs here in this unflowery London. 
 
 And I cannot fling away the poor stalks that put forth this 
 ghostly echo of the true flower, feeling them such a symbol of my 
 life, all colourless and shrunken as it is of our lives let me say, 
 of the lives that attach themselves to a mere stalk the root 
 being some far-off reminiscence that can only be recognised as a 
 hope. 
 
 When shall we see the real blossom, the flower of humanity 
 in the fulness of colour and form that come from a real root ? 
 
 . . . Always with the thought of you there comes help to me. 
 I felt so especially thankful for our drive home together on 
 Monday. ... I cannot tell you how much blessing I feel in 
 that part of your life which we then entered on. In this im- 
 perfect condition so much help comes to us from being enabled 
 to contemplate that part of the lives of others which is lifted 
 above ordinary life by peculiar love. Of course it is not peculiar 
 in one sense and the most natural perhaps but I mean that 
 one feels sometimes able to recognise universal bonds and duties 
 only through the microscope of those special affinities. What we 
 owe to all, what we claim from all, seems in these dreary moods 
 nothing until we see how individual human souls can combine 
 and lose all separateness, and then it seems revealed how this is 
 only the promise and pledge of something that is the common 
 right of humanity. How different is our capacity to recognise 
 faint shades of a colour, before and after we have seen it pure !
 
 96 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 THE CRAG./W/V 25, 1871. 
 
 ... I wish George Eliot would delineate what seems to me 
 both the commonest and yet almost the greatest tragedy of life, 
 the pathos that there is in a strong character that cannot com- 
 plete itself. What makes for happiness, as M. Arnold would say, 
 is so much less the strength of separate impulses than the power 
 of throwing preponderant force into the one that is to govern 
 where this is wanting, energy of feeling seems only to prolong 
 the civil war. And one sees for some lives that this prolonged 
 civil war is inevitable without miracle. I always listen for the 
 voice that shall say, " Take up thy bed and walk." . . . No, we 
 cannot help being poor and blind. But if among the poor and 
 blind some were able to bear pain patiently, to resist wrong with- 
 out self-assertion, to love us through unkindness and contempt, 
 would not the world see that the unseen presence was with them ? 
 
 From E. R. G. to Miss WEDGWOOD. 
 
 8 PALACE GARDENS, W.,//y 27, 1871. 
 
 It sometimes seems to me quite wrong that I should receive such 
 letters all to myself. They contain such a wealth of rare things ! 
 
 "The pathos that there is in a strong character that cannot 
 complete itself." I think that there was that about my beloved 
 mother. It would be a fine subject for G. Eliot, and well suited 
 to her pen. 
 
 No, I don't think the world would see that there was a presence 
 supporting those who could love' on through unkindness and con- 
 tempt, who bore pain patiently, &c. I think there are more of 
 such than you do ; but I don't think they would ever be appre- 
 ciated by the spirit of the world which has an opposite ideal. 
 
 I have written on without telling you what has been in my 
 thoughts all the time. For I shrink from telling you, feeling that 
 you will dislike it as much almost as I do. We are to go to 
 Washington for six long months ! The Government has asked 
 Russell to go as the English Commissioner to settle the claims of 
 American and British merchants under the Treaty of Washington. 
 It has been hanging over us for some time. He felt he could not
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 97 
 
 refuse, supposing the climate was not thought unhealthy for either 
 of us, and that he might return by the end of March whether 
 the work were finished or not. This condition has only just 
 been agreed to. Now nothing remains but that the Corporation 
 and the constituents consent, which of course they will. So I 
 consider it settled. 
 
 We should have to start the last week in September, or the 
 first in October. It is very unattractive to me, and the Nile 
 seems so delightfully dreamy and picturesque in comparison with 
 that go ahead New World. Still I do not altogether hate it, for 
 I feel a pleasure in R. having a good bit of work to do for which 
 he is fitted, and I think he will be interested in the place and 
 people. And I have a certain pleasure in going forth into an 
 unknown land. But to leave you and some others is very 
 grievous, and to be cut off this quiet winter (certainly we should 
 have gone to the Nile, probably for four months), and only to 
 return after Easter when the busy London time begins, seems to 
 eat away a great slice of friendship opportunity. 
 
 In 1871 Mr. Russell Gurney was appointed as English 
 Commissioner in an arbitration at Washington, between 
 the claims of British and American merchants. Two 
 winters were spent by him and his wife in Washington, 
 the summer between being spent in England. 
 
 Before settling down to the winter's work in the 
 autumn of 1871, they took a journey to Niagara, and 
 in the spring of 1872 to some of the Southern States. A 
 few of Mrs. Russell Gurney's letters from America, most 
 of these being in the form of journal letters to Miss Venn, 
 are here given. 
 
 To her Aunt, Miss VENN. 
 
 BREVOORT HOTEL, NEW YORK, 
 September 19, 1871. 
 
 Yes, here we actually are ! I wish you could see how well, 
 and comfortable, and pleased. It has been a day of great excite-
 
 98 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 ment. Soon after breakfast land came in sight, and all the 
 passengers began to collect. Some we had never seen before, 
 and others so transformed by elegant toilettes brought out for the 
 occasion, that we hardly knew them again. 
 
 There are two promontories that leave a passage between 
 them called the Narrows, and enclose the immense harbour, and 
 are something like the ridge on which Genoa is built : much 
 prettier than I expected; woods and fields and thickly dotted 
 villas. . . . When one gets within the harbour there appears an 
 enormous circle about eight or ten miles across, with buildings 
 to the water's edge. It impresses one wonderfully with its extent 
 and the variety of its buildings. 
 
 Now all the passengers gathered to the edges of the vessel, and 
 with their opera-glasses could make out their friends on the pier 
 who were waving handkerchiefs to them. Some had been absent 
 one, two, or three years from fathers, mothers, or even husbands, 
 and their excitement kept increasing. It was quite infectious, I 
 assure you, as we slowly neared the great pier where so many eager 
 faces and waving pocket-handkerchiefs were to be seen. Many 
 of the passengers told us whom they were longing to see ; and we 
 went up to them when they had descried their longed-for ones, 
 and congratulated them, and shook hands with them while their 
 tears were overflowing ; and then after long waiting and difficulty 
 in approaching the shore, the bridge was managed across to the 
 pier. And one little woman burst across in a moment from the 
 crowd, and dashed into her husband's arms, with such a bound 
 as I shall never forget. 
 
 We remained till the last, as there were no arms to fly into. 
 . . . We were set down at this hotel in the style of a first-rate 
 Paris hotel. When we arrived the master did not come to receive 
 us, but we were ushered into the parlour, as they called it, and 
 were received by the master exactly as if he were a gentleman 
 receiving his guests, perfectly civilly, but without the faintest 
 suspicion of being under any obligation to us as customers. He 
 asked about our passage, and how many passengers we had, and 
 how long we should stay, with a kind of benevolent but not
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 99 
 
 condescending interest. The rooms are delightfully airy and 
 clean, and in good taste. 
 
 We immediately went out for a walk down the Fifth Avenue, 
 in which the hotel is. I fancied all the houses were like one 
 another, and all in a white monotony; not at all. They are 
 either red brick or a fine warm-coloured stone; and not all 
 touching one another, but like a succession of villa palaces, 
 thick trees between them and the road, and little green settings 
 to each home. Climbing plants up the balustrades, and massive 
 stone stairs up to the front door, which is generally of finely 
 carved mahogany with plated handles and bolts many tropical 
 leaves forming a border round the edge of the house. Here and 
 there churches with weeping willows by their sides. I was quite 
 unprepared for so much charm in the place. . . . 
 
 Since I began this we have had time to investigate. It is 
 a desolate-looking place, notwithstanding the bright sun that 
 has been shining upon it since we have been here. There are 
 the widest and the most wildly bad roads I ever saw, like ploughed 
 fields ; with tram lines along them for the great omnibuses, and 
 houses on each side here and there, some rather handsome and 
 some little painted boxes. The redeeming feature is the row 
 of trees on each side. The town seems to extend over an 
 immense area, with great gaps and unfinished buildings in all 
 directions. It is just like a town beginning to grow out of a 
 clearing. 
 
 On Monday we went for a drive. It is rather pleasant and 
 exciting to feel sure that you have experienced either the very 
 best or the very worst of anything. Certainly we may say now 
 we have been on the very worst roads in civilised life. They 
 are absolutely like ploughed fields, only with less regular hum- 
 mocks. We drove round the large handsome white marble 
 Capitol. These buildings look as if giant children had been at 
 play, and set up their toy buildings here and there in the midst 
 of the country. It is as if the town were camping out in 
 the middle of a prairie, not a pretty fresh prairie, but one all 
 trampled about by builders and masons of a very untidy kind,
 
 TOO LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 who left heaps of stones and bricks and mortar here and there 
 and everywhere. 
 
 To Mrs. FRANCIS GALTON. 
 
 BREVOORT HOTEL, NEW YORK, 
 September 21, 1871. 
 
 DEAREST LOUISA, The great Atlantic is passed. Our voyage 
 prosperous. One sight of almost compensating beauty in exchange 
 for sea-miseries such large sapphire-blue, heaving, crested waves 
 breaking up into dazzling white cascades of foam, and pools of 
 glacier-green interlacing. It was very exciting as we approached 
 New York, escaping the perils of the deep, seeing the New 
 World appear, and then sharing sympathetically the joy of our 
 fellow-passengers in recognising first through opera-glasses, and 
 then face to face, the longing, waiting, beloved ones on the pier. 
 I think the Americans do not try to conceal their natural 
 affections as we more sophisticated ones do. I felt the scene 
 a kind of foretaste or promise of the meeting I long for, when 
 the separating flood shall be past, and we awake from the be- 
 wildering dreams and dark cabined state of our voyage. . . . 
 
 If we get back safe from May till October, we shall expect 
 our friends to make much of us ! Your very affectionate E. G. 
 
 To Miss VENN. 
 
 WASHINGTON, September 22, 1871. 
 
 . . . We only arrived here at 11.30 last night. I wrote to 
 you after our first week in New York. The next day (aoth) 
 Russell went forth with Mr. Clive to the Recorder's Court, and 
 there sat almost all day, wishing to see the plan worked of the 
 examination of the accused as a witness in his own case. He 
 came back, glad that he had been, and pleased on the whole ; 
 and said that very good order had been maintained, though 
 there were no wigs and gowns or officials of threatening aspect 
 of any kind. 
 
 Late in the afternoon we had a carriage, for which we paid 
 about 285., and took a drive in the Central Park, a kind of
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 101 
 
 Bois de Boulogne. While the carriage was at the door Russell 
 had to be interviewed by three editors in succession. During 
 the first interview he was rather indignant, but became meeker 
 and meeker as they went on. . . . 
 
 SARATOGA SPRINGS, October i. 
 
 Well, now I must tell you all that has happened since I 
 wrote last. Not much of happening, to be sure; but just the 
 daily page as it turns itself over, you will want to hear about. 
 You will fancy that it has been wrought in more varied colours 
 than it has been, for it always seems as if something peculiar 
 must be happening on the other side of the Atlantic, I know. 
 When I last wrote to you we were just closing with a house 
 which we finally engaged, and where I think we shall be very 
 comfortable. 
 
 On Thursday we set forth alone, back again to New York. I 
 shall not describe that journey; we had no adventures, and 
 though we smiled invitingly to every passenger on the road, 
 no one proffered any remark or asked any questions, as we had 
 been led to expect Americans would. 
 
 We set off on Saturday morning by the Hudson Central 
 Railway. This is a magnificent line, and the carriages are 
 delightful, with great broad windows of plate glass through 
 which one can see the view to perfection. The great charms 
 of the views were the breadth of this noble river, the quantities 
 of boats upon it, the numbers of villas on its banks, and the 
 varying rocks and hills and woods, and some distant well-shaped 
 hills, that added their light blue tints as a background to the 
 gorgeous colours of the nearer shrubs and trees. Autumn does 
 indeed paint magnificently here. The Virginian creeper climbs 
 up everywhere, and the sycamores and shumachs take up every 
 gradation of crimson, gold, and purple. Many of the villas are 
 rather like those on the Lake of Como. No, not so handsome, 
 but they have terraces and cypresses, and balconies, and look 
 very gay and life-enjoying. 
 
 We went, after making some inquiries about different
 
 104 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 I never before heard of the fullest congregational singing and, 
 at the same time, skill and taste. His sermon was to me in- 
 tensely interesting; manly, candid, full of spiritual force, and 
 with here and there little touches of humour that were perfectly 
 delightful, and not the least irreverent. We liked it so much 
 that we could not help making another expedition in the evening 
 to hear him again. He is a man about fifty-seven or fifty-eight, 
 very genial - looking, and he seems dowered with a kind of 
 supremacy that compels one to look at and listen to him. He 
 ought to be heard with understanding ears, for he is not the 
 least guarded or balanced, but presents you with a glowing, 
 living picture of one side of a truth at a time. At any rate, 
 the worship was like life and sunshine after dwelling in the 
 Catacombs, as we had been doing during the last four Sundays. 
 
 To the Honble. Mrs. COWPER-TEMPLE. 
 
 NIAGARA, October n, 1871. 
 
 Most seriously I want to lay it on your consciences you 
 must come and see this heavenly vision. I cannot use any 
 words about it. I can only say, Come and see. It is as if 
 one had been caught up into the third heaven, and heard 
 unspeakable words, which it is not lawful to attempt to utter. 
 It is such a promise to find loveliness exceeding abundantly, 
 above all that we could ask or think. This is what it has been. 
 I could only cry, with the overpowering sense of this. The fair 
 beauty of the Lord came upon me with such astonishment, 
 when I only expected to find His grandeur and awfulness. The 
 rapids are like a wide, foaming sea before they fall ; then, when 
 they break into the dazzling purity of whiteness, the pearl-grey 
 veil of foam is always mantling up around them, in changing, 
 mysterious folds. And the large rainbow planted in the midst 
 is more brilliant, and at the same time more ethereal, than 
 any I ever saw in the sky. Will you not be thankful for me 
 that my unworthy eyes have been given this. The sound of 
 many waters is now in my ears. You must stay a week at least,
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 105 
 
 as we have done, and see it in sunshine and shadow, and wander 
 in and out of the flaming woods, and come upon it unawares. 
 
 To Mrs. FRANCIS GALTON. 
 
 NEW YORK, October 27, 1871. 
 
 Your letter was written October n, while we were sitting 
 on a pine stem in Luna Island watching the rapids the leaping, 
 joyous, wonderful, free rapids above Niagara. All round the 
 autumn woods were burning themselves away in gorgeous, many- 
 tinted flame colours. And the voices of these many waters 
 filled the air, and great clouds of illuminated misty spray from 
 time to time mysteriously veiled the wondrous scene, and then 
 were rent away, partially revealing new combinations. 
 
 These rapids had been less anticipated and realised before- 
 hand, and therefore came upon one with more freshness of 
 delight, perhaps, than even the falls. No ; the impression that 
 Niagara made was something quite by itself, and shivered to 
 pieces all preconceived opinions, and carried one away one knew 
 not whither. 
 
 To Miss JAMESON. 
 
 WASHINGTON, November 1871. 
 
 DEAREST MARION, Your dear letter came to me just after 
 our arrival in the house that is to be our home here for five 
 months, and your loving greeting has helped to bring sympathetic 
 images into the bare place ! 
 
 I have felt your sighs in this unfamiliar room, and sighed 
 with you, and so the room is less shut in by its grey walls than 
 before ! But it is unspeakably sad that you should be nailed to 
 your sofa in weakness of body while your poor heart is so riven 
 and aching and often perplexed. 
 
 To walk about physical motion is some relief even to the 
 perturbed spirit. Certainly the cross on the spirit and the cross 
 on the flesh do act and react on one another, so that each is 
 intensified by the other ; and how strange the dispensation seems 
 that your best and most comforting friends should be kept away
 
 io6 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 from you ! Not strange, for it seems the often appointed plan, 
 that in the wilderness the comfortable words are to be spoken 
 by the Spirit to the spirit. Some one remarked that the paralytic 
 man had no friends to place him in the healing waters ; and for 
 thirty-and-eight years he waited in vain at their brink. What long 
 and repeated disappointments ! Yet when he was healed by 
 Him who met him afterwards in the Temple, how thankful he 
 must have been not to have been healed in the other way before ! 
 Divine comfort and teaching and light must come in its own 
 gradual way, wrought in us. How long that must take, con- 
 sidering all our fibres and surfaces that want renewing and re- 
 adjusting and developing an inner man to be raised out of 
 corruption. I see more and more how patient we must be ! 
 During that suffering of your blessed one, that it wrings your 
 heart to think of, I believe the finishing strokes were being put to 
 the renewing of that inward being, day by day. Perhaps that 
 painful decay of the outward is mysteriously connected with some 
 stages of spiritual purification. Do not, therefore, grudge your 
 blessed one that perfecting through suffering which the Captain 
 of her salvation led her into, but take courage to rejoice that she 
 was counted worthy. You are still tasting part of the cup with 
 her, and cannot finish it by any efforts, I believe. Would that 
 some vivid realisation might be granted you, of her present con- 
 dition nearer the throne, which should take the taste out of that 
 former cup. 
 
 One flash of such I had, as I saw Niagara at first, with its 
 extraordinary brilliancy of beauty : the large vivid spirit iris ; the 
 depth of the purity of the foam ; the voice of the many waters 
 all overwhelmed my whole being, not with awe at its grandeur, 
 but with a pathetic sense of the lavish crowding together of fair 
 majestic beauty in this manifestation of the Lord of the earth. 
 It was as if the words came to me, " exceeding abundantly, above 
 all that we can ask or think ! " This is a token of the glad sur- 
 prise in store for us. If any one at that moment had said to me, 
 " I grieve that you suffered so much in crossing the Atlantic," 
 I should have laughed them to scorn !
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 107 
 
 Well, all this time I am telling you nothing. Since Niagara 
 it has been all railroadings and huge hotels, and schools and 
 institutions, interspersed with some kind-hearted friendly acquaint- 
 ances. I have felt more interested than I expected ; but it is 
 difficult in a few words to generalise our experiences : they have 
 been so detailed. It is astonishing to see such young towns, 
 so large and flourishing; such wide tracts of country with their 
 railroads and clustering villages and towns ; such successful, 
 busy, enterprising human beings ! I thought this would be 
 only disagreeable, but there is an element of life in it which 
 is exhilarating. 
 
 I enjoyed the congregational fulness of song and worship at 
 Mr. Ward Beecher's, and his manly, vigorous preaching, com- 
 pletely unconventional, and with a sense of humour that he 
 could not resist ; but I discovered no irreverence in him, and 
 no affectation of originality. 
 
 We find it comfortable to be settled here after our wanderings, 
 with our nice servants ; but except the attache's to the English 
 Legation and three or four foreign Ministers, we have seen no 
 one. The season not having begun, it seems that people do not 
 much call, and the Senators are not yet come. 
 
 To-day it has been brilliant, just like an Italian October day ; 
 but two days before it was bitingly cold with high cruel winds. 
 These alternations are to be expected through the winter. It is 
 such a straggling, unlovely place ; the Capitol a very fine build- 
 ing, but such incompleteness everywhere. No aiming at the 
 " sweetness and light of perfection," materially or morally, I 
 think! 
 
 To Miss VENN. 
 
 WASHINGTON, December 22, 1871. 
 
 We had our party to dinner, and I quite think it turned 
 out successfully ; though we were in a dreadful fright because 
 Mr. H., who knows all the peculiarities of the Americans, had 
 said that it was the most difficult and delicate point imaginable 
 to arrange the precedence of those we had asked. The Judge
 
 io8 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 of the Supreme Court ought to go first, and the two Cabinet 
 Ministers ought to go first, and the Spanish Minister, though 
 he represented a sovereign in general circles, was considered one 
 of the family by any of the diplomatic corps, and we are to be 
 considered as belonging to the diplomatic corps ; and then the 
 case was referred to Sir E. T., and he and Mr. H. took op- 
 posite views. And then Mr. N. went to consult an old Miss B., 
 who has been for many years in the world of Washington society, 
 and she only shook her head and said she could really give no 
 opinion, but said that almost anyhow they were to be offended. 
 
 Finally we determined that the Spanish Minister was to go 
 first, and that Russell should take his wife. Then the Califomian 
 lady was to come next. Mrs. D., the wife of the Minister of the 
 Interior, was taken by the Secretary of the Treasury ; and she 
 was a homely grandmother who talked very lovingly of her four 
 little grandchildren who were coming for Christmas. Well, no 
 one seemed the least bit inclined to be offended, but were as 
 friendly as possible, and after dinner we had seven or eight 
 others. That Blague Bey, the Turk, is as good as a comedy any 
 day. He speaks English with just enough accent to give it the 
 greatest capacities of fun and expression. And there was a 
 pretty Mrs. C., who is one of those outspoken creatures who says 
 exactly what comes uppermost, and between these two we were 
 greatly amused ; it made the end of our evening quite lively. 
 
 To the Honble. Mrs. COWPER-TEMPLE. 
 
 WASHINGTON, 1872. 
 
 I find it so difficult to let the past go. Long blanks and 
 rather empty days give me the opportunity of looking back with 
 such longing eyes. Have you read Mrs. Augustus Hare's 
 Memoirs ? The drama of a life, when one is permitted to see 
 within as well as around it, becomes increasingly touching and 
 interesting, as one gets far on in one's own. One's curiosity 
 becomes intense to learn how it fares with travellers after their 
 early companions and eager aspirations have left them, or faded. 
 With all that melts away, one longs so to know what is actually
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 109 
 
 attained and held. Patience certainly seems to come to a 
 matured right life. But how much of energetic aspiration is 
 lost as that is gained ? It is strange to be set here on a narrow 
 bridge or isthmus, from which I look back on my youth and 
 maturity, and see before me the descent of age, long shadows, 
 evening, death, still appearing on the rather distant horizon, but 
 with so few objects between it and me for the eye to rest upon 
 except the graves of beloved ones who are farther on in the 
 journey. Having no children certainly lessens one's hold on 
 life, do you not think ? And till one's parents go, one does not 
 fully taste this. 
 
 To Miss VENN. 
 
 WASHINGTON, January 9, 1872. 
 
 . . . On Friday the 5th we gathered together all our energy 
 and went forth after tea to call on Mrs. T. This is like an old- 
 fashioned English house, with broad oak stairs, landing-places 
 all thronged with little portraits, and china, and relics of the 
 past, and this old lady affects English ways in everything, and 
 very pleasant and comfortable those ways seemed. She had a 
 Sutherland table and hissing kettle in, and made tea for us. She 
 is very High Church in the old-fashioned way, and thinks " private 
 judgment " the greatest curse, and education of the lower ranks 
 poisonous. I did not think there were any such remaining any- 
 where ; fancy finding one in America ! She evidently thought 
 us the rashest of advanced Liberals. However, on the whole, we 
 seem to have given her satisfaction, for the next morning, by 
 cock-crow, she sent in a little note to beg us to go in to dine 
 with her that very day at six o'clock. We found there a Ken- 
 tucky lady who had lived surrounded, she said, by dear old 
 slaves till the war time ; and all were talking of the paradisaical 
 state the slaves were in before the Emancipation and the misery 
 into which they had all fallen. Judge L. was very pleasant and 
 amusing, and not nearly so in harmony with the dark ages as the 
 old lady, but tending in that direction. He does not think, 
 however, that the country is degenerating. He thinks there is
 
 no LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 less crime than there was ; much less drunkenness, though there 
 are frauds. He says this is the worst place we could be in for 
 forming a judgment of the best class of Americans, for here most 
 of the people are officials or take part in politics. He confirmed 
 what has been said over and over again, that the best people do 
 not mingle in politics, and that they are in the hands of the 
 people who want to grow rich by this means, having failed in 
 other ways. And yet he would not agree to what I said, that 
 this must lower the general standard of morality very much. He 
 did not think that politics affected the general heart and life of 
 the country at all. He went on to speak of the negroes in a way 
 that would have roused Uncle Henry l to indignation. 
 
 To the Honble. Mrs. COWPER-TEMPLE. 
 
 CHARLESTON, March 1872. 
 
 Oh, how my heart responded to all you said in your dear 
 note. " Even the serious things don't seem worth while," with 
 the foundations quivering. Is the Lord amongst us or not ? is 
 the question stirring one's whole soul ; and the life-blood seems 
 to gather round this central question, and to retire from all the 
 circumference beyond. Did you read in " Middlemarch " a sen- 
 tence about " the keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human 
 life, which would make us die of that roar which lies on the 
 other side of silence ; but as it is, the quickest of us walk about 
 well wadded with stupidity." Perhaps this kind of quilted gar- 
 ment is intended to keep us from being bewildered by the mani- 
 fold deep questionings in order that we may each take sufficient 
 interest in our tiny bits of work. Yet again, one feels one could 
 work so much better if those questions were answered ! 
 
 Oh, if you also had been with us on the St. John's River, 
 Florida, so wondrously clear and smooth, and reflecting such a 
 heaven! Now narrow enough to make its palm-fringed banks 
 seem an arched bower, beneath as well as above. And wild 
 oranges grew there and fell into the still edges of the water, lying 
 there like balls of fire ; and hundreds of snow-white cranes flew 
 1 The Rev. Henry Venn.
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY in 
 
 above us, glittering in the sunlight, and sweet little grey storks 
 picked their way amongst the sedgy banks. There were groves 
 of old ilex trees draped with a long waving grey moss and other 
 fantastic plants ; and all reached, unrestrained by man, towards 
 the clear waters, or dipped thirstily into them. We had nearly a 
 week in this lovely primeval region. 
 
 To the same. 
 
 April 1872. 
 
 Oh, I knew what the departure of that blessed seer [F. D. 
 Maurice] would be to you ! The light is dying off our mountain 
 peaks. When, when will the morning come and show them to 
 us again ? One does think of him as a voice ! its trembling still 
 vibrates in our memory and must help us to pray. 
 
 To ELLEN MARY GURNEY (between the two visits to America). 
 PALACE GARDENS, August 1872. 
 
 Dear child, I much wish I could oftener feel you by my side, and 
 that the two worlds in which we are living could be more blended. 
 The description of your Babbacombe life makes me long to be 
 young again and to have such a chance of happy, free, out-of-door 
 life. Yet I hope and think you are enjoying such a life more 
 than I ever did such times in my youth. I was always looking 
 on, and did not receive as I should have done from the present. 
 And this is still my besetting sin, though by experience and con- 
 viction I do believe that in the present our daily bread is to be 
 found, and that our salvation is in the now. Every day to me, 
 as well as you, must have its message, its teaching, its nourish- 
 ment, its medicine. Yet fain would I skip some and get a 
 glimpse beyond the horizon. The coming kingdom, the large 
 eternal life, makes my heart so long to taste it, as one cannot 
 in the flesh ! I know one's energy should expend itself in striv- 
 ing and longing to receive more of this blessed life here, and I 
 believe my desires for that which lies beyond the veil come 
 from the idleness and listlessness which keep me back from 
 striving here as I should do. Then the details of visiting and
 
 H2 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 going backwards and forwards from an American to a London 
 season are wearying, stale, and flat, though tolerably amusing to 
 the outermost surface of one. I have had much happiness from 
 very loving and loved friends, and most refreshing and exhilarat- 
 ing it has been to be amongst them all again. And long rays 
 will stretch from the light of their presence into the distance 
 and darkness of Washington. 
 
 To the same (after return to America). 
 
 WASHINGTON, November 1872. 
 
 Our wanderings in Canada lasted a fortnight. They included 
 finely situated Quebec ; the rapids, which we shot successfully 
 near Montreal ; Niagara the magnificent, which we again won- 
 dered at, and bathed our souls in ; a religious community, 1 which 
 seemed to me really like a seed sown in a large place for the 
 coming kingdom. I cannot explain to you, for it would need a 
 volume, the fulness, and the simplicity, and breadth of ideas 
 which these people are endeavouring to carry out. 
 
 They think they are very consciously and mightily led by the 
 Spirit Oh ! may it be so indeed and that they have supernatural 
 evidence of this in many ways. We could only stay there 
 twenty-four hours, so it was but a superficial glance we could 
 give. How / longed to remain I need not tell you. And how 
 flat, stale, and unprofitable the fashionable watering-place, New- 
 port, seemed afterwards, I need not relate. The villas and 
 gardens, and fashionable sea-shore drive, and the carriages and 
 horses are all in first-rate style ; and here the New Yorkers 
 disport themselves in the summer months, regardless of expense. 
 Here were the P.'s, and Mr. and Mrs. B., extremely kind and 
 hospitable and intelligent people, and so were some others who 
 invited us. 
 
 From Newport we travelled here, stopping at a lovely villa on 
 
 the Hudson banks, with the heartiest, sunniest people. The host 
 
 drove four-in-hand splendidly, and took us all about the lovely 
 
 country ; and would fain also have sailed us up and down the 
 
 1 That of Mr. Harris at Brockton.
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 113 
 
 broad Hudson in his fairy yacht. But we preferred the dear 
 earth, decked as she was in her gorgeously flaming garments of 
 crimson and gold. 
 
 We then, as I said, came on here. The Commissioners met 
 and arranged about future work, and then insisted on adjourning 
 again till October 28th. So off we started again, shaken and 
 dusted, dragged by snorting engines to Boston, 500 miles off, 
 and there sojourned very agreeably for ten days. Our cice- 
 rone, Mr. H., was most useful to us. Took us quite in charge, 
 pioneered us about every day, and caught celebrities for us to 
 see : Dr. O. W. Holmes, whom I was very glad to see, having 
 much liked his " Autocrat of the Breakfast Table." We were 
 also taken to Longfellow's. He is serene, simple, and tender, as 
 an old poet should be, and eminently picturesque. 
 
 From Boston we went by rail almost to Albany, and from 
 there struck into very pretty hilly country. Oh, the jewels we 
 saw, rubies and topazes especially, hanging translucent on the 
 trees! We had only two days for this pretty Berkshire, and a 
 glance at the Shaker Community, who planted themselves here 
 one hundred years ago, and live in celibacy and community of 
 goods, and flourish as to material prosperity greatly. Unfortun 
 ately, we could not see their religious dance, but they expounded 
 their curious tenets to us; and though so distorted and un- 
 balanced, there is an interesting side to all these extravagances, 
 as proceeding from dissatisfaction with the poor, mutilated, un- 
 influential Christianity generally seen in the world. A stretching 
 out of the hands, however blindly and impotently, for some- 
 thing higher and less earthly. 
 
 We returned here for the 28th, and the Commissioners have 
 been getting on steadily ; but we are hopeless of the work being 
 finished before the summer ! 
 
 To the same. 
 
 WASHINGTON, April 1873. 
 
 Just now the claims are getting on well, and the sunshine 
 and the many blossoms are cheering ; and feeling that we have 
 
 H
 
 n 4 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 only three weeks more of Washington, gives it a sort of halo it 
 has hitherto been without. 
 
 I don't know how to be thankful enough that the long cold 
 winter is over, and my dearest has not suffered at all in health. 
 We are to have a fortnight loitering here and there when we 
 leave this, and are due at Newport on the ist of June till the 
 work is finished. I greatly hope, as things look now, that we 
 may embark about the i5th of August, and get home by our 
 twenty-first wedding day ! It was silly of me to say the work 
 here was " petty and insignificant." In one sense this is true. I 
 mean that I think an ordinary attorney would have been as 
 well, perhaps better calculated than R. to settle the claims. In 
 another sense, to be permitted to lay even a brick in a work of 
 peace between these countries is an honour. Besides, I am 
 utterly convinced that we have no measuring rods for ascertaining 
 what is great or small in the work given us to do ; and I hope 
 this was given to us, not snatched by us. I know we did not 
 wish for it. But I have a headlong way of rushing into some 
 work for R., and it seems to gratify a moral ambition if it 
 demands a sacrifice. This kind of sentiment at the outset of an 
 undertaking is of the flesh, and needs trying and sifting by time 
 and wear and tear of circumstances ; and this we have had, and 
 have no business to complain. 
 
 CORRESPONDENCE WITH J. W. FROM SEP- 
 TEMBER 1871 TO DECEMBER 1875 
 
 From E. R. G. to Miss WEDGWOOD. 
 
 1871. Starting for America, 
 Saturday, \ I o'clock. 
 
 Your dear letter has brought you to me this morning! I 
 shall feed on it on the voyage, but I was obliged to taste it first. 
 
 I must tell you the Southampton meeting was really very 
 successful, and one moment quite supremely sweet : a sentence 
 of my beloved with such a look towards me when he thanked for
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 115 
 
 some expressions also to the "amiable lady," he said, that one 
 who in his absence from home, &c., would still make his life a 
 delight ; but it was only the look of perfect forgetfulness of all 
 the people and applause that there was in the tone and look, 
 that brought an atmosphere of heaven. 
 
 Received October 2. 
 
 We have had a very fair voyage. One glorious day at the 
 end of a gale, Sunday, when I crept on deck, and saw the forms 
 of the frolicsome waves and their dancing crests flying off into 
 cascades and making filigree silver network over the sapphire 
 and pools of indescribable glacier-green swirling amongst them. 
 I feel as if I just waked from a bad dream to see this, and then 
 relapsed again into a mollusc. Oh, this Babel in which I am 
 now writing ; about sixty people down two long, shaking tables, 
 playing at whist, chattering, &c., and sailors stamping overhead. 
 The American tones very predominant. The smell of steamer, 
 tobacco, and meals all mingling. How can I attempt to disen- 
 gage my spirit to commune with you ? But this is just a line to 
 go from the New World to show you I am just the same, neither 
 better nor worse ; only yearning a little more affectionately across 
 the gulf to my dearest Snow, and needing her thoughts and words 
 more than ever. 
 
 From E. R. G. to Miss WEDGWOOD. 
 
 WASHINGTON, September 26, 1871. 
 
 It seems rather sad to have arrived at one's journey's end. I 
 had a kind of sensation of what the exiles to Siberia felt when 
 they looked curiously out at the last stage, with which they knew 
 they would become so miserably familiar ! And this does look 
 so like an outpost; as if a stray higgledy-piggledy town were 
 camping out on a prairie, and not a fresh prairie, but one worn 
 with brick dust and tramping feet. 
 
 Then we learnt on arrival here that every hope must be given 
 up of getting finished in six months. So two winters seem spread 
 before us instead of one, and this makes the place uglier. But
 
 n6 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 really there is much that is consoling and pleasant and encourag- 
 ing. The colleagues seem decidedly promising. The winter 
 climate, all tell us, is very mild and sunshiny. We have taken a 
 comfortable house. We like what we have seen of the people. 
 The British Legation attaches have been most kind and helpful, 
 and are intelligent and quite gentlemen. Then we like our own 
 two very much. We shall house them, but they will only break- 
 fast with us. We shall, however, rarely get an evening alone 
 from what we hear, and are just making up our minds to live in 
 public almost. I don't think, however, that I shall feel so shy as 
 at home ; there seems something freer in this atmosphere ! We 
 like the perfect conviction of equality with which innkeepers, &c., 
 treat us, without a tinge of rudeness. 
 
 R. just returned from his first meeting, finds Frazer and 
 Corti pleasant to work with. He anticipates no difficulties, but 
 lengthiness in getting through. 
 
 From E. R. G. to Miss WEDGWOOD. 
 
 This travel in America under these circumstances would have 
 intoxicated me with joy twenty years ago, and now I have passed 
 another way. I am longing for that " corporate element in Chris- 
 tianity " that you say Miss G. speaks of a spiritual community 
 and intercourse and gifts in a kingdom not of this world. . . . 
 
 What a thrill of remorse shot through me this morning, when 
 I knew that I had let yesterday's mail close without a line, 
 having kept my words to you back to the last, and then I found 
 myself left dead and dry (as I find myself oftener and oftener 
 with advancing years) ; and I would not force myself to write to 
 you in that condition, but said I would wait till the morning. 
 The mornings come to me so freshly and hopefully, and wear 
 away into such stupid, commonplace days ! Yet I always expect 
 some new wonder day to dawn and last for me. 
 
 Tell me, always tell me such good things as your No. 6 says, 
 about the paralytic waiting thirty-and-eight years by the healing 
 waters. How unbearable to him if it had been prophesied that
 
 LETTERS OF EMEL1A RUSSELL GURNEY 117 
 
 no good would come to him from them ; and afterwards what 
 a joy that he had not been dipped in them ! And Christ finding 
 him in the Temple, that I respond to. But I want the atheists 
 to have a Temple ; some seeking after worship, I mean. I know 
 they have an earnest religion, but I dread their losing the faculty 
 of discerning the living Lord, if there is not that seeking, upward- 
 longing region in the heart which makes it a Temple. If they 
 are content to leave off looking for the stars, and shut themselves 
 in to the lamps, will the stars force themselves in after them ? 
 Well, no doubt the Seeker and Saviour will know how to make 
 them try again, as your letter in the Spectator about Mr. Erskine's 
 views makes one feel. 
 
 Did you read F. D. M. on the Athanasian Creed ? I liked 
 it particularly. But Russell says he cannot see a glimmer of 
 meaning in it as applied to the Creed ; that it no more touches 
 the question than it does the system of Copernicus, or anything 
 else ! I own that I think it strange that he should feel that 
 Creed a help to emerge from opinions about God into God 
 Himself; but surely this is the ideal work of all expressions of 
 belief and definitions of the Truth. 
 
 From E. R. G. to Miss WEDGWOOD. 
 
 WASHINGTON, New Year's Day, 1872. 
 
 . . . And now, do you know I am writing between the visits 
 of two Senators, M.C.'s and Judges ! We have just come from 
 the President's New Year's Reception, and Russell has started 
 with a list of thirty ladies on whom he is to call, and I stay at 
 home to receive the gentlemen. I have had fifteen, and now 
 there is a pause. I have not found one the least like the Yankee 
 one imagines, vaunting himself and his country ; but, on the con- 
 trary, rather shy and formal, as if they were trying to be very 
 particular in their manners. And so I have found them easy to 
 get on with, because it seems as if they only wanted a little good- 
 natured encouraging chat. Another carriage and black coachman 
 interrupted me ; a Judge of the Supreme Court, and two young
 
 n8 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 sons of a lodging-house keeper came in together. The two were 
 as modest as possible, and did not seem to like to sit down on 
 the blue sofa, and would not have any tea or coffee. Does it 
 make them more contented to feel they may call on anybody, 
 I wonder. I often say to people, " We have too much exclusive- 
 ness in England, I like the removing barriers " ; and without 
 exception hitherto I have been answered, " We don't like it at 
 all, it only leads to display and extravagance, and a mad desire 
 for distinction of some kind or another." 
 
 From E. R. G. to Miss WEDGWOOD. 
 
 WASHINGTON, January 14, 1872. 
 
 I am happy to say I cannot agree with you that Christianity 
 is a failure as a deliverer from sin. It has been fully tried by 
 such a minority ; but those have been, I think, wonderfully de- 
 livered from selfish aims, though not completely, and I cannot 
 help thinking that even the diffused Christianity in the air has 
 done more for its opponents than they can guess. They would 
 not have joy in evolution, I believe, if they had not imbibed 
 inspirations for the perfecting of the whole creation from Chris- 
 tianity. . . . 
 
 Something you said in your last letter but one, and a sentence 
 I saw somewhere quoted from Goethe, came home to me par- 
 ticularly as I felt so frittered into shreds. You said you had a 
 misgiving sometimes lest those who do not look for immortality 
 should not find it ; and Goethe said he believed in the im- 
 mortality of those who had souls enough to live again. I do 
 fear when my body is dissolved my spirit will dissipate itself all 
 about in smoky atoms ! For I cannot feel a current of my being 
 setting anywhere ! It must be something quite different when 
 one has attained to the resurrection of the dead. 
 
 Days have passed since I began this, and I have been to five 
 receptions each afternoon, and to evenings, and have 158 new 
 faces and names to bear in mind. Is it not an odd dispensation ? 
 Muddling and externalising seemed the last things I needed, yet 
 these opportunities seem appointed me.
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 119 
 
 From E. R. G. to Miss WEDGWOOD (about a -visit to 
 Brocton, U. S., 1872). 
 
 You asked me to tell you about Brocton, if I managed to get 
 there. On Friday last we made a long expedition from this 
 place, and reached the railway station of Brocton Junction, two 
 or three miles from the shores of Lake Ontario. We saw Mr. 
 Harris standing at the luggage van. I had not seen him before, 
 and I dreaded to find a man of whose sanity or sincerity I should 
 doubt. A cheerful, open, hearty face and manner at once dis- 
 pelled my misgivings ; there was nothing of the religious leader 
 that I could trace about him. He attended to our baggage, had 
 all his wits about him, talked of the politics of the day, pointed 
 out different vines in the vineyards we passed and different ways 
 of cultivating them, like a man whose great interests lay among 
 secular things. He and his people have about 300 acres of 
 ground, partly adjoining the station, partly a mile off. His 
 cottage, to which we drove (he had provided a nice open carriage 
 for us), stands on rather a raised platform with slopes on either 
 side, some with vines, and the sea-like blue lake in the distance. 
 It all looks like very new country, wild and rather untidy, and 
 only beginning to be brought under cultivation. These people 
 have been here five years. The cottage to which he took us is 
 very inviting and pretty, a kind of balcony porch leading into a 
 dining-room ; a library, well stocked with books and engravings, 
 and a bedroom and dressing-room, all communicating, all nicely 
 cared for, decked with flowers, &c. A widow, rather elderly, 
 presides a homely, but very beaming, gentle creature, who 
 welcomed us very simply and sweetly. Mr. Harris looks about 
 forty-six or forty-seven, strongly built, with rather a fine head, 
 and impresses one with having an abundance of force and a sense 
 of freedom, and very positive convictions. I did not feel, 
 as with Mr. Maurice, or Mr. Erskine, or Mr. Campbell, this is 
 indeed a holy, spiritual man ; but I did feel most strongly this 
 is an honest, perfectly simple, good man. 
 
 After we had rested he took us about the place, chiefly
 
 120 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 amongst vineyards, and to their great wine-making place and 
 cellars. He aims at making the very purest and best wine that 
 it is possible to make ; that Christianity should regulate every 
 part of the process. This is the aim in each of the industries he 
 is carrying on : a farm, a nursery-garden, a hotel, a restaurant at 
 the railway station; presently he hopes to get a maple-sugar 
 factory. He says these trades are just beginning to answer, he 
 thinks, but it is almost impossible to compete with the cheaper, 
 adulterating, self-interested tradespeople. His experience of the 
 corruption in every trade and business in which religious people 
 were engaged, and a terrible early experience of the hollowness 
 of the Evangelical clergyman and leading members of the con- 
 gregation to which he belonged, drove him to try to embody 
 Christianity in secular life to get rid of selfishness in every 
 business and transaction. The principle that those who come 
 must accept is, nothing for myself, my life and work and hope 
 for others. Yet each of those who have property are to keep 
 their right to it. But he says the great difficulty is to make them 
 keep up any sense of their personal belonging ; there is no desire 
 to keep, but to give. The wine business, and I think the 
 nursery-garden, were begun with money of Mr. H.'s. A mill 
 and bakery by another on the co-operative principle. Complete 
 self-renunciation to the will of God and service of the brethren, 
 he thinks, opens the heart to the influx of the Spirit, and that 
 by degrees the body is to be completely redeemed and regener- 
 ated by an actual respiration of heavenly or spiritual breath. He 
 breathed on them and said, " Receive ye the Holy Ghost ; " he 
 thinks miraculous gifts accompany this condition, and that they 
 were lost when this physical redemption by spiritual breathing 
 was lost. He and his followers think he has the gift of dis- 
 cerning of spirits, and some other supernatural gifts. He 
 has received communication from departed spirits (he believes), 
 which have been confirmed by external facts. Spiritualism, as 
 generally understood, he thinks full of danger and evil. He 
 believes that there is a decaying away of all religions now, which 
 will increase ; but that the kingdom of heaven has also begun to
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 121 
 
 appear, through the manifestation of these breathing sons of 
 God. This may be drawn up into heaven again, but he hopes 
 the Lord, in some special way, will come to those who look for 
 Him ; and then His prayer will be fulfilled for unity, " I in them 
 and Thou in Me," and the world will know and the kingdoms 
 of the earth be brought in. They occasionally have worship 
 together, and he preaches, but some time they work on Sunday. 
 Each is to consider the advantage of all rather than his own 
 soul's welfare. He thinks the solacing oneself with hopes of 
 heaven has been most pernicious. Our great endeavour and 
 longing should be, "Thy will be done on earth as it is in 
 heaven," and that this must be fulfilled. He takes an extremely 
 dark, and I hope exaggerated, view of the corruption of evil 
 everywhere and of the strength of the principalities and powers 
 and rulers of the darkness of this world ; thinks our bodies and 
 souls infested with demons, and that the more we get en rapport 
 with the spiritual by religious observances (without the radical 
 uncompromising giving up the whole will to Christ), the more we 
 are infested by them. He thinks he is assailing a stronghold of 
 deceitful spirits, and that he meets them in very close contact, 
 and that it is given to him to bind them. He looks like a man 
 who has struggled much and been marred, but feels the strength 
 of conquering. Unfortunately, our time was so short, and the 
 next morning was so strangely, intensely hot, that he did not take 
 us to see the people. I saw only one young man who was 
 attending to the horses and drove us, called Ernest (the son of a 
 clergyman), who had the same energetic, cheerful face ; and the 
 young woman who waited on us seemed neat, modest, and bright. 
 The restaurant at the station is far the best of any we have seen 
 in America; sparkling with cleanliness and flowers, and the 
 "ladies" who served I talked with, and found them very 
 courteous and amiable, but reticent. Mrs. Requa, the widow, 
 was ready to answer anything I asked, and also to speak glow- 
 ingly of all the peace and joy she had found here. She has 
 been with Mr. H. seven years, and her husband had been four 
 years when he died, blessing God, she said, for all he had received
 
 122 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 here. There seemed to me a kind of glow and earnest expecta- 
 tion in the atmosphere that made one think of the early Chris- 
 tians. Mr. H. does not wish people to remain here unless they 
 find a work that suits them ; but thinks that the newly-born and 
 still weak require the support of fellowship for a time. I find my 
 account of things at Brocton degenerating into an exposition of 
 Mr. H.'s views, because there was so little besides to describe, as 
 all is everyday life; secular things unsecularised by the spirit 
 of utter self-renunciation and active love, and the hope of a fuller 
 manifestation of the kingdom of God. As I write, I feel how 
 unreasonable to expect anything from these visionaries; all 
 experience of the past shows one that when Mr. H.'s personal 
 influence ceases, these houses of cards will fall, and yet, I confess 
 to you, my heart is so drawn to this chimera, I could almost 
 long to cast in my lot with theirs. The great misgiving that 
 would hold me back, would be lest Mr. Harris should be made 
 too much of a pope by his followers. I saw this disposition 
 plainly in the widow, and the thing that repelled me was narrow- 
 ness. " No other work than that at Brocton could be a lasting 
 one." But I have come away so quickened in a longing for 
 righteousness righteousness here. 
 
 From E. R. G. to Miss WEDGWOOD. 
 
 PALATKA, ST. JOHN'S RIVER, FLORIDA. 
 Sunday, March 10. 
 
 This day three weeks, soon after you receive this, we expect 
 to be sailing towards you. For Saturday 3oth our places are 
 taken in the White Star Line ship that leaves New York. On 
 Easter Day think of us on the sea the exile nearly over ; the 
 taste of it all but gone ; and the question only remaining, What 
 has it wrought in us ? 
 
 We left Washington ten days ago for a hasty flight into the 
 South. We have been travelling over tracts of pine-covered 
 marshy land, strangely flat and monotonous, but now and then, 
 since we reached Georgia and Florida, breaking out into patches
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 123 
 
 of magnificent forest scenery of ilexes and pines, with the most 
 luxuriant undergrowth of laurels, magnolias, wild oranges, and 
 climbing yellow jessamine, and the palmetto ; the free growth of 
 all astonishing one with its lavish profusion. In these favoured 
 spots growth seems a joy and not a struggle. Yet a few yards 
 off life seems again restrained and niggardly. The mystery is 
 brought vividly before one of the conditions of life, the breath 
 that awakens it blowing everywhere, yet some impediments hold- 
 ing it back as in the spiritual world. If we had not been in 
 Jamaica, many scenes here would have enchanted me even more. 
 But here there is no beauty of hill and valley and there is more 
 swamp and sand. To-morrow we go up the Upper St. John's, 
 and return to Savannah Friday, and to Washington on the 2oth, 
 for a few more sittings of the Commissioners, unless we hear by 
 that time that the treaty is at an end. 
 
 The return to England was delayed yet another five 
 weeks, but May found Mr. and Mrs. Russell Gurney 
 again at their cottage at Woolhampton. 
 
 From E. R. G. to Miss WEDGWOOD. 
 
 May 31, 1872. 
 
 I must tell you what an overwhelming meeting we have had 
 with little Kai ! Running from one to another and screaming 
 and crying with joy ; and finally selecting me to spread himself 
 over, and lay his paws abidingly round ! And the cot does look 
 wonderfully sweet. I wish you were here too. The grass and 
 leafiness never looked so bewitching as in contrast to America ; 
 and everything seems so curtained and bowery, after the wide 
 expanses and public life. 
 
 Thanks for your dear words. I do not see worldly life so 
 satisfying to many I know; "more than spiritual ever seems," 
 you say. I heard such an account of the satisfying spiritual in- 
 toxication prolonged through seven years in a convent, which I 
 must tell you about. But how is spiritual life to be adjusted 
 with healthful energy and interest in earthly things, I wonder.
 
 124 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 From Miss WEDGWOOD to E. R. G. 
 
 CUMBERLAND PLACE, July g, 1872. 
 
 I wanted to tell you how delighted I was with your husband's 
 speech last night. It seemed to me such a rare specimen of 
 that little appreciated virtue, justice. When will people see that 
 generosity is the easy, and so to say, coarse virtue, and that all 
 that kind of excellence which it absorbs must, in a mind more 
 delicately conscientious, take the form of justice at least in all 
 the more responsible situations of life ? 
 
 From the same, 
 
 RAVENSBOURNE, August 1872. 
 
 I always find myself asking the same question, after every 
 visit to you Is it possible that any intercourse in this world can 
 go on being an unmixed source of joy ? And is not the time at 
 hand when the " lean kine " are to appear upon the scene ? But 
 now I ask the question without anxiety, for I always feel, well, if 
 it is so, let them come ! I have had enough now to live upon. 
 I feel that in my communication with you I have been enabled 
 not only to find a fellow-watcher from my spot of earth into the 
 spiritual world, and a response to all that part of my being, but 
 also so wonderfully a channel to all that joy that our hearts 
 must crave for in this world, you have given me a vicarious hold 
 on it that seems at moments all I need. 
 
 It is not often that one's spirit can come into such close union 
 with another, that what gives joy to that other can warm one's 
 own inmost life with the same kind of joy as one's own joy, and 
 satisfy imagination with all the varied detail without which sym- 
 pathy is imperfect ; but this I do feel with you your peace, your 
 joy is mine. Think of me as one of your convalescents, living 
 on you, only one you cannot get rid of, but whom you will find a 
 less sombre comrade, I trust, when this ill-fitting garment of mor- 
 tality is removed.
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 125 
 
 From E. R. G. to Miss WEDGWOOD (on the return voyage 
 to America). 
 
 ON BOARD THE "MORAVIAN," 
 August 22, 1872. 
 
 It seems to me time to wake up and say a word to you. It 
 has been a time of physical misery and mental inanity such as I 
 have not yet experienced. 
 
 On Tuesday night I could appreciate more the kind of horror 
 of being the sport of the great waters. They seemed to roar, and 
 then gurgle and hiss around, above, beneath one, as if longing to 
 destroy one, and as the ship shuddered and trembled, I shuddered 
 and shivered too, and could not mount above with any sense of 
 trust and love. Now the storm is over, and we are in smooth 
 waters, the sun shining. We cannot well reach Quebec till 
 Monday 26th, and shall have had a twelve instead of a ten days' 
 passage. 
 
 I have just been reading your letter, and thinking with you, 
 will the night time of our life seem so short, and not worth 
 thinking of when our morning dawns ? I have thought of this 
 especially in seeing the abject misery of the poor crowded emi- 
 grants in this vessel ; huddled together in dirt and damp and 
 sickness : the one consolation that could be offered them being 
 that it could not last long, and would be forgotten when over. 
 But such a consolation cannot and ought not to be sufficient for 
 the miseries of life. If they are only to be submitted to and got 
 through, life is a poor, unworthy gift. Some language must be 
 learnt in these parts of life, some tools forged that are necessary 
 equipments, I suppose, for our new encounter ; but if we begin 
 to sing before the time, perhaps we shall fail to get this equip- 
 ment woven. 
 
 The people about me are nice, easy-going ones, making the 
 best of circumstances, thinking a little good sense in adapting 
 oneself to things as they are pretty much all that is needed to 
 make the world what it ought to be.
 
 i2 4 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 From Miss WEDGWOOD to E. R. G. 
 
 CUMBERLAND PLACE, July g, 1872. 
 
 I wanted to tell you how delighted I was with your husband's 
 speech last night. It seemed to me such a rare specimen of 
 that little appreciated virtue, justice. When will people see that 
 generosity is the easy, and so to say, coarse virtue, and that all 
 that kind of excellence which it absorbs must, in a mind more 
 delicately conscientious, take the form of justice at least in all 
 the more responsible situations of life ? 
 
 From the same. 
 
 RAVENSBOURNE, August 1872. 
 
 I always find myself asking the same question, after every 
 visit to you Is it possible that any intercourse in this world can 
 go on being an unmixed source of joy ? And is not the time at 
 hand when the " lean kine " are to appear upon the scene ? But 
 now I ask the question without anxiety, for I always feel, well, if 
 it is so, let them come ! I have had enough now to live upon. 
 I feel that in my communication with you I have been enabled 
 not only to find a fellow-watcher from my spot of earth into the 
 spiritual world, and a response to all that part of my being, but 
 also so wonderfully a channel to all that joy that our hearts 
 must crave for in this world, you have given me a vicarious hold 
 on it that seems at moments all I need. 
 
 It is not often that one's spirit can come into such close union 
 with another, that what gives joy to that other can warm one's 
 own inmost life with the same kind of joy as one's own joy, and 
 satisfy imagination with all the varied detail without which sym- 
 pathy is imperfect ; but this I do feel with you your peace, your 
 joy is mine. Think of me as one of your convalescents, living 
 on you, only one you cannot get rid of, but whom you will find a 
 less sombre comrade, I trust, when this ill-fitting garment of mor- 
 tality is removed.
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 125 
 
 From E. R. G. to Miss WEDGWOOD (on the return voyage 
 to America). 
 
 ON BOARD THE "MORAVIAN," 
 August 22, 1872. 
 
 It seems to me time to wake up and say a word to you. It 
 has been a time of physical misery and mental inanity such as I 
 have not yet experienced. 
 
 On Tuesday night I could appreciate more the kind of horror 
 of being the sport of the great waters. They seemed to roar, and 
 then gurgle and hiss around, above, beneath one, as if longing to 
 destroy one, and as the ship shuddered and trembled, I shuddered 
 and shivered too, and could not mount above with any sense of 
 trust and love. Now the storm is over, and we are in smooth 
 waters, the sun shining. We cannot well reach Quebec till 
 Monday 26th, and shall have had a twelve instead of a ten days' 
 passage. 
 
 I have just been reading your letter, and thinking with you, 
 will the night time of our life seem so short, and not worth 
 thinking of when our morning dawns ? I have thought of this 
 especially in seeing the abject misery of the poor crowded emi- 
 grants in this vessel ; huddled together in dirt and damp and 
 sickness : the one consolation that could be offered them being 
 that it could not last long, and would be forgotten when over. 
 But such a consolation cannot and ought not to be sufficient for 
 the miseries of life. If they are only to be submitted to and got 
 through, life is a poor, unworthy gift. Some language must be 
 learnt in these parts of life, some tools forged that are necessary 
 equipments, I suppose, for our new encounter ; but if we begin 
 to sing before the time, perhaps we shall fail to get this equip- 
 ment woven. 
 
 The people about me are nice, easy-going ones, making the 
 best of circumstances, thinking a little good sense in adapting 
 oneself to things as they are pretty much all that is needed to 
 make the world what it ought to be.
 
 126 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 August 26. 
 
 Since I wrote this, we have been detained twenty-four hours 
 in a fog at the entrance of Belle Isle Straits. We have seen ice- 
 bergs under a beautiful sunrise. We have seen a supernatural 
 display of Aurora Borealis ; and the glassy sea in the Gulf of 
 St. Lawrence reflected the spirit-dancing lights. It is again an 
 experience of joy coming in the morning. We are watching the 
 sea turning into the mighty river, and we are hoping to be landed 
 this evening at Quebec. 
 
 From Miss WEDGWOOD to E. R. G. 
 
 Your dear letter has arrived from Belle Isle Straits. That 
 sunrise over the icebergs must have been glorious, and the 
 dancing lights over the sea. But what a Purgatory you went 
 through before the dawn. Now you have almost forgotten it, 
 and are at the Brocton Community. How I long to hear about 
 that, and dread you may be disappointed. 
 
 From Miss WEDGWOOD to E. R. G. 
 
 CUMBERLAND PLACE, November 3, 1872. 
 
 How shall I make you feel the flood of happiness that floated 
 my soul when the dear, two-headed yellow envelope walked up 
 to my room on Wednesday the 3oth ! The rocks and shoals 
 seemed suddenly far beneath me, and I felt how life would be 
 quite easy, if only one were often thus lifted on the tide of love. 
 As I grow older I feel what is most precious in a real, mutual 
 love is not even the exquisite sense of sympathy in idiosyncrasies, 
 delightful though this is, but the promise of a wider brotherhood 
 which seems given in the sense that two souls can come so near 
 and find such well-being in each other's neighbourhood. 
 
 I sometimes feel the ties we form here (such as ours, I mean) 
 may be like the puddles left on the beach, mere specimens of 
 what is to be spread everywhere when the tide returns. And 
 yet there is something unsatisfactory in that thought, for one
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 127 
 
 cannot bear to feel that any love shall ever lose, not only its 
 absolute value, but its proportion in our spiritual life ; one 
 cannot wish the individual ties to be obliterated like the rock 
 pools at high tide. But I have tangled the threads ; perhaps 
 the fulness of perfection will -reconcile advantages that now 
 seem incompatible. 
 
 From E. R. G. to Miss WEDGWOOD. 
 
 WASHINGTON, November 20, 1872. 
 
 What have I to tell you about our life here ? It is much less 
 irksome to me than last year. Some friendly beings embellish 
 it ; but chiefly, the sense of being expatriated and imprisoned has 
 worn off with the novelty. Russell is well and can work, and we 
 have both left off straining our eyes to look homewards, and can 
 live contentedly by the day. 
 
 Boston interested me much. I saw several fresh, energetic, 
 untrammelled creatures, who could only have grown under this 
 regime, I think. 
 
 Last night we were at the President's ; about a dozen people 
 sitting in a circle, talking over their triumph at the elections. 
 R. spoke of the dirt thrown on both sides in the way of personal 
 accusations, and said if one believed half, there could not be an 
 honest man in the country. Grant said, " But surely it's just the 
 same in your country ; people say anything they like at elections, 
 and forgive everything afterwards." 
 
 From E. R. G. to Miss WEDGWOOD. 
 
 WASHINGTON, February 12, 1873. 
 
 A day of pouring rain, dark and gloomy, Russell gone to 
 Baltimore. A kind of dull sense of the end of all things about 
 the house ; when lo ! in comes a buff letter and everything is 
 changed. The glimpse of present, living love brought home to 
 the heart, what sunshine it is ! 
 
 The day after I wrote my letters poured in [after the death 
 of her uncle, Mr. Henry Venn], and brought such a tide of sweet-
 
 128 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 ness and blessing, and this week I have been living with my 
 blessed ones, and feeling such an inheritance in them. Certainly 
 the convictions of all those were translated into life in an un- 
 common degree. 
 
 Yesterday I by chance had a talk with a scientific man who is 
 surveying and mapping all the mountains. He has just come 
 from five months alone on the Cordilleras, and had been reading 
 Robertson's sermons, and his heart was rejoicing in them. He 
 spoke of prayer and the scientific difficulty from inside his own 
 sheltering experience of a Father's heart, but did not speak like 
 an ordinarily religious man. I felt it so refreshing, I came 
 dancing home almost. 
 
 April 12. 
 
 A marriage has always something of a death in it to the 
 nearest and dearest, and it is followed too by something of a 
 resurrection better life to all often too. You give up some of the 
 presence, to understand the spirit better. You see less of the 
 hindering veil of every day, and more of the true being beneath. 
 
 From E. R. G. to Miss WEDGWOOD. 
 
 BROADLANDS, ROMSEY, October 31, 1873. 
 
 . . . The heavenly sense of being at home again prevents my 
 " making haste " about anything. It is such a foretaste of how it 
 will be. Two oceans overpast and all restored ; and the wander 
 ings and the weariness and misgivings and questionings as to 
 whether it was well so, all lost and merged in the sense of rest 
 and peace. And this view on which my eyes are resting, the 
 many-coloured trees all veiled in morning pearly mist, and the 
 onward-gliding, but clearly mirroring river set in smooth green 
 pastures curving away into the distance beneath sheltering woods, 
 seems the fit shrine of this rest and peace. And "the fair saint," 
 with her unfathomable and extraordinarily wide sympathy, its pre- 
 siding and guardian angel. 
 
 If you were but here you would be unfoggened ! We have 
 all felt what you say about the autobiography of J. S. Mill exceed-
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 129 
 
 ingly interesting, only we think we should not mind the halo 
 obliterating the features of his adored one so dull as you do com- 
 pared with the reasonable filial devotion in the first part of the 
 book. 
 
 November 22, 1873. 
 
 I wish you would write a review somewhere of Stuart Mill. I 
 saw only one in the Spectator, and it wants much more. That 
 seems to me a most instructive life, and the most pathetic one I 
 think I ever read. I wonder his worship of his wife does not 
 more interest you. That suppressed soul of his looking upward 
 and seeing her fill heaven ! 
 
 From Miss WEDGWOOD to E. R. G. 
 
 QUEEN ANNE STREET, December 31, 1873. 
 
 I feel inclined to finish the year with you, after spending so 
 much of the last day with you, partly to tell you how much I had 
 enjoyed those hours, for I have such a desire to know more of 
 your surroundings as well as yourself, and feel as if I could picture 
 your acquaintance-world better after these glimpses. It is not 
 the most interesting kind of world ; yet, from my own experi- 
 ence, I know that it is a loss to be without acquaintance, for 
 which even the greatest wealth of friendship does not entirely 
 compensate. It is not a case of the large hole for the cat and 
 the small one for the kitten, though one does sometimes feel 
 as if all acquaintance were only so much underwood that one 
 would like to cut down when one has picked out the future 
 trees. To me to-day, as I was coming home in the omnibus, 
 there came a strange new joy and brightness. I felt such an 
 influx of hope for the coming year, that I longed to share with 
 you. I think the hope that comes in these autumnal years on 
 anniversaries does not, like the old hopes, mean the prelude to 
 disappointment. I feel like Stanley in his answer from that 
 terrible German boy, " My best years are to come." You cannot 
 say that. But the absolute best lies beyond the space that is 
 marked in years, for both of us. Oh, how one's soul flutters 
 
 I
 
 130 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 and struggles to rise up into the region that seems so near and 
 sometimes so inaccessible the world where we should be one 
 with each other, because of the common relation that we should 
 live upon ! I came upon a thought in some MS. lectures Mr. 
 Hutton has lent me that struck me much that we are united by 
 reverence as much as we are severed by taste ! 
 
 From E. R. G. to Miss WEDGWOOD. 
 
 QUEEN'S HOTEL, HASTINGS, 
 February 14, 1874. 
 
 . . . When I was last here I envied Caroline Stephen her 
 opportunities for abundant ministrations ; now I think how 
 much better it is to have the memory of my unmarred be- 
 loved one to the very verge. But whichever way they go, 
 there are peculiar pangs and peculiar gleams of comfort. 
 
 Has the intercession of Christ no meaning to you ? I suppose 
 not, as you do not see any place for prayer for others. I think it 
 is a kind of divine volition in humanity, that must take place ere 
 the essentially Divine will can have its way. There must be 
 some deep meaning in the intercession of Abraham and Moses 
 and our Lord's prayer for Peter when Satan desired to sift him, 
 and Job for his friends it runs all through the Bible certainly 
 the evil spirit that could not be cast out except by prayer 
 and fasting. 
 
 From Miss WEDGWOOD to E. R. G. 
 
 31 QUEEN ANNE STREET, W., 
 February 22, 1874. 
 
 Did you like that article ? I felt it so wonderfully expressive 
 of the heterogeneous feelings the book gave me. How can any 
 one come so near God, and end in a " perhaps," as he does ? 
 How can our relation to Him deserve some attentive considera- 
 tion and not demand the whole ardent devotion of our lives, 
 the devotion that no more excludes human love than caring for a 
 book excludes caring for the author ?
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 131 
 
 From E. R. G. to Miss WEDGWOOD. 
 
 8 PALACE GARDENS, 1874. 
 
 I don't think I ought to be forgiven for my silence at 
 Hastings. I can only say truly every day I thought of you. 
 But I wanted to be silent It is not that I am very anxious 
 about my dear one. I only realise that he has reached a new 
 platform, . . . and my own approaching anniversary, I wanted 
 to keep it a time of silence, and turned from my writing things. 
 But the last day I was so cheered and uplifted by a little book 
 by Pere Gratry, Les Sources, second part ; do you know it ? 
 You must like it with me, and feel that it brings prayer before 
 you as a help to others, irresistibly. I never felt the Christian 
 life set. before one with such a powerful attraction. It seems to 
 fill the whole horizon, and to leave no room for personal regrets 
 or fears ! 
 
 June, 1874. 
 
 I am full of hope about the inconceivable things preparing 
 for us, and I don't think we must go on too much regretting our 
 failures. I see the creature must die before the new life can find 
 an entrance ; so let us fail and give up. 
 
 From E. R. G. to Miss WEDGWOOD. 
 
 September 6, 1874. 
 
 I send you a copy of part of a letter written to Mrs. S., which 
 will interest you. It makes me long for that heart union with 
 our Lord she has tasted. ... If this " love-life " they describe 
 were only for our own joy it would be wrong and sentimental to 
 seek it. But if thus the love of Christ is to flow through us to 
 others, we may surely open out to receive it. I feel being so 
 weaned from everything else, and by this weaning seem to walk 
 just now almost alone. 
 
 Oh, that it may be a preparation for that union for which I 
 hunger and thirst !
 
 132 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 From Miss WEDGWOOD to E. R. G 
 
 MIDDLETON LODGE, September 7, 1874. 
 
 I was thinking to-day that the meaning of the interest of 
 human passion was made clear by its relation to the only deeper 
 love, or rather by its typical position towards it. And it is 
 memorable that this feeling was never a subject of dramatic in- 
 terest till Christ came. The ancients had an exquisite apprecia- 
 tion of conjugal love, and they fully apprehended the spirit of its 
 hideous counterfeit, but the feeling that is the ground of all 
 fiction with us was to them a blank. The different dispensation 
 under which we live penetrates all life and makes our relations 
 to each other quite as different as our relation to God. 
 
 From Miss WEDGWOOD to E. R. G. 
 
 September 26, 1874. 
 
 I think what most rouses despair in me is when some waft 
 of cheerful, sensible content with a world unlightened by God 
 reaches me. 
 
 This atmosphere surrounds me, and seems so wonderfully 
 to wither the small germ within. I cannot understand it. With- 
 my poor M.'s fierce unbelief I never felt it ; it is the abiding 
 legacy of that short friendship that I have so much more realised 
 the power she angrily denied. But when I come near a spirit 
 which goes on its way and does its work and is cheerful and 
 prosperous and ignores God, I feel my lamp go out. Why is 
 this? 
 
 I have no blame of such a state most of those who arouse 
 this feeling in me are far better than I ; yet some contagion 
 seems to pass to me from them, and then I feel I must fly to 
 you to escape it. 
 
 . . . Do not struggle to sweep clear a day for me. My strong 
 angel, I can lean upon you without seeing you.
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 133 
 
 From Miss WEDGWOOD to E. R. G. 
 
 HOPEDEAN, December 20, 1874. 
 
 I always repeat to myself what I have so often repeated to 
 you, that no life is so remote from the spiritual as the intellectual, 
 and remind myself that if this be so it follows that those who are 
 meant to lead an intellectual life must find access to the other 
 difficult. . . . What an intense sleep it is of Nature ! And the 
 enfolding shroud here so pure. In London it seems the symbol 
 of degradation. How one longs for the purity of Fire that con- 
 verts all alien things to its own nature. I always feel the difference 
 when I see the unsullied snow. 
 
 From E. R. G. to Miss WEDGWOOD. 
 
 8 PALACE GARDENS, December 31, 1874. 
 
 Heartily I greet thee this New Year's Eve ! Rather afraid 
 I am to speak into your region of country purity and silence, and 
 your intellectual atmosphere, with Greek, Greek characters before 
 your eyes. I am obliged to forget that when I speak to you. 
 And it always seems so incomprehensible to me that it should be 
 as you say it is, and, as facts seem to prove, that the intellectual 
 and the spiritual regions are so far apart and difficult of access 
 from one another. I always fancy them interwoven. 
 
 That the spirit's domain should be more akin to the sensual 
 or sensuous seems strange. 
 
 Darkness, murky, dark fog, such as one does not often see, 
 enfolds us here, and there is such a strange hush : it is just like 
 a death time. 
 
 I am gathering all my dearest ones together in my memory, 
 and trying to feel hand in hand as we advance into the Unknown. 
 In full confidence that it is into unfathomable Love above, be- 
 neath, around, within, from which nothing can separate us. I 
 feel so empty of all sense of it now, or of sense of anything ; 
 yet afraid and ashamed to complain with everything open to us. 
 
 Yes, the Fire is a deeper purifier than Water. One who bap- 
 tizeth with Fire we need. May we not refuse His Baptism this 
 New Year ! Ever your most loving, E. G.
 
 134 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 From Miss WEDGWOOD to E. R. G. 
 
 HoPEDEAN,_/aary 3, 1875. 
 
 Now as I look out this balmy day, and see the field spread 
 with ragged patches of snow so that looking on a square yard 
 one might forget the thaw so perhaps it is to be with our emer- 
 gence from the winter of the soul ; there are nooks in one's ex- 
 perience that heap up all icy influences, and as one struggles 
 through them one must remember that this is the drift, and that 
 the sun is shining. 
 
 How strangely different was your New Year's Eve and mine 
 in outward aspect, here the pure pale lilac shadows crept all day 
 over the smooth snow that sent me back with its glitter when I 
 tried to walk in the afternoon, while you were swathed in fog 
 and the long crystal pendant outside the window seemed a magnet 
 for the sunbeams, which, however, left it quite undiminished when 
 they vanished behind the hill. 
 
 How often we judge each other just as wrongly as if you had 
 made sure I was wanting candles all day, or I that you could not 
 stir out because of the dazzle of the snow ! It does seem strange 
 that the spirit and the intellect should be so unharmonious ; but 
 I think it is as explicable, or at least as natural, as that two notes 
 close together should produce an intolerable discord. The 
 sensuous and the spiritual life are like the first and third of the 
 scale. But the intellect comes next to the spirit, and any attempt 
 to sound these together is as discordant as the keynote and the 
 second played in unison. We may harmonise them, but only by 
 the introduction of a new element, and without this new element 
 they are mutually abhorrent. But when the new element is 
 brought in, the harmony is far richer than in the common chord. 
 
 I think the sense of inadequacy which continually haunts me, 
 and, I suppose, most people, in all the obvious sources of feeling, 
 of suffering almost always, and of enjoyment sometimes, will one 
 day be remembered by us as the prophecy of a complete unveil- 
 ing of the realities that are around us now, like things that touch 
 us asleep, but not strongly enough to waken us from our dreams.
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 135 
 
 From E. R. G. to Miss WEDGWOOD. 
 
 HASTINGS, January 28, 1875. 
 
 Your dear letter reached me on that strange anniversary, the 
 26th, when beloved mother was swept away in silence before my 
 eyes five years ago. That was a day of judgment, that came 
 as a thief in the night a day of darkness from which there was 
 no escape. Its incidents are all graven as with a pen of iron. 
 And they seem inexpressibly painful, though the great fact does 
 not seem absolutely painful ; and now she is, I have no doubt, 
 five years nearer to me than she was this desolate day of 
 1870. . . . 
 
 We found it blowing a gale here, and the waves were quite 
 magnificent. But I grudged two days of such wind and rain out 
 of our six for my Russell. All Wednesday he was in town, and 
 I thought over my last year's misery. And your dear note, re- 
 ceived just before we came here, with its compassionate glance 
 over this waning (in time) relationship, made me reconsider my 
 standing-place, and I felt pretty sure trust had so deepened and 
 grown beneath my feet that I could not be so shaken again. 
 
 You turn almost against the name of Christianity because it 
 is the living God now you want. Why, is not that just what 
 Christianity in its true sense is ? Emmanuel, God with us. I 
 have been reading here Jukes' four aspects of Christ in the four 
 Gospels ; and he helps one to see vividly how as He was in the 
 world so must we be, and how each step must lead to the Cross 
 and Resurrection. I trace that you have been that way. But as 
 yet my footsteps have followed with the easy, well-to-do crowd ! 
 
 From E. R. G. to Miss WEDGWOOD. 
 
 August 7, 1875. 
 
 I am extremely glad that you are en rapport with dear, strange 
 Mrs. H. She hears voices and sees hands that others do not 
 see, and this often disturbs her adaptation to those around, 
 to her own great anguish. 
 
 Oh, that confusion of tongues at Babel ! What a deep cause
 
 136 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 it sprang from, of separated natures. And what a far-off vision 
 does that seem that the Son had faith to claim from the Father 
 for humanity, " that they may be one as we are." 
 
 From Miss WEDGWOOD to E. R. G. 
 
 August 12, 1875. 
 
 . . . What one has to do in almost all worldly matters is to 
 be quite sure before one acts, and it is this which is fatal in the 
 spiritual world. That which is action in the spiritual life must 
 be the cause of certainty and cannot be the result. 
 
 I cannot calmly think of the winter without you, and yet I 
 can believe it may be best ; but there was a terrible blank in 
 those American years. I think the disproportion between the 
 length of this life and the slowness of some of the processes that 
 go on in it is one of the hints that all experience gives of the 
 Beyond ; yet it is so difficult to hear and interpret ! 
 
 From E. R. G. to Miss WEDGWOOD. 
 
 August 16, 1875. 
 
 In the evening I went on to Brighton and was so welcomed 
 by my sweet Ritualists, with whom I joined in several services in 
 their little oratory, all decked with flowers. Dear souls, they 
 have love, joy, peace, humility, patience besides. And when I 
 condoled a little with Alfred about his health, his utter weakness 
 that makes every effort a burden, he whispered with a radiance 
 indescribable, " Yet labour is rest when it is for Him." 
 
 . . . All this is not in answer to your letters. Indeed, they 
 are not to be answered, but I like you to feel that they do not 
 fall into space, but into a vibrating instrument, even if the sounds 
 given back cannot get themselves into measure and meaning. 
 
 I should like you to write an essay on those two words, " The 
 just shall live by faith," and " Men are saved by their want of 
 faith." Yet this latter even in material things is but a very partial 
 truth, and in our relationship with others cannot be carried out 
 at all. But what I rejoice in for you, as for myself, is in our seeing
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 137 
 
 that we must become fools to others and to ourselves in order to 
 receive the same Spirit that was in Jesus Christ without measure. 
 You must very deeply discern this necessity when you say that 
 this attitude in your own eyes is a far greater trial than to bear 
 any contempt from others. 
 
 Now I think the poor, the unendowed with natural gifts, are 
 saved this anguish. But strangely in little things I am taught 
 how unconsciously I have been cherishing self in this thing and 
 the other. . . . Now I record to you as you do to me, that I 
 will in the spirit let go these things which are of the flesh, let 
 their roots be slain by refusing nourishment for them wherever 
 I can. 
 
 We can't say where it will lead us, as you say, but we have 
 nothing to do with that. We must not speak for self or seek self 
 in anything, however small, I am convinced ; but I don't see how 
 this is to be attained except by the love of One so much lovelier 
 and worth loving than ourselves, in whom we may find all the 
 precious things we want to grab for ourselves, letting Him be the 
 Ruler in everything within, and the Disposer of all around. My 
 glimpse shows me it might be s.o ; and I think the Bible is won- 
 derful as an open window towards Him (looking deeply into its 
 words, not upon them as a critic), and such an antagonistic force 
 to the things of sense and intellect. 
 
 September 15. 
 
 Do you think spiritual thoughts go radiating off into the 
 building of a spirit brain, as the " Unseen Universe " implies ? I 
 am so delighted with the idea of energy radiating off by the ether 
 into an invisible structure, and vice versa. It is very much what 
 Swedenborg declared about our spirit bodies. I love, too, the 
 realisation this book gives of the Son conditioning Himself into 
 this universe in the energy of Life everywhere, the first-born of 
 every creature, and the fast-fruits of the Life that all are to grow 
 up into. And so one may say actually He is life of our life and 
 bone of our bone, as I recognised last year from positive experi- 
 ence, and my eyes were at the same time opened to see Him 
 giving its virtue to the sap flowing up into the apple trees and
 
 138 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 making them fruitful. Just now the gardener was speaking of a 
 better stock on which the roses could be grafted, not so strong as 
 the ordinary stock, which is apt to assert itself and affect the 
 grafted roses. What an illustration this is of our individual inter- 
 ference with the indwelling life of the Son of Man. 
 
 I liked very much seeing that nice sentence of your mother's 
 about my dear uncle and aunt. She has just left us, riper and 
 riper in love, still with such a funny little adamantine strata run- 
 ning through, and such a desire for both worlds for those she 
 loves not at all seeing their incompatibility. 
 
 September 25. 
 
 Alas ! I have found that dear smitten one [Lady Augusta 
 Stanley] weaker than I have seen her at all. Still she said, " with 
 good hope of recovery." . . . I do not think she has ever looked 
 in the face the possibility of the continuance of that crippled 
 state ! I believe we are brought up to these things gradually. A 
 long half-conscious approach, and then a moment when the finally 
 shut door brings despair and death. Then the other door of 
 hope is opened in that very spot, and here springs up the Resur- 
 rection life. . . . 
 
 I do believe we are many of us looking for opportunities of 
 obedience, and learning this and doing that, and we do not wait 
 enough for the sweet Comforter. And in sickness and pain there 
 is such a thing as leaning back upon Him, and taking His cup 
 of consolation. 
 
 When my father and my mother forsake then the Lord this 
 strange forsaking, this desert, these are the places whence the 
 living waters flow. I see it must be so, through the experience 
 of others, and through a window of my own. The rainbow 
 cannot be without the clouds. 
 
 From Miss WEDGWOOD to E. R. G. 
 
 September 27, 1875. 
 
 In moments it seems given me to imagine how all experi- 
 ence may be as changed by the unveiling of its true meaning as
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 139 
 
 a painted window that we look at from within for the first time. 
 Oh, for the light to shine through all this on which it has so long 
 shone from without. 
 
 There have been wonderful moments of unveiling, but I want 
 to abide within the cathedral. I so often find myself an inhabit- 
 ant of the world, that region which we have often agreed is 
 further from heaven than hell is. I think the only way back 
 from it is through hell. I must tell you a curious little bit of 
 odd consolation that came into my mind the other day in read- 
 ing some old notes of mine on chemistry. The first name pro- 
 posed by Lavoisier for nitrogen was azote, "the life-opposing," a 
 name fully justified by all its obvious properties. But behold the 
 life-opposing gas turns out to be the one indispensable element 
 in food ! It is, indeed, the distinctive constituent of animal 
 substance. I need not translate my parable. How many spirits, 
 perhaps, must pass through life as azote ! 
 
 From Miss WEDGWOOD to E. R. G. 
 
 December i, 1875. 
 
 I wanted to write much of Broadlands, and a very perfect 
 morning I had with your Desideria, and a little bit of his 
 charming tender appeal to her that so thrilled me with the 
 sense of coming very near a perfect union, and then how I 
 stayed and saw her in her exile phase (as it seemed to me) 
 at the dinner-party, where I felt her home-sickness so curiously 
 blend with all the other experiences, of course not expressed 
 by word or deed, but to me most legible in the eyes and folded 
 hands. 
 
 I think in Linlathen there was more the sense of a rich and 
 peculiar individuality, and at Broadlands more of a very trans- 
 parent medium for the sun to shine through. It is strange, so 
 near as they are, I feel they belong to different dispensations. 
 
 December 3. 
 
 Where are you now? Are balmy gales round you? We 
 are deep in snow ; the ivy outside is turned into a camelia bush,
 
 140 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 and is laden with heavy blossom ; the streets have an hour of 
 transitory, deceptive beauty, but all will soon be mud. I remem- 
 ber Mr. Scott dwelling on the opposite purity of snow and fire 
 that which disappeared at the first touch of evil, and that which 
 converted all evil to its own nature. It has always given a 
 different meaning to the description of God as a consuming fire. 
 
 To the Honble. Mrs. COWPER-TEMPLE. 
 
 THE COTTAGE, WOOLHAMPTON, 
 1873 [or later?]. 
 
 When I realise your life, it sometimes gives me a selfish pang, 
 lest, as you fly through such spaces, and reflect such varied hues, 
 all the absorbent that can possibly receive that little bit of drab 
 colour which is especially me should be used up. I should see 
 you, but I should be unable to hold you, and you would speak 
 to me, but my ear would catch the strain, the effort it would be 
 to you. When you feel this state approaching, please do not try 
 to keep it off and to comfort me ; but coupez court, and let the past 
 be buried out of sight. Why it has come to me to say this I can 
 hardly think, because my confidence is so great in your love. Per- 
 haps it is because just now such a thick white fog has come and 
 hidden the dear trees and green slopes that I best love from this 
 window. Perhaps because there is such a sensation in the air of 
 all things being shaken ; and in reading over my stores of old 
 letters, chiefly my mother's, the record of a long life, I see 
 evidences of deep interests and even of friendships that passed 
 away no, not a real deep friendship, I think ; still it is strange to 
 feel how much a heart was moved at one time by some things 
 that ceased utterly to affect it at another point in its history. 
 One longs to know what is the residuum of all these impressions. 
 Are the years within us like the rings in the oak's stem ? If so, 
 it is well to be " full of days." And they help to bring up more 
 sap from the ground, and to put forth more leaves, to be shadier 
 and greener for more kinds of fellow-creatures, from the ivy and 
 primroses and the squirrels, up to the lovers. But if the days
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 141 
 
 only tire us and eat up our sap like caterpillars, what good shall 
 our lives do to us ? 
 
 To ELLEN MARY GURNEY. 
 
 HEREFORD, 1873. 
 
 Yesterday I was travelling to this old home of my youth, 
 filled with memories of all my past life, now looking so still in 
 the dim November, as if waiting for a new life. I find much talk 
 of the " Mission Week " and work here, all different in utterance 
 from that of your spiritual world, and with neither can I quite 
 chime in. Yet I trust to learn more and more from that Root 
 from which both spring. 
 
 To the same (on the beginning of a new life at Brighton 
 with her brother}. 
 
 One line I must write, to say how I entered into your letter. 
 How natural ! how completely I see it must have been, just as you 
 describe. All the little actualities marring, in a slight, superficial 
 way, the heavenly idea of this new home. And such as these 
 are to educate our spirits ; and the effect of such circumstances 
 is to make a " natural selection " and subordination of our lower 
 to our higher qualities. 
 
 How sure I am, that in every gain there must be a loss. 
 And so, on and on, till all the lost parts of our being are 
 again gathered and enriched in a glorious whole in the Resur- 
 rection life. 
 
 The conviction is now so overpowering, that everything is 
 arranged, all prepared, and ready for us. That we have only to 
 take it drop by drop, and it is the very way of salvation for us. 
 Just as those atoms of Tyndall's are all endowed with those 
 strange selective and other qualities, that contain such wonderful 
 possibilities, so the circumstances and our spirits' lives are 
 adapted and fitted to each other, for discipline, nourishment, 
 chastisement, enlightening, fructifying purposes a blessed, 
 blessed web, one thread of which cannot be spared.
 
 142 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 To the same. 
 
 PALACE GARDENS, 1874. 
 
 You sent me such a breath of leisure, and sweet thoughts, and 
 lovely, interlacing colours this morning, that I feel almost sitting 
 by your side, under the broad sky, with the vision of blessing 
 everywhere. And did you know how I should welcome the 
 sketch of white lily ? It is full of its own stately grace ; and its 
 bold, uplifted, heaven-aspiring bud, ready to open and drink the 
 light, is full of symbolism, it seems to me. 
 
 I want you to remember me especially each day, from Thurs- 
 day next to the following Tuesday. We are going to have a 
 kind of retreat at Broadlands, for prayer and longing for a 
 higher life. About eighty or ninety will be gathered together 
 to look upwards. Of course, my dear one cannot come, but 
 wishes me to leave him for this. Will you ask our beloved 
 Alfred's prayers for us ? They are in hopes that Mr. Body will 
 preach in the Abbey on Sunday, on which day a great many will 
 join at the early Communion. But prayers and exhortations will 
 be given by many laymen, and not even churchmen. 
 
 I spent some hours with the dear Macdonalds yesterday, and 
 was alone with Mr. Macdonald for three-quarters of an hour. 
 I found him in the mood of his very best hymns akin to Faber. 
 Full of the highest aspirations, based upon the most child-like 
 simplicity. And I felt it a privilege to be in the room with him. 
 
 The following is taken from a letter written by 
 Mrs. Russell Gurney's cousin, Caroline Stephen, to 
 Ellen Mary Gurney : 
 
 Her religious experiences were the very keynote of Emelia's 
 life. I cannot attempt any account of them ; and, indeed, I hope 
 you will be able sufficiently to set them forth in her own words. 
 
 It was, no doubt, through the influence of Mr. Erskine of 
 Linlathen and Mr. Macleod Campbell that she was freed from 
 the oppressive Calvinism of the teaching of her early youth.
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 143 
 
 But this emancipation left her still unsatisfied, until those later 
 experiences of 1874 or 1875, connected with the Broadlands 
 Conferences, which prepared her to accept the mystical views of 
 the Rev. Rowland Corbet, rector of Stoke upon Terne. 1 She 
 loved to sit at the feet of religious and artistic teachers ; as she 
 once said to me, " I have an intense pleasure in being converted." 
 
 The following letters from Mrs. Russell Gurney are 
 a record of the impressions left by some of the Broad- 
 lands Conferences : 
 
 August 1874. 
 
 You ask me to write my impression of the Conference we 
 attended at Broadlands. 
 
 As I attempt to define the essential and enduring parts of 
 those impressions, a manifested Life rises up before me in 
 exuberant, changing growth, reaching forth in almost infinite 
 ways, and I am convinced of the impossibility of seizing its 
 outline. The natural framework to the spiritual picture pre- 
 sented to us was fair, and who can describe the summer glory 
 and the whisperings of wind amongst stately trees, and the clear, 
 calm movement of a river amidst green pastures, so that one 
 immersed in darkness should feel their harmony and peace and 
 beauty ? Much less can words depict to those who have not 
 witnessed it, the revelation of spiritual life in a united body of 
 Christians. The vision that was impressed upon us, reflected, 
 as it were, in this company (though, of course, so narrowed by 
 time and space), may best be described in St. Paul's words as 
 that of " the whole body fitly joined together and compacted by 
 that which every joint supplieth, according to the effectual work- 
 ing in the measure of every part, making increase of the body 
 unto the edifying of itself in love." These words seem to me to 
 epitomise those six days of Communion. 
 
 The purpose of this gathering together was different from that 
 
 1 A long correspondence with Mr. Corbet on religious subjects resulted in 
 the publication by her of " Letters from a Mystic of the Present Day " (Elliot 
 Stock).
 
 i 4 4 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 of other religious gatherings. It was not for the teaching of 
 religious truths, nor for the arousing of the careless, nor even for 
 taking counsel one with another on spiritual subjects, though, I 
 think, all these objects were in a measure attained ; it was rather 
 for the blending of hearts, through prayer and silence and separa- 
 tion from the world, and thus preparing a condition, or, as it 
 might be expressed, an atmosphere, in which the teaching of the 
 Spirit should be heard, and the truths we already accepted 
 vitalised. This atmosphere we all felt increased day by day. 
 
 More and more it seemed as if the blessed spirit were moving 
 upon hearts, deepening them, humbling them, and drawing from 
 them fragrant odours of adoration and love. 
 
 One of a different nation, 1 who largely contributed to the 
 building of our Spiritual Temple, said some words to this effect : 
 " I had often heard that sentence, ' Guided by the Holy Spirit,' 
 but was half inclined to think it something dangerous ; but now 
 I understand what it is very well. Have we not realised here 
 that He means us all to be of one heart ? " 
 
 This was experienced by many ; their secret thought or need 
 seemed to be met by others. Very remarkable also was the 
 teaching of one supplemented and crowned by some added word 
 of another, either in prayer or in comments upon some verse of 
 Scripture ; so that it was often felt, when the day's utterances 
 were considered, that hot one could have been omitted without 
 a distinct loss. 
 
 As we sat together morning after morning under those over- 
 shadowing beech trees, the breeze now stirring and now dying 
 into silence amongst the abundant leaves, and heard the wild 
 doves' voices in the intervals of our own prayers and hymns, it 
 did indeed seem as if one heart were shared by all. We seemed 
 together to ascend higher and higher, and, in the rarefied atmos- 
 phere that we breathed in common, to gather courage to make a 
 fuller and more joyful consecration of body, soul, and spirit to 
 our Lord. 
 
 In such an atmosphere we shared all things in common. Self 
 1 Theodore Monod.
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 145 
 
 seemed to pass out of sight, and even the sanctuary of the heart's 
 Holy of Holies was revealed without a sense of profanation. 
 
 These personal revelations cannot be repeated; they were 
 fresh pulsations from the love-life of the soul, that can no more 
 be written with pen and ink than the fragrance of the flower, or 
 the clearness of the morning dew. 
 
 A very distinct feature of this conference must not be omitted 
 in any attempt to delineate it, namely, the conversations over 
 passages in Scripture between Mr. Jukes and Mr. Douglas, two 
 well-instructed scribes, who had not tarried in the letter of the 
 Word, but had discerned everywhere beneath it the living Word. 
 Their unveiling of the inward and spiritual meaning in the Jewish 
 history and ceremonial was deeply interesting and practically 
 helpful. The interweaving by these and others, of the intellec- 
 tual and the spiritual in the teaching of Scripture, gave a bracing 
 tone to the emotions excited during the more devotional exercises, 
 and recalled the words, "Wisdom and knowledge shall be the 
 stability of thy times, and strength of salvation " (Isa. xxxiii. 6). 
 
 I sometimes wondered whether there would have been such 
 freedom of utterance, whether innermost hearts could have been 
 so outdrawn, if the host and hostess who gathered us together 
 had been other than they were ; possessing their outward home 
 only to make others absolutely free of it. His spirit was so at 
 home in the heavenly kingdom, his voice ascending and dwelling 
 there in prayer, so completely natural as to remove all sense of 
 transition between the things of the outward and of the hidden 
 life ; and by his side was one who, like 
 
 "... a nerve o'er which do creep 
 The else unfelt oppressions of the earth," 
 
 would perceive even on the distant horizon any possible jar be- 
 tween speakers, or the hurt of some sensitive soul, or the need of 
 a timid one for encouragement, ere the word trembling on his lips 
 could be liberated ; and in all such cases swift imagination was 
 at the service of charity, and relief was devised. A sense of free- 
 dom and naturalness was in the very air we breathed. 
 
 K
 
 146 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 A joyous little child often flitted round the tabernacle of 
 beech trees, and served to symbolise the filial spirit, as set forth 
 by some among us in the oft-quoted words of St. Augustine, 
 " Love, and do as you like." 
 
 December 1889. 
 
 The above description of the first Broadlands Conference was 
 written under the impressions then received, in their first glowing 
 freshness. 
 
 Fifteen years of testing time have sifted those impressions, 
 and I feel impelled to endeavour to answer the question some- 
 times asked, " Was all you described a passing wave of religious 
 excitement, or does any result remain that you can still grasp ? " 
 Very briefly and meagrely, without any allusion to creed or doc- 
 trine or special personal experience, I would say, doubtless there 
 was excitement at that extraordinary time, a joyous thrill of emo- 
 tion that could not but pass away; but recognition of eternal 
 verities, then, as never before vitalised, remains. I think the 
 compelling evidence in living witnesses brought us almost into 
 touch with the Divine presence, so that the possibility and bles- 
 sedness of communion between heaven and earth became from 
 that time established facts in our consciousness. The reality of 
 the one Spirit that stirred our hearts then abides now, and in- 
 creasingly compels recognition, not a memory but a power, as- 
 sailed and yet strengthened by the stress of everyday life. 
 
 In 1875 the conference was most ably led by Canon Body. 
 It lasted for three days, and was conducted rather on the lines of 
 a church retreat. Progressive instruction was given by Canon 
 Body in the mornings, while later in the day there were conver- 
 sational meetings. 
 
 To attempt to give further details of the various conferences 
 that succeeded these would involve repetition, and become weari- 
 some. Yet each time a providing hand seemed to send us a 
 special teacher or prophet, whose personality imparted some 
 fresher and fuller light to the aspect of truth he reflected. Once 
 we were led by Mr. Boyd Carpenter (now Bishop of Ripon), and
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 147 
 
 those who were present will remember his taking the 23rd 
 Psalm as the framework for his three days' large and stimulating 
 and deeply interesting instructions. At several meetings Dr. 
 George Macdonald seemed to be entrusted for us with special 
 messages, not poetic alone, as his cannot fail to be, but, above 
 all, eminently practical, in for ever pressing upon his hearers the 
 fact that willingness to do the will of the Father leads to know- 
 ledge of His doctrine ; and as the tender filial communings of his 
 mind with God were revealed, we recognised that we also of the 
 nineteenth century had our George Herbert. 
 
 Once the quaint negress missionary, Amanda Smith, stirred 
 all hearts by the account of her wild, impassioned search for God, 
 repeating to us in vibrating, pathetic tones the appeals she used to 
 make to Nature to lead her into His presence. " O sun, you have 
 been obedient to your Maker, O moon and stars, you know your 
 Ruler, will you not tell Him I'm a sinner, and ask Him to find 
 me and forgive me ? " Then she made us partakers of her joy by 
 her simple, rapturous story of finding or being found of Him, 
 when all things became new to her, and she had looked at her 
 hands with surprise to find them black still, while she was so 
 conscious of the new life that bounded through her veins ! 
 
 And so year by year we drew on to the last of these happy 
 conferences, which took place in August 1888. 
 
 I am permitted to copy a few lines from Lady .Mount- 
 Temple's journal giving some of its details. " Father Stanton 
 was there, who had not been with us before. He spoke as if his 
 lips had been touched with a coal from the altar, and was full 
 of Christian large-heartedness and charity. He was particularly 
 glad to meet Mr. Newman Hall, and kindly welcomed also some 
 from the Salvation Army. He said he had been perplexed to 
 find so much goodness and piety outside the church, in persons 
 who had not even the benefit of the blessed sacraments; and 
 addressing the audience, he said he would be happy if any one 
 present could solve the difficulty, and give him a reason for this. 
 A voice, a well-loved voice, answered from the other end of the 
 orangery, " Heredity ! " We concluded the voice signified that
 
 148 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 all being children of God, we might expect to find in all some 
 likeness to the Father. Mr. Jeaffreson beautifully opened our 
 morning services with meditations on the Magnificat. George 
 MacDonald, as ever, sought to draw us to the very heart of God. 
 Hannah Smith was radiant, direct, and practical, and seemed to 
 clear and brighten the atmosphere. Mr. Corbet rightly divided 
 the Word of Truth, and Alfred Gurney, as he had always done, 
 soothed and blessed us with his heavenly thoughts before we 
 closed our day. Mr. Farquhar, our constant friend and teacher, 
 read us one of his clever original papers on the Parables. We 
 had also a much-gifted Swede, Professor von Bergen, who gave 
 us a most interesting lecture on Parsifal ; and though last men- 
 tioned, not least appreciated, our dear Antoinette Stirling sang to 
 us, standing under the beech trees with her inspired face, pouring 
 out her rich volume of voice, full of soul, in praise and in appeals 
 to us to trust our God, in the ' Song of the Quails,' ' The Lord is 
 my Shepherd,' and others." 
 
 Little has been said in these notices of the Broadlands Con- 
 ferences concerning him who was their mainspring, their very 
 heart. What his pervading spirit in our midst did for them, for 
 us all, could not be said in his lifetime : it can never be said ; 
 only in the spiritual, fuller life can it be measured and seen by 
 other scales, and " other larger eyes than ours." He was amongst 
 us, not as the apparent master of the assembly, but as one who 
 had the right to be the servant of all, like the Divine Master. 
 He was the preparer and the almost hidden ruler of the feast. 
 In our rooms we used to find his carefully thought out pro- 
 grammes of the subjects for consideration, with a few sentences 
 of counsel for our profitable use of the time. He was ever 
 circulating amongst us to unite and to encourage all. He did, 
 indeed, " honour all men." I remember one who was not in the 
 same sphere of society, who had been to Broadlands on business, 
 saying, "When I had been with Lord Mount-Temple, I came 
 away glad to be alive ; and that's not always the case when I 
 leave a great house : I often want to hide myself." " Yes," I 
 answered, " his courtesy was perfect." " Well, I suppose it was,"
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 149 
 
 she said, "but I thought his was the grace of our Lord Jesus 
 Christ." It may easily be imagined how such a spirit in our 
 centre was the uniting element that brought each and all into 
 touch with one another : 
 
 " Some there be that by due steps aspire 
 To lay their hands upon that golden key 
 That opes the Palace of Eternity." 
 
 After all, it was chiefly this he did for us ; and hearing the 
 simple reality of his voice in prayer, and seeing the illumination 
 of his face, who did not long to follow and enter with him that 
 " palace of eternal life." 
 
 Was not the goal of " The Quest," described in the preceding 
 pages, apprehended (as far as we may apprehend an ever beyond 
 goal) by intimate heart-union with Him who is the Truth ; and 
 did not the aim of his life express itself and take visible form in 
 these conferences ? 
 
 To discover and promote spiritual unity beneath outward 
 divergence became increasingly the desire of his heart, and by 
 the exercise of his wide sympathies he was more and more 
 qualifying to be the link, the Uniter (as some called him) not 
 only between members of different classes of society and of 
 different nations, but a far rarer attainment, of differing Chris- 
 tians ; and this not by stilling them, like drowsy members of the 
 " Happy Family " (as unfriendly animals used to be seen cooped 
 under one cage), but by uncovering and appealing to that deep 
 Christ-nature and Christ-enthusiasm which arouses all to give to 
 and to receive from one another of their very truest. 
 
 His many good works, social, political, and philanthropic, 
 were seen and known of all ; their tokens remain and will endure ; 
 without undervaluing them, it yet seems to some who were pre- 
 sent at the " Conferences," that it was in these that the sap of 
 his finer ideal life had found issue, and had brought almost into 
 sight, even in this cold climate, a bud of the mystic Rose of 
 Paradise. 
 
 These meetings made him very happy. As Lady Mount-
 
 ISO LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 Temple writes, " His greatest joy was to see the glory of the 
 common life manifested in others." Was not such a joy as this 
 the inflowing of the tide of that more abundant life that was to 
 quench his long thirst, and carry him out of our sight? 
 
 On the 1 5th of October, on the last Sunday of his life, I was 
 permitted (I thank God and my dearest friend for it) to enter the 
 sacred chamber where he lingered on the threshold of life, and to 
 behold once again that blessed face, though consumed with fever, 
 still placid, and often illuminated with wonderful flickerings of 
 light from beyond. 
 
 Occasionally, amidst inarticulate whisperings, two names could 
 be distinguished, the dearest in heaven, and the dearest to him 
 on earth. I beheld, too, a miracle of love in the one always by 
 his side, courageously, radiantly giving him leave to depart to the 
 " far better " with his Lord. 
 
 In the early part of 1875 her nephew, Alfred Gurney, 
 and his sister made a journey to Egypt and Palestine, 
 which she followed with the greatest and most encourag- 
 ing interest throughout. 
 
 To ELLEN MARY GURNEY. 
 
 I do thank you heartily for letting us know of your vision [of 
 a possible journey to Palestine], even should it pass quickly away. 
 One requires a little time to weigh it calmly. It is so exquisitely 
 dazzling and attractive that one's first impulse is to say, " Oh yes, 
 yes, it is for them ! " And I am not at all sure that a sober judg- 
 ment should not re-echo the same ; but of this I at present know 
 nothing. A mental spiritual reinforcement is much to be desired 
 in any health plan, I am sure. Oh, to go with you ! I have to 
 glance at my tired one on the sofa in order to keep me from 
 saying, "I will, I must!" But such a privilege cannot be 
 snatched. It can only be prepared for those who are made meet 
 for it. I more and more believe in an atmosphere about Holy 
 Places. Of course it cannot be breathed by being in them physi-
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 151 
 
 cally, unless the inner spiritual being, in a prepared condition, is 
 in them indeed. But then, surely, much may be received. 
 
 To the same. 
 
 December 31, 1874. 
 
 This is exactly like the death day of the year. All life seems 
 ceasing. I am recalling the images of all my dear ones, and 
 hand in hand we seem passing into the unknown. But in that 
 darkness is the love, above, around, beneath, and " in Him is no 
 darkness at all." 
 
 To the same. 
 
 January 1875. 
 
 Are you really in the ancient land of Egypt, the type of 
 human wisdom and sense, out of which the people of God are 
 called into that other kingdom that cometh not with observation \ 
 where the King is meek ; where the milk and honey flow ; where 
 the inhabitants are receivers rather than workers. Do not 
 try and worry to make the most of all your opportunities ; but 
 be still, and let them flow into you, when and how and where 
 they like. Take pleasure in seeing that circle with the outspread 
 wings, and remember the motto, " God's providence is my 
 inheritance." 
 
 What a sunbeam you sent me from the orient land ! How 
 my heart leaped as I read it. That Hotel du Nil. Why, I have 
 been on that gallery more or less ever since. Oh, may that 
 venerable Elijah dragoman feed and protect you well on the 
 wondrous river ! No, I don't think it signifies being old in the 
 East. I thought they always were old, and that anything short 
 of four or five hundred years was not counted. He will sit and 
 smoke, and make the provisions come, I should think, and must 
 have emissaries who do the running about. 
 
 I have just screwed up my courage, and asked Mr. Jukes if 
 he will give us an afternoon Bible-reading one day a week. I 
 don't know any one who has so brought me heart to heart with 
 the Bible as he has. 
 
 But first the natural, then the spiritual. Through the human
 
 152 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 to the Divine. May you be carried right through the shell, the 
 outward, to the very innermost Sheckinah, in the Holy Land, if 
 you go there, my blessed pilgrims. But don't stir yourselves up, 
 rather relax ; let yourselves subside stand still and see. He 
 does give to His beloved in their sleep. Why should we rise up 
 so early and eat the bread of carefulness ? 
 
 Why do I advise and preach, as it were ? I assure you I 
 don't mean it addressed to you, but I just express myself. I long 
 to pour out my heart to you. Alas ! what a pouring out of a 
 poor material that is. And yet, is it not strange ? We are told 
 to make melody in our hearts to the Lord. So, His ear may 
 discern melody, what is melody to Him, even in our hearts. Is 
 it not strange, beyond conception ? 
 
 The other day I had such joy in combining the thought of 
 God's being pure love with the i3Qth Psalm. Just read it, "O 
 Love, Thou hast searched me, and known me," and then, 
 " Thou, Love, hast laid Thine hand upon me." He laid His right 
 hand upon me and said, "Fear not." The fact is, we are not 
 worthy to think of, to say such things : we cannot attain to it. 
 But we may yield ourselves to that blessed searching and proving, 
 and so be led in the everlasting] way, in which there is time to 
 grow and increase in the knowledge of Him. 
 
 To the same. 
 
 April 1875. 
 
 It seems to me almost impossible to write to you when I think 
 of the address on the envelope awaiting this letter ! 
 
 If you possibly can find time, do me an outline of one hill, or 
 one bit of an olive stem, or something seen from the Mount of 
 Olives, quite small, that I may put it into my interleaved Bible. 
 I do try, and shall continue more now to ask for the blessings 
 and gifts to mind and body you need for this pilgrimage, day by 
 day. As the hills stand round about Jerusalem, so may the Lord 
 be round about you, and bring you back to our loving arms, with 
 much impressed from without and unfolded from within, that 
 may be a treasure to you and many all the days of your life.
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 153 
 
 I cannot bear to lose an opportunity of seeming to follow you 
 there. I feel so for your difficulties there. The constant stu- 
 pendous difficulty of always feeling one does not feel adequately, 
 turning one back to stone. It has always been so at the great 
 " crises of compassed hopes or fears fulfilled." " The day of days 
 was not the day." But never mind. Let that day come as it 
 will. The framework of His life will impress itself on your 
 memory, and at some time or other will help you just when you 
 need it. " My times are in Thy hand " how delightful ! And 
 He fashions our poor hearts and perceptions and memories after 
 His own good will. What is the good of always struggling to 
 receive, when He is ever giving liberally, with no upbraidings? 
 So don't cut yourselves with knives. How I should like to read 
 that at Carmel. That prayer of calm confidence. And how I 
 should like to read about Elijah in the cave, and the tempest and 
 the fire, and the Lord was not in either. 
 
 Your first journal, describing the first week of tent-life, 
 flowers, &c., just almost inebriates me with wild longings ! But 
 it is so absurd. For I know that it is just where I now am that 
 God is, and the only place for me to find Him. And this is 
 holy ground for me as long as His will keeps me here. And 
 now, when you receive this, you will be turning your backs on the 
 blessed land ; but the joy of the whole earth will be with you 
 still, and increase more and more, so that when you are fifty, and 
 much has faded that seemed to promise and to make up the 
 charm of life, you will be able to say, Thou has kept the best 
 wine until now ! 
 
 May 1875. 
 
 I received your letter from the Mount of Olives, and have 
 since had your last journal, sketching the expedition with such 
 names, Carmel, Hermon, &c., on which you were just starting. 
 And now, I think, you will hardly be in the mood for Athens, the 
 perfection of the earthly life, so different from Zion, that other 
 perfection of beauty, out of which the Lord shone. Athens must 
 speak of a beauty so complete and finished, and of the past ;
 
 154 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 while that life of failure, despised, marred, and still without form 
 and comeliness to the eye of sense, becomes more and more in- 
 finite to the seeing eye, and so fills the horizon with possibilities 
 and aspirations and hope, that imagination knows not how to 
 leave it and to gather round the classical city. How you ever 
 will contain all these worlds and lives, I cannot imagine ! Does 
 not your brain ache with photographs of them ? It is well you 
 are young, or what would become of poor old bottles, with all 
 this new wine poured into them ? Are the skies more delicately 
 fair at Athens than anywhere, and those sun-ripened white 
 marbles against them, I seem to see? 
 
 In November 1875 Mr. and Mrs. Russell Gurney 
 started themselves for Egypt, and were absent until 
 April 1876. 
 
 To the Honble. Mrs. COWPER-TEMPLE. 
 
 Near SlOUT, EGYPT, March 1876. 
 
 Since I wrote last we have been in all the wonders of Thebes. 
 In one corner of Karnac I longed for you to stand beside me 
 more than anywhere. Not in the grand hall of 134 columns, 
 tinted so wondrously, first by their own natural grey-pink granite 
 colour, then by the sculptures and paintings variegating their sur- 
 face, then by the sun and air of 3500 years. But it was not this ; 
 but eight mutilated giant half-buried statues that I wanted you to 
 see. They stood out of their dust-graves more or less, all the 
 remaining faces obliterated, some heads quite gone. Every part 
 dinted with time, or the blows of enemies every part except in 
 each statue the firmly-clasped hands crossed on the breast, 
 clenching the symbol, one in each hand, of Eternal Life ! They 
 seemed to bring the past ages into such close sympathy with us, 
 and how pathetically ! And did not that heart's cry go up into 
 the highest heaven, and help to bring Him down to give the Life 
 " more abundantly " ; and are they not still a spectacle to men and 
 angels, as generations come and go, we witnessing with them that
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 155 
 
 we are still athirst for more of that Eternal Life, and are waiting, 
 buried, mutilated, unmeaning, but clenching our Hope and His 
 Promise, till He comes fully to redeem it ? 
 
 To the same, 
 
 We do want joy in such scenes as you describe. Joy in the 
 very travail pangs. Submission, acquiescence, does not seem the 
 thing. We need to be able to sing the " Doxology of the re- 
 generate soul " in Romans viii. : 
 
 " And make our converse, even while we die, 
 An interchange of triumph and delight." 
 
 It must, I think, be easier, so to speak, to be more than con- 
 querors than just to keep one's faith above the water. Such 
 depth of need and anguish must either drown in despair, or give 
 the impetus that lifts the soul into the life of God. Yet it is not 
 so in reality often. Darkness and suffering go together, patience, 
 silence. Moment by moment an unconscious death to self, ere 
 the wings grow, and the flight is taken into the glorious liberty. 
 
 To the same. 1 
 
 Yes, it looks more appalling than fever. But I trust those 
 who love her know that those convulsions are no t signs of suffer- 
 ing. Her spirit may be all the time in the sweetest dream, per- 
 haps wandering in green pastures, by still waters, while the 
 tenement is so shaken. 
 
 But are we now coming into a dispensation when the angel of 
 destruction pours out vials of trembling ? When He answers us 
 by terrible things in righteousness. In having come to under- 
 stand so much more than in former ages that God is love, have 
 we been forgetting the stern realities around us ? In learning to 
 value so much more " the daisies," and " the laughter of the chil- 
 dren," are we losing hold of the other notes in the scale ? And 
 do we need these startling rents in the beautiful surface of life, to 
 
 1 Alluding to one mentally afflicted.
 
 156 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 make us know indeed that God is our refuge and strength, and 
 that we need not fear though the earth be removed, and though 
 the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea ? 
 
 To ELLEN MARY GURNEY (in the Tyrol). 
 
 Do you remember the Blake drawing of the Fall? The 
 throne above shaken. The angels with the thorns and marks of 
 woe, and earth beneath showing the wild beasts devouring one 
 another, the creation appalled, and Adam and Eve with downcast 
 faces leaving the garden behind. But between them that serene, 
 simple, fresh morning face, stepping forth, leading each by the 
 hand, forgetting the things behind, into the all things new. 
 
 Each morning I shall pray that your hand may thus be taken, 
 and you led forth. 
 
 How unexpected was the joy of all those wild flowers ! How 
 unexpected are our delights as well as our sorrows ! It is very 
 blessed to think we know not what a day may bring forth. 
 
 I was reading to-day about the manna that came down from 
 heaven. "What is this?" the meaning of the word. How 
 deeply and earnestly are many minds saying this now concerning 
 the bread that cometh down from heaven ! 
 
 How blessed is food provided. Just what we want Chil- 
 dren don't know what they want. Let us be content to be stupid 
 sometimes, not always feeling or aspiring. Is it not delightful to 
 feel that all our surroundings and conditions, ice, snow, hail, frost, 
 wind, dew, rain, fire, stars, sun and moon, both days and nights, 
 light and darkness, natural and supernatural, are all for us; and 
 we may yield to their play upon us, and sing to each, " Bless ye 
 the Lord ; praise Him and magnify Him for ever." 
 
 Never did the words strike me so much as last night, " The 
 God of hope." First St. Paul says, the God of patience and con- 
 solation. There is something beautiful in this succession. First 
 patience must have her perfect work, before even consolation. 
 And then the God of hope sends forth His own hope from His 
 emerald surrounded throne.
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 157 
 
 He has hope for us, and for this poor shipwrecked humanity ; 
 so He can afford to wait, to bless fully. Yesterday I was think- 
 ing with a kind of despair of the dry bones around, and of my 
 own coffined state ; and I thought good Mrs. M., who was with 
 us, so almost foolishly sanguine about those whom she was work- 
 ing amongst, and that she did not appreciate the weight of evil 
 around and within. And then this word struck upon me as never 
 before. God's hope for His poor world. He sees all, and yet 
 has a fountain of hope for us. And it must flow into us more 
 and more, after the day of patience and consolation. So that we 
 may dare to look at the coming years, knowing that God's hope 
 will more and more be ours, ever green and spring-like, and lead 
 us more and more into His abundant peace. 
 
 To the same. 
 
 I received much more than I gave at Brighton, and such 
 visions as I received there spread out into volumes. Visions are 
 so much better than memories of words. One needs to find 
 words for them, if they are to pass through the understanding to 
 others ; but they remain within, they grow, and become glorious, 
 as one grows oneself in larger and deeper faculty of beholding. 
 What a revelation is each human being, drawn out by and mani- 
 fested by all the action of God's providence upon them ! They 
 are, indeed, new worlds, infinite worlds in which we may walk forth 
 and recreate ourselves. 
 
 This morning the verse that seemed given me was, " I am the 
 true Vine, and my Father is the Husbandman." How exquisite it 
 seemed that the Husbandman, who has long patience and gives 
 the early and the latter rain, is also the Father of our spirits in 
 whom we live and move and have our being. Do muse over 
 that a long time. It seems to be fraught with prospects, magnifi- 
 cent prospects. 
 
 May the Lord of the nights and days be with you and give 
 you His " treasures of darkness " as well as of light. 
 
 I have been thinking so much of the Word that is very nigh
 
 158 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 us, in our hearts and in our mouths. That we have not to climb 
 up for any more than to dive down for. But that is just where 
 we are, at the very level we can reach. 
 
 How should we dread the future ? It is only going deeper 
 into the love of God ! 
 
 " What limit is there to Thee, Love, 
 Thy flight where wilt Thou stay ? 
 On, on, our Lord is sweeter far 
 To-day than yesterday ! " 
 
 In leaving the things that are behind and pressing forwards, 
 we draw nearer to Him in whom are hidden all our precious, 
 undying blessed ones and blessed things. 
 
 I see more and more it is faith and patience we need in order 
 to inherit the promises. All things are ours ; but to appropriate, 
 to use our own, can only come by faith and patience. 
 
 To the same. 
 
 PALACE GARDENS, 1877. 
 
 I used to think that the joy of the Lord that was to be our 
 strength was only the evidently supernatural joy, such as that of 
 the Transfiguration, or the rejoicing in spirit in the deep discovery 
 of the Father's purpose ; but surely besides these mountain tops, 
 to which few are taken and where even these may not tarry, the 
 everyday gleams^ of natural sunshine, into which by His blessed 
 providence He leads us, are His joys, to which He wills to give 
 responsive smiles. 
 
 To the Rev. ANDREW JUKES. 
 
 THE COTTAGE, WOOLHAMPTON, READING, 
 March 5, 1877. 
 
 MY DEAR MR. JUKES, I must thank you for so very kindly 
 proposing to come and see me. . . . One of my first thoughts 
 on the day when my malady was declared to be smallpox was to 
 send a message to you to ask you to "appear before God for 
 me " ; but my second thought was that the isolation which this
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 159 
 
 illness brings with it was meant to cast me more completely and 
 directly on God, and I thought any message might possibly 
 lead you to desire in your goodness to adventure yourself near 
 me. Both Russell and I are very grateful to you. I have had a 
 very mild attack, and have found nothing hardly but repose and 
 a sense of the loving-kindness of God moment by moment. I 
 always seem to escape the Cross. And now it is given to me 
 to see the opening buds of spring instead of London life. How 
 shall I escape being spoilt by such flowery paths? 
 
 Do you know, Mrs. C.-Temple actually offered to come and 
 nurse me directly she heard I had smallpox ! Was not that like 
 touching the leper ? Believe me, most truly and gratefully yours, 
 
 EMELIA GURNEY. 
 
 To the Honble. Mrs. COWPER-TEMPLE (in anxiety about 
 her husband). 
 
 You may fancy how it seems to me we are slipping down 
 a sandy crumbling shore into the ocean of eternity. The ocean 
 of love ! Still its brink is a place of trembling and failure of 
 heart and flesh ; so must it be. 
 
 To ELLEN MARY GURNEY. 
 
 I have felt so surely that the Tabernacle was taking down ! 
 Yet he is better and will be better still, I think. But I seem 
 ever waiting and watching to see the " Post " and the " Token." 
 I am reading over to him the letters I wrote to my mother on 
 our wedding tour twenty-four years ago. It does make life seem 
 like a story-book ! 
 
 To let go seems such a large part of the teaching of life, as 
 well as to hold. Though it is winter still, we have had to let go 
 our spring-promising almond blossoms. The funeral of the year 
 begun already ? I am full of the thought, through both Mrs. Mac- 
 pherson and James Hinton's Life, of the blessing of giving up. 
 It is as if the Christ within could only be uncovered, could only
 
 160 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 shine forth, by everything that ministers to self (even to the neces- 
 sary self-hood) being taken away. Its sheltering bowers, its rest- 
 ing-places, &c., so that there should be nowhere for Him to lay 
 His head, though the foxes and the fowls have their refuges. He 
 saved others, Himself He cannot save. 
 
 To the same (visiting the GEORGE MACDONALDS at Nerui). 
 
 1878. 
 
 Just this time last week I was bidding you adieu, and now I 
 can rejoice in the thought of your being at home with the dear 
 pilgrims on the blue sea-shore. Strange to say, the description of 
 the hill, the terraces, the subterranean passages, &c., seemed all 
 so natural, I felt I must have been there in the spirit. Well can 
 I picture that drive from Genoa through the painted villas, and 
 then in the growing darkness that mysterious approach to the 
 great silent uplifted abode ! And how soon the fatigues and 
 worries of the journey were forgotten. Can it, will it be so when 
 we arrive and awake ? I almost hope not. One wants the deep 
 sorrows and dark puzzles to be explained and made valuable, 
 rather than just swallowed up and forgotten, by reason of their 
 short insignificance, in the great abiding glory. 
 
 You will rejoice that I think my beloved has gone on im- 
 proving a little each day since you left He has had such nice 
 letters from Central Criminal Court lawyers. One says, " Since 
 you took me by the hand, so many years ago, I have always felt 
 encouraged by your presence in all that was manly, true, and 
 upright." He is reaping some of his sheaves, and such a sweet 
 halo of tender humility gathers round. 
 
 To the same. 
 
 PALACE GARDENS, March 1878. 
 
 I have just received your card from Pisa. Did I not follow 
 you there ! How often used I to be locked into the Campo 
 Santo, when the custode was at his dinner, and wander and 
 wonder round and round. And then a voice used to call
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 161 
 
 " Giuseppe, Giuseppe," when a party of travellers came to see 
 it; and a boy used to call this Giuseppe to come and walk 
 hastily round with them, and in five minutes they were gone, 
 and I was in silence again with their echoes. I used to feel 
 the place so unspeakably ; but my own personal achings and 
 longings were too intense for me to enter into its deeply in- 
 teresting details. But, of course, I know that unhappy angel 
 crouching on the Day of Doom, and all those little, new-born, 
 unclothed souls flying about. And Solomon scrambling up, 
 uncertain whether to turn to the right or the left. And that 
 happy group under the orange trees, over which the old woman, 
 Death, hovers, having turned a deaf ear to the maimed ones, 
 who entreat her approach. And how lovely the pattern of sun- 
 light that came through the slender shafts on that soft-coloured 
 pavement. The cathedral, too, was most lovely in my eyes, a 
 kind of violet hue of shade which I never saw anywhere else. 
 
 To the same. 
 
 VENTNOR, Easter Even, 1878. 
 
 May the blessed Father raise thee indeed on the morrow, 
 from the grave and gate of Death into His Son's glorious free 
 resurrection life. 
 
 Little can we murkily guess at the meaning of these words 
 even. Yet, in spite of our being in death and its unconscious- 
 ness, and darkness, and corruption, we are in the midst of life. 
 And, as best we can, we will rejoice and be glad, and make our 
 dungeon prison walls vibrate with our song, for He is risen ! 
 
 VENTNOR, Easter, 1878. 
 
 An impenetrable white fog-blanket, barricading our windows 
 and nicely interchanging with grey drizzle, has been our prospect 
 up to the present moment, with the exception of a fine gleam and 
 nice, though cold, little drive on Thursday afternoon. Till then, 
 I think, I never knew what it was to perceive the whole atmos- 
 phere for five minutes, surcharged with primrose scent, as we 
 passed between two woods thronged with these lovely beings. 
 
 L
 
 162 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 The delicate dream-like youth of that inhaling ! Its epitome of 
 past sweetnesses, and its promise of renewal should, indeed, have 
 borne me on out of death into our surrounding life. Surely we 
 shall get some antennae again sometime, to vibrate and dilate 
 more to Nature's scents ! 
 
 To Mrs. PEARSALL SMITH. 
 
 I am very glad thee saw the MacDonalds at their fitting Home. 
 Is not such a family of God's founding wondrously lovelier than 
 a community ? Much as I hanker after a community as an ideal 
 portrayal or carrying out of diviner principles of society than 
 anything to be seen in general on earth. What is to be the sign 
 of the descent of the heavenly Jerusalem, the four-squared city ? 
 
 In the meantime just this beautiful Nature does so satisfy and 
 enthrall me. Now the twittering of birds I hear. I see the 
 grey-green short grass on the sloping fields with dim, half-buried, 
 waiting daisies, and nearer under the garden shrubs, snowdrops, 
 in triumphing piercing of the brown earth, yet hanging down 
 their pure little trefoil canopies sympathetically over it. 
 
 Does thee not think that widespread pain of body and soul 
 is too great a mystery for one to wish to dare very much to shirk 
 it, except at the moments one is writhing under its lash ? Some 
 divine plan must be involved in it. 
 
 From Mrs. PEARSALL SMITH to E. R. G. 
 
 THE CEDARS, HADDONFIELD, N.J., 
 May 29, 1878. 
 
 MY BELOVED MRS. GURNEY, I have heard that Mrs. Temple 
 reports your husband to be in poor health, and I have felt ever 
 since that I wanted to write to you and express my sympathy, and 
 to tell you what unspeakable sweetness comes with any trial or suf- 
 fering, if it is once really hidden in the lovely will of God. I know 
 you have learned a great deal about this, and perhaps know more 
 than I do. But even if so, you will not mind being reminded of
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 163 
 
 it, for it is a lesson that one has to learn daily in the pressure of 
 some heavy cares or sorrows. I have often myself been com- 
 pelled to say the blessed words, " Thy will be done," over and 
 over a thousand times almost before the sweetness has come. 
 But at last, as surely as God is God, His will has encircled me 
 and mine, as with the walls of an impregnable fortress, and my 
 soul has sunk into utter repose ! But to do this, one thing is 
 essential, we must look resolutely and absolutely away from all 
 second causes. We never can say, " Thy will be done," to second 
 causes, for they generally arise from human sins or human mis- 
 takes. And if we look at them, we shall soon be in despair. 
 But there are no second causes in the universe, dear friend. 
 Everything is God's instrument accomplishing His purposes, and 
 all is ordered in infinite wisdom and love. Man may seem to 
 control affairs or to disarrange them, but behind all the seething 
 and tossing of human affairs, God sits as a refiner with fire, and 
 not a sparrow even falls without Him. What infinite comfort 
 there is here ! 
 
 But why do I write thus to you? I wonder if it can be 
 that you specially need it just now. I am sure you will be 
 glad to know that the pathway of trial has been turned into a 
 pathway of light and blessing to my soul. The dear Lord has 
 been so good to me that I can only look back and praise Him, 
 and look forward and trust Him. And I have learned that it is 
 indeed true that " by the thorn road and none other is the mount 
 of vision won." The road may be mysterious, but the end is 
 blessed. Therefore, dear friend, we will accept that which our 
 Father sends with submissive spirits, will we not ? and make His 
 dear will the bed of rest for our weary and aching hearts : 
 
 " Upon God's Will I lay me down, 
 
 As child upon its mother's breast ; 
 No silken couch or softest bed 
 
 Could ever give me such sweet rest." 
 
 With warm Christian love, I am yours in our risen Lord, 
 
 H. W. SMITH.
 
 164 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 CORRESPONDENCE WITH J. W. 
 FROM DECEMBER 1875 TO NOVEMBER 1876 
 
 From E. R. G. to Miss WEDGWOOD. 
 
 SUEZ, December 9, 1875. 
 
 Is it really only a fortnight since I saw you stand watching 
 our departure ? How like the inevitable sundering of death it 
 did seem ! And the silence of absence that followed ; and yet if 
 we had remained together we might have been silent but how 
 different that is ! I still see you standing there, and think you 
 want to know how the unknown into which you saw us drifting 
 has seemed to us. ... 
 
 Now, such exquisite scenes have been granted to my eyes. 
 The sandy desert, in its wondrous gold-haze tints and soft 
 dove shadows ; the sublimated mountains, like visions melting 
 into the sky; and the strange, stately, wild beings in flowing 
 drapery striding by the water side. It has all been really intoxi- 
 cating to me. And to-day an expedition of six miles into the 
 desert of the Red Sea, the " mountains of deliverance " barring 
 the way back to Egypt on one side, and the far-away mountains 
 towards Sinai on the other, bounding the wonderful undulat- 
 ing expanse of golden sand. It was burning hot as we rode on 
 donkeys those six sandy miles, without a sign of vegetation, and 
 then we saw some black-looking palms in the distance, and found 
 a little grove and a spring of water that had made a little oasis 
 garden, and a veiled woman came up to me and gave me a 
 rose. I cannot tell you what a parable and what a promise it 
 seemed ! The evident impossibility of any plant finding life and 
 nourishment in those dry, loose, shifting sand waves ! But the 
 water had come up from beneath and all was changed. " And 
 the wilderness shall blossom as the rose." Oh, what hinders ? 
 why does not the blessed water flow?
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 165 
 
 From Miss WEDGWOOD to E. R. G. 
 
 December g, 1875. 
 
 I have felt you so wonderfully near me all the time you have 
 been going further and further in the flesh. I cannot tell you 
 how sometimes at night you have seemed to enter into that 
 inmost circle where only those human spirits can enter who bring 
 us nearer to the companionship that is more than human. I 
 have often felt as if I rose upon your wings out of the murky 
 atmosphere around, and found myself in an upper stratum of life 
 where all seemed pure and bright. I have often thought of what 
 you said, that we were coral builders building up a common 
 structure, and it did not so much matter which mouth opened to 
 the water (or whatever it is). I am sure you have opened your 
 mouth for me. 
 
 From E. R. G. 1o Miss WEDGWOOD. 
 
 FLOATING NORTHWARDS BETWEEN ASSOUAN AND THEBES, 
 February 15, 1876. 
 
 Two such letters met me from you at Philoe three days ago. 
 Those words of yours in one have so set me musing that all the 
 temptations in the wilderness were to do something not absolutely 
 wrong. I have often felt in a dim way here that perhaps I have 
 consented to come into the region of sense, when I ought to 
 have sought exclusively to receive only by faith, as chastening 
 seems to meet us again and again. Our boat had a narrow 
 escape of sinking in the cataract on Saturday. It went on the 
 rocks, and if it had not stuck there, would have filled imme- 
 diately with water, having six holes knocked in its bottom. We 
 were not in danger of our lives, for our little boat took us on 
 shore ; but it was a wonder we did not lose our home and things 
 in this desert. We have been detained three days for mending. 
 If one could but see a little more clearly which is the land of 
 sense and which the land of promise, the valley of blessing, one 
 fancies that would be all one needed. I suppose Abraham felt 
 no doubt when; he went out, not knowing whither, and Balaam
 
 1 66 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 a great deal; and yet he, too, might have wished to be quite 
 sure. That lurking self that so disguises itself! May it only 
 be discovered to us, and shown to us where our faith needs 
 purifying. 
 
 The old Egyptians worshipped Ra as the visible Sun God, as 
 they saw him in the heavens and in authority ; but behind him 
 was Amun Ra, " the concealed " the source of Ra ; Amun could 
 not be felt after. 
 
 Yes, I sketch in this temple of Ra, and am fascinated ; and 
 often, when I look at my little daubs, which I have rushed at 
 making early in the morning, when the colours are halcyon, and 
 see how I have utterly missed them, I feel And for this you 
 have tarried without ! 
 
 Yet day by day I go on, and Russell is pleased, and it seems 
 as necessary as any other part of external life. 
 
 You said how far the pleasure region was from the spiritual, 
 and this sunny land of strange beauty and glamour is that to me. 
 The fragments I pick up about the old religion are most inter- 
 esting, and I am lost in wonder why it should have been con- 
 demned so strongly by the spirit. 
 
 From Miss WEDGWOOD to E. R. G. 
 
 QUEEN ANNE STREET, March 8, 1876. 
 
 " Floating northwards " delightful thought ! Yet I feel won- 
 derfully little impatience to have you in my arms again. Our 
 love seems to me to belong oh, not entirely, but wonderfully 
 predominatingly to the unseen, and touch and vision are less 
 necessary here than with any other equally precious intercourse. 
 No, I am sure you do not too much delay in the land of sense. 
 I know no one with less temptation to the outward; you may 
 safely worship in the temple of Ra. I believe it is a great 
 mistake to regard those things as mutually inimical which set 
 each other to sleep. How often we have said it When the 
 head thinks, the heart cannot feel ; and yet where thought never 
 came, feeling could hardly ever come either. The predominance
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 167 
 
 of either weakens the other, but there is an equipoise that is 
 the strength of each, for both need sleep. It is so, I think, even 
 with that in us which is root of thought and feeling alike ; that 
 which in us is an eye, and above and beyond us is light that 
 which recognises the spiritual and unseen. I think no region 
 is further from it than what we mean by Art, and yet how much 
 Art owes to it, or, rather, how the whole of what is most 
 enduring in Art goes out of it. What a mere drawing-room 
 affair it would become if we banished all that it borrowed from 
 Religion, and yet as the Art grows perfect the Religion dis- 
 appears. 
 
 I like that idea of Ra and Amun Ra. I have always a great 
 longing after the Egyptian mythology. I feel with Shelley, rather 
 than with Milton, to all these old mythologies. 
 
 From E. R. G. to Miss WEDGWOOD. 
 
 March 1876. 
 
 I should like to tell you all I have felt about Osiris here, 
 and the pathetic magnificence which makes a halo round his 
 mutilated figure; his arms crossed on his breast, with his rod 
 and his staff. These and his grasping hands are almost always 
 evident. Have you read Plutarch's account of the Egyptian 
 religion ? Yesterday we went to Abydos, the ancient This, from 
 which Menes came five or six thousand years ago, the chief 
 burying-place of Osiris, and where his worshippers loved also 
 to be buried. Little remains earlier than Sethi I., 1400 B.C., 
 who restored a temple here ; but I ventured on buying a little 
 bronze Osiris, that a poor man had found in the dust-heaps, 
 for four shillings, most unmistakably antique. 
 
 The ride of eight miles over the brilliant green plain barley 
 ready to be cut, and beans in full flower, and some with pods almost 
 ripe, looking like a green lake, with raised mud villages standing 
 out of it, encircled with palms was wonderfully lovely. Abydos 
 lies beyond the green line on the edge of the desert, and is 
 only partially excavated. The intaglios and bassi-relievi are
 
 1 68 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 in the best style of any I have seen. Here Osiris and Athor, 
 the homed Cow Goddess of Love, with the moon between 
 her horns, have sometimes beautiful faces, and lay aside their 
 hawks' and cows' faces, and receive the mortal king with 
 such gracious enfolding arms, and touch his lips with the symbol 
 of life, ? , and sometimes pour from vases above his head a 
 stream of this symbol and the one for purity. Is not that a 
 precious anointing? Is it not very strange that Moses should 
 give no kind of allusion to life beyond the veil when, for his 
 forty first years it had always been brought before him ? Even 
 if he thought it all fabulous, I should have thought he would 
 have opposed it rather than have utterly ignored it. Perhaps 
 seers need to be so concentrated on their own visions that all 
 others are nothing to them. 
 
 From Miss WEDGWOOD to E. R. G. 
 
 March 24, 1876. 
 
 I have been reading Plutarch de Iside et Osiride. I like so 
 much Plutarch's belief that the legends about Osiris contain 
 truth as the rainbow embodies the sunlight ; it seems to me a 
 much deeper comparison than he knew, describing not one 
 particular mythology, but all our elaborated views about God. 
 If the Light is to become an object of contemplation to us, it 
 must change to colour, otherwise it is a thing to see by rather 
 than to see. How distinctly Osiris and Typho must have typi- 
 fied the struggle of the life-giving and the destructive principle 
 to those who lived between the Nile and the Desert ! I am so 
 surprised at Plutarch making Typho the Sea instead of the 
 Desert, but I suppose to those who lived by the sweet fertilising 
 waters, those which were neither sweet nor fertilising seemed 
 even more the antithesis than the barren sand the copy of the 
 life-giving thing without its life-giving power. How much fur- 
 ther off that seems always than anything that is quite unlike. 
 
 Plutarch's is such a modem mind. His complete ignoring 
 of Christianity is so strange. I do not think he once unques-
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 169 
 
 tionably mentions it, yet it had been a power in the world for 
 more than 100 years, and never was there a more earnest and 
 reverent spirit than his. Is there any similar development now 
 to which earnest, thoughtful men are blind ? The dispensation 
 of the Spirit will not be a more obvious thing than the dis- 
 pensation of the Son. How strangely difficult it is to wait 
 for God ! 
 
 Our spiritual years seem to me part of a large cycle. I 
 recognise the season I have known before, but it has found me 
 in a more genial region, the place is changed as well as the time, 
 and richer flowers open to the strengthening sunbeams now. 
 
 I long to look at your little Osiris and your sketches. I 
 think I too much expressed in my last letter a non-impatience to 
 see you. I do feel a great desire now to look upon you face to 
 face, and I hope we shall not again be separated for some twenty 
 weeks of our remaining pilgrimage. I fear in the object of this 
 excursion you are somewhat disappointed, but the wondrous 
 peace you speak of could not have been so fully manifested here, 
 amid various interruptions and helps, and that will abide with 
 you as a glimpse of something to come. It is always some- 
 thing different from that which is sought, which is found, at least 
 in outward aspect. 
 
 From Miss WEDGWOOD to E. R. G. 
 
 April 9, 1876. 
 
 That time with your Desideria [Mrs. Cowper-Temple] was 
 like some bath of wondrous revival. She was suffering from 
 violent headache, and could not even drink a cup of tea she 
 poured out to keep me company. She read me some letters, 
 but it was so much more her than anything she said that re- 
 freshed me, that it seems misleading to remember this last. I 
 am sure she will be wonderfully at home in the Invisible, one 
 sees the Heimweh in every look of hers, and I feel it a promise 
 of a full unbroken repose in that far-off Home. As we sat in that 
 pretty green room I felt as if I had dived down to some magic 
 cavern under the sea, where all the din of earth was shut off by
 
 1 70 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 pure, clear waters, and even the light came softened and coloured ; 
 it is an hour that lives in my memory with four or five of this 
 weary pilgrimage one of them our sunset walk from the Con- 
 valescent Home at Broadlands, do you remember ? 
 
 Since that I have had rather a gay time, my friend Dr. Hort 
 staying with us, and various people to meet him. Have I ever 
 talked to you about him ? I think him much the most interesting 
 man I know at least, the man with much the most interesting 
 mind, which is not quite the same. Only one thing remains 
 with me of all the conversation which so much interested me, 
 but I think it gives you an idea of the man that he thought the 
 arguments which we could bring forward to support any con- 
 viction, bore the same proportion to the true grounds of that 
 conviction as a pencil outline to the richness and variety of 
 Nature. I think only a deep and subtle mind could have felt 
 that. There is a certain disinterestedness of intellect in him that 
 I have very rarely, almost never, found united with depth of con- 
 viction, although I believe it would be its perfect fruit Mr. 
 R. H. Hutton dined with us to meet him, and I had some talk 
 with him that interested me. He was trying to explain Mr. 
 Clifford's views to me, that he regarded Consciousness as the 
 inside of Matter that it was, as it were, the concave, and matter 
 the convex. 
 
 ... I cannot say, and I hardly understand it, how wonder- 
 fully closer I feel our bond to have grown in your absence. Now 
 when I am walking alone I find myself looking forward to our 
 meeting in a way I never did before. I seem to have acquired a 
 right to you that is something new. I am sure we have been 
 travelling in convergent paths, and now are nearer than when 
 you left England. 
 
 From Miss WEDGWOOD to E. R. G. 
 
 May 3, 1876. 
 
 I always feel ten minutes with you like a sprig of lavender 
 shut into my days, and as if a few words with you helped to retain
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 171 
 
 the fragrance. Oh, how one needs a continual re-immersion of 
 one's spirit in the waters of love and trust as the dust of life 
 gathers upon it in all one's petty bustle, and what seems the dis- 
 proportionate and yet inevitable amount of thought and care one 
 has to spend on small arrangements for oneself. 
 
 What a nothing would all outward snubs and rebuffs be, but 
 for one's own sympathy with them. This load of an undelightful 
 nature is the true cross without which all other crosses would be 
 light, and this is just that which is never entirely removed. The 
 sense of incompleteness which repels others, oh, how it weighs the 
 heart which confesses it ! And yet He said, " Blessed are the 
 poor." Certainly they are blessed or cursed there is no middle 
 path. 
 
 ... I think one needs a very direct and vivid sense of guid- 
 ance in all the events of small social import, for they seem so 
 disproportionate such small things make intercourse difficult or 
 uninteresting. I have been reading Cicero on Friendship, and it 
 strikes me afresh, what I have always thought how completely 
 the woman is the discovery of these later ages. I feel in reading 
 that sort of thing as if I were going back to a mere man's world, 
 and it seems to me less than half the world, as if the relation be- 
 tween the two more than doubled the world of each. 
 
 Front E. R. G. to Miss WEDGWOOD (on receiving 
 Martineau's Sermons). 
 
 October or November, 1876. 
 
 It is as if you had lent me an Eolian harp, all sensitive to the 
 breathings of the winds of God. Bringing me their tones with 
 such delicate and subtle perfumes too. I am afraid of being too 
 enthusiastic about it ; it seems to me lovelier than anything I ever 
 read. I had all yesterday one of my worst heads, and between 
 my dizziest fits just looked in here and there to uplift myself, and 
 now am beginning. How it is that one who so recognises all 
 called forth in man by the Spirit in apostolic teaching and the
 
 172 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 needs of man should think the facts of Christianity are just 
 imagined by man, I cannot understand. But it does not prevent 
 my rejoicing in and longing to bathe in all this blessed man 
 has found in Christ. Why have you not told me some more 
 about this exquisite being ! 
 
 Watts's portrait now comes back to me, and fits these utter- 
 ances. Tell me some more.
 
 PART III 
 
 1878-1896 
 
 MR. RUSSELL GURNEY died on the morning after 
 Ascension Day, May 31, 1878, after an illness of only 
 a few days. 
 
 In the following August Mrs. Russell Gurney left the 
 house in Palace Gardens which had been their home for 
 about twenty-five years, and prepared to move into the 
 small house in Orme Square, which had for many 
 years been her "Home" for convalescents. Here 
 she retained a few rooms for her own use, leaving the 
 largest sitting-room still for the invalids. 
 
 During the months that intervened, before she 
 moved finally into Orme Square, she stayed with her 
 uncle and aunt, Mr. and Miss Venn, at Hereford, and 
 with her nephew and niece at Brighton, and also at 
 Broadlands. Giving, however, the greater part of her 
 time to her dear friends the Miss Kearys at Eastbourne. 
 For a short time in the early part of 1879 she travelled 
 abroad with her nephew and niece, and stayed with the 
 George MacDonalds in a villa at Porto Fino near Genoa. 
 Shortly after her return she took possession of the house 
 in Orme Square, which remained her home from that 
 time, and where for a good many years she still received 
 five or six convalescents. She made frequent flights 
 
 from London ; and as long as her uncle at Hereford 
 
 173
 
 174 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 lived, a part of each year was spent in ministering to 
 him. 
 
 During these lonely years, and as long as her 
 strength permitted, it was her delight to fly to the side 
 of any friend who was in suffering either of body or 
 mind, or need, such as she could supply. Distance or 
 inconvenience, as many would testify, seemed of no 
 account to her in these ministerings. 
 
 To Lady MOUNT-TEMPLE (after Mr. RUSSELL 
 GURNEY'S death). 
 
 June 1878. 
 
 Lift up your hearts ! I have always felt that joy was the thing 
 for sorrow to transmute into, not acquiescence, and that I could 
 not be satisfied with patience, though that is very well and pre- 
 cious and much needed for long intervals. But Joy is such a 
 near relation of Love, and must live while Love lives ; and though 
 Love be wounded and aching and Joy veiled in her grief, yet 
 mornings break. Love is not slain and cannot be divided, and 
 Joy springs up with singing. 
 
 I can say to-day I am so rejoiced that my beloved lives in the 
 bosom of the Father, and that no man takes his joy from him. 
 
 What a deep mysterious blessing shall we find one day in all 
 that the Lord has denied us. I can see even in earthly things 
 how my best things have been given through withholdings. And 
 as I read the touching account in Livingstone's journal of his last 
 days and hours, and of his unquenchable eager thirst to succeed, 
 kept up through deathly disease and weakness, yet uncrowned 
 with fulfilment, and of his death coming to him in the lonely 
 swamp on his knees, I felt so it often is with the chosen followers 
 of the crucified One : their thirst must be insatiable till the hour 
 comes His hour. " Your time is alway ready," He said ; but His 
 hour was not till Lazarus had lain four days in the grave.
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 175 
 
 To ELLEN MARY GURNEY. 
 
 PALACE GARDENS, June or July 1878. 
 
 I must tell you of a little opening that seemed to come to me 
 from the spiritual-sensible, for so I call those kind of glimpses 
 that partake of the nature of dreams or visions. 
 
 Last night I prayed with great desire for some little token of 
 a thought from his heart, even if I might not have any glimpse 
 of himself. And before I went to sleep, as I believe, I opened 
 my eyes to see if my little night-lamp was burning, and I saw a 
 rich bouquet of wall-flowers in a kind of jug held near my face, 
 so wonderfully real. I gazed, and as I gazed they slowly receded 
 to just over the little lamp, and disappeared. 
 
 I said to myself, " Wall-flowers what can it mean ? " And 
 an answer seemed to flash through me, " These grow for you out 
 of the wall of separation." 
 
 To Mrs. FRANCIS GALTON. 
 
 AYLSTONE HILL, HEREFORD, July i, 1878. 
 
 ... I seem unable to take your advice about waiting to wind 
 up Palace Gardens. I don't feel as if I could rest till I had 
 folded away one chapter and so made way to begin another. Do 
 not think that I will bury myself away from beloved and ever to 
 be welcomed friends. I shall not. But I seem to see a way on 
 which I would enter with willing feet, and I am impeded and 
 lacerated by memories that can be only memories. His memory 
 is and will be more and more a presence ; but that is to be expe- 
 rienced in a fresh path, not in trying to taste again that outward 
 fruit of it which has withered. God has a fresh Word for us 
 every day. Your ever-loving E. G. 
 
 Mrs. Russell Gurney's friendship with the Rev. 
 Andrew Jukes was one deeply valued by her from about 
 the year 1874 or 1875 onwards. She owed much to his 
 illuminative words both in his books and in intercourse.
 
 1 76 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 He occasionally gave Bible readings in her house, 
 and little companies used to meet there on Ascension 
 Day year after year for spiritual conference, when their 
 thoughts were led by him. After the Palace Gardens 
 days these little gatherings were transferred to her 
 nephew's house, St. Barnabas Parsonage, Pimlico, where, 
 so long as it was possible for him to come, Mr. Jukes 
 was ever a welcome and revered friend, possessing, as 
 Alfred Gurney always felt he did, some of the gifts of 
 the seer. 
 
 Fragments of correspondence between Mrs. Russell 
 Gurney and Mr. Jukes are here given. The following 
 interesting record of their friendship has been contri- 
 buted by the Rev. Herbert Jeaffreson : 
 
 " Mr. Jukes was ordained deacon in 1842, but within a year he 
 left the Church in consequence of difficulties with respect to the 
 oath required by the Act of Uniformity, and became a Dissenter at 
 Hull. I suppose he was much what is called a Plymouth 
 Brother, but I do not think he ever formally joined that body, if, 
 indeed, there is any regular body to join. He was very unfit to 
 be the leader of a sect, for he had little practical knowledge of 
 men, and was constantly taken in. His chapel was split when he 
 introduced a more regular type of service, which they called 
 formal and ritualistic ; but the great dissension arose over his 
 book on the 'Restitution of all Things' (1867), which was 
 regarded by many as heretical. He broke down in health, left 
 Hull, and in 1869 moved to Highgate. There, about 1872, he 
 was visited by Mr. and Mrs. Pearsall Smith, who came to Eng- 
 land to hold religious meetings. At one of these meetings he 
 made the acquaintance of Mr. and Mrs. Cowper-Temple, and 
 through them, I believe, came to know your aunt. The first 
 time that I remember hearing him speak of her was after the 
 Broadlands Conference of 1877, when he came back full of the
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 177 
 
 praises of a young poet-priest (Alfred Gurney), who had gone 
 there with his aunt. 
 
 "I did not often meet them together two or three times, 
 perhaps at the dear Ascension Day meetings at St. Barnabas, 
 and once at a Broadlands Conference. I did not think that the 
 very affectionate regard which existed between your aunt and 
 Mr. Jukes indicated a very close community of thought. When 
 the 'Letters of a Mystic' were published by her (1883), Mr. 
 Jukes was uneasy about the book, thinking it cut away the 
 grounds of Christian morality, and he urged me to write a review 
 of it ; but my paper never got beyond a rough draught. I may 
 be quite wrong in my estimate, but I have an impression that 
 the agility of your aunt's mind was a little out of harmony with 
 Mr. Jukes' temper. She was always ready to welcome light, or 
 what seemed to be light, from any quarter, and was not always 
 careful to harmonise fresh light with truths previously ascertained 
 or with the elements of the Creed. Mr. Jukes, on the other hand, 
 grasping some basal truth, was disposed to disregard whatever 
 he did not consider as in harmony with it. I do not think this 
 temper often made him narrow, but it did not make him rigid. 
 Perhaps the difference was that between two persons, one of 
 whom is an accredited teacher of others and feels the heavy 
 responsibility of putting opinions before them. I fancy it was 
 some difference of temper, rather than any contradictory opinions, 
 which kept them from being entirely sympathetic in thought. 
 And I am sure that no difference marred their mutual love. 
 
 " To put the same thing in a different way, I should say that 
 Mr. Jukes' was an affirmative, Mrs. Russell Gurney's an interro- 
 gative mind. He had not much interest in many things which 
 occupied her ; he read little poetry, met few people who were 
 not in some way religious, seldom cared to discuss politics, and 
 was not very deeply concerned even in philosophy, except so far 
 as it touched religion. She, I imagine, was interested in every- 
 body and everything. No doubt the circumstances of their lives 
 accounted to some extent for this difference." 
 
 M
 
 1 78 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 From the Rev. ANDREW JUKES to E. R. G. 
 
 CLEWER, WINDSOR, August 24, 1878. 
 
 MY DEAR MRS. GURNEY, Your letter has just reached me 
 here. I am so glad that you have been able to be with the Miss 
 Kearys, for your presence must have been a comfort to them 
 both as well as a blessing to you. And the night of weeping will 
 soon be past. Joy cometh in the morning. And even while the 
 sorrow lasts it is all working for us, not against us. If our faith 
 were stronger we should even now rejoice in tribulations, knowing 
 that thus only do we escape from self, thus only do we enter the 
 kingdom. Of course flesh and blood will shrink. Even the 
 Best-Beloved said, " If it be possible, let this cup pass from me." 
 But the fruit such sufferings bear, for we are all used sacrificially, 
 and the glimpses, too, which such trials give us of heavenly things 
 for it is the angel with the last plagues who says, " Come and I 
 will show thee the Bride, the Lamb's Wife " can even now more 
 than compensate for all the pain. Therefore, as St. Peter says, 
 let those who suffer according to the will of God commit the 
 keeping of their souls to Him in well-doing as unto a faithful 
 Creator. All is for us specially all sorrow is for us. And when 
 we suffer, we suffer with God. Our death is His Cross. Let 
 sufferers then rejoice. God gives us the Cross, that the Cross 
 may give us God. Yours most truly, ANDREW JUKES. 
 
 To ELLEN MARY GURNEY. 
 
 8 PALACE GARDENS, September i, 1878. 
 
 I set off for the morning service at St. James's. Sudden 
 courage came to me to go there after the lapse of the fourteen 
 weeks since I was there with him. And not till I was there did 
 it come into my memory, that on this day, twenty-six years ago, 
 I was married in that very church ! 
 
 I walked home through the gardens which our feet have so 
 many a day trod together. And now it is evening 
 
 " The darkness deepens ; Lord, with me abide."
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 179 
 
 How can we make it at all definite or real to find our beloved 
 vanished ones in God? We have, I fear, to lose some of the 
 personal, the precious internal special characteristics in the eternal 
 abiding ones ; have we ? Is it part of the losing of our own life 
 in order to find it ? Just now it is rather the converse of this 
 that I am finding. 
 
 To the same. 
 
 EASTBOURNE, November 1878. 
 
 Is it not wonderful how the current of God's love has just 
 floated me in and out of coves and harbours and floated keepers 
 to me, one after another ; so that for a single night I have not 
 been alone, for more than three months, without any planning 
 or providing of my own. 
 
 To the same. 
 
 EASTBOURNE, 1878. 
 
 I have an idea that it was quite a revelation for us, that scene 
 of the moon reflected in little, shimmering, broken lights across the 
 sea. But the golden, unbroken sphere in the still pool is the sleep 
 in Jesus a condition which so stills all the ebb and flow of 
 the faculties as to reflect the whole circle of God Himself. Oh, 
 how baffled we are in trying to put into words even one's own 
 poor thoughts ! How much more in trying to grasp the thoughts 
 above and beyond, sent us by God through higher and holier 
 mediums. 
 
 Is it not strange how one goes on to the last moment, not- 
 withstanding knowing that the train is going to carry one off, 
 feeling a kind of eternity in one's present companion. I think it 
 must have something to do with the root of our being, being in 
 God, with whom the past, present, and future is. We must 
 taste things by fragments, and have one broken off before another 
 begins. Read your " Sacrement du moment present" again, as I 
 am going to do. We must get rooted and grounded in that, 
 in order to bear at all being whisked on, away from the blessed 
 objects round which our arms cling.
 
 i8o LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 I feel more and more that our sorrow must be transmuted 
 into joy. It must not only make patience. For Joy is always 
 born of Love, and our love for our beloveds is stronger through 
 absence and death ; so its roots must send out blossoms of joy. 
 
 To the same. 
 
 EASTBOURNE, 1878. 
 
 I have had some great gleams of joy given me in the 
 assurance of the joy of my beloved one. Say a Te Deum for 
 us both. 
 
 The 1 4th was my blessed Flory's birthday, a day especially 
 spent in the sense of her precious little life. I seem to go about 
 with such a sense of riches and grandeur, in having three such 
 angels so closely linked with me in heaven sister, mother, 
 husband. Each so perfect, and so blessedly, indulgently loving 
 to me. " I must not scorn myself, they love me still ! " We 
 will take courage. We will even go on our way rejoicing. 
 Nothing else will do. It is joy that is the absolute necessity 
 of our being ! 
 
 To the same. 
 
 HEREFORD, December 1878. 
 
 I write in my bedroom, with windows in three different 
 directions, looking into trees all clothed upon with snow. One 
 looks through arcades, and galleries, and winding snow paths 
 to the tree-trunk within. And outermost the fine twigs, all 
 frosted, make a kind of halo of dissolved pearl. I had forgotten 
 how beautiful it was. But it is the beauty of death. How 
 different from the leafy trees, with birds twittering amongst the 
 branches, which I looked into in the middle of June. But that 
 was a more desolate time than this. I am nearer to him, I think, 
 than then. More content, perhaps, to receive him, without 
 seeing him ! 
 
 This so came to me yesterday. " Whom the world cannot 
 receive, because it seeth Him not;" "Eye hath not seen;"
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 181 
 
 " The things that are seen are temporal ; " " Blessed are they 
 that have not seen, and yet have believed." 
 
 Strange it is that we seem put into a world of sense in order 
 to be detached from things that are apparent to the senses. 
 " Touch not, taste not, handle not, which all are to perish." 
 
 To Lady MOUNT-TEMPLE. 
 
 Many little signs come looming through the fog-girding, and 
 I know I should see more were my eyes purged, my eye single. 
 Your little, brazen, triangle clock opposite my bed, ticking and 
 saying the words 
 
 " Not one poor minute 'scapes Thy breast, 
 But brings me favours from above, 
 And in this Love more than in bed, I rest." 
 
 G. HERBERT. 
 
 It used to seem as if Eternity were such a puzzling thought ; 
 but now I feel the mystery is in Time. What is that measured 
 thing to do with us and for us ? Why does it so change us and 
 our surroundings ? 
 
 It becomes so wondrous to look back to the bud, blossoming 
 and decaying, of our life story, and that of others. And the 
 pathos of departures, of absence, of times past. It must be a 
 kind of breaking up of that which should be whole, one, God's 
 Life, part of His sacrifice, perhaps like His broken Body for us, 
 His Soul poured forth unto death, that drop by drop we might 
 drink of it. 
 
 I think we shall find Time is just the gradual unfolding of 
 what God is, suited to our capacity ; at least, to awaken and 
 unfold our capacity for the beginning to learn Him. When we 
 shall have done with saying, that was, and that will be, and shall 
 know that all is, that will be the consciousness of the Everlasting 
 Embrace.
 
 1 82 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 To the same. 
 
 Do you remember how Joan of Arc's " Voices " and super- 
 natural light ceased just when she seemed to need them most 
 for herself? And Savonarola was also forsaken. And I half 
 remember many others whose lamps seemed to go out though 
 they had long burnt steadily. 
 
 Most of us are contented with an adherence to an external 
 God. Perhaps those who apprehend Him within feel that first 
 apprehension utterly worthless. Can it be that, after having 
 received the consciousness of inward life and light, they are 
 deprived of it in order to go back to a firmer, deeper hold on 
 the naked external truth ? Perhaps that staying on the name of 
 God of those who walk in darkness and have no light is the 
 very perfecting that is needed before the consummation of com- 
 mending the spirit at every moment into the hands of the Father. 
 I suppose no one really knows what it is to be in darkness but 
 those who know what the light of His countenance is. How 
 few have known that ! I fancy I would gladly bear the pain of 
 long privation for a short glimpse of the joy of the light. 
 
 We are blessed, because our spirits are poor and needy. We 
 are athirst, and we know we are naked, and miserable, and blind. 
 It is therefore quite, quite certain that we shall not be sent empty 
 away. And we will not suspect Him for one moment, even when 
 appearances seem against His tender, generous, loving-kindness. 
 
 To Mrs. FRANCIS GALTON. 
 
 AYLSTONE HILL, HEREFORD, 
 December 30, 1878. 
 
 MY DEAREST LOUISA, We have always greeted each other 
 at this time. May every blessing be given you both, dear friends. 
 Sometimes when our most beloved on earth is gone from our 
 emptied arms, all seems gone. Then again one finds God is 
 not gone, and He gives us power to awake to other good things ; 
 but most of all He comforts us with the power of hoping in the
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 183 
 
 invisible and the enduring. Often this seems like hoping against 
 hope, but, on the whole, it is a firm anchor. 
 
 Think of me especially on New Year's Eve at twelve o'clock. 
 How many times he and I have held each other's hand as we 
 took the new step into the dark year together. 
 
 To ELLEN MARY GURNEY. 
 
 HEREFORD, December 1878. 
 
 The last Sunday of this wonderful year is closing ! Closing, 
 and yet, as I trust, opening. May He that hath the key of 
 David both close and open for us ! Let us look for much 
 resurrection, power, and joy ! We are to be revived again, to be 
 built up by the breath of God, through the hunger for righteous- 
 ness, for His meat, which must come from all the disintegration 
 and waste of tissue, which such sorrow, and such sense of failure 
 as sorrow always convinces us of, brings. 
 
 To the same. 
 
 March 1879. 
 
 Tiny crystal flowers of snow career aimlessly through the sky. 
 The poor birches shiver and shake in the wintry blast. Yet 
 everywhere our chestnut buds burst through their glue-coats. 
 
 Time and space do not belong to the spiritual world. But 
 something analogous to them does, I suppose. But when they 
 have done their work, when the Son gives up the kingdom to the 
 Father, and He is all in all, and we one in Him, they will be 
 no more. 
 
 To Lady MOUNT-TEMPLE. 
 
 May 1879. 
 
 To think that it is now between five and six months that you 
 have been made to tarry in the valley of the shadow of death. 
 You are becoming acquainted with that region indeed, and you 
 are learning many varied lessons. What is this long, long bap- 
 tism intended for? This month 1 is wonderful to me. The 
 
 1 The month of her husband's death.
 
 1 84 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 dividing sea is, as you say, less deep, and the word Evermore 
 begins to sound more than Nevermore through my soul. 
 
 From Lady EASTLAKE to E. R. G. 
 
 7 FITZROY SQUARE, May 23, 1879. 
 
 DEAR MRS. GURNEY, It is always a sad pleasure to see your 
 fair handwriting. Still the regret was not needed. I was glad to 
 be treated like a friend to whom the truth can be spoken. I 
 should be afraid to come unceremoniously if you did not treat 
 me so. 
 
 And your letter has made me think too. I don't wonder that 
 the gradual change I spoke of should seem strange and even 
 repugnant to you. I thought I felt the same for many sad years, 
 and could not have believed in its possibility. But the change 
 came gradually of itself. I was not conscious of any co-operation 
 on my part. I was possessed by a feeling stronger than myself, 
 under which I could only just stand, not move, I could only pray 
 and watch my own heart, and leave God to act on it as it pleased 
 Him. In such a position I felt I could not go wrong. And so 
 it has gradually come that He is firs /, as He ought to be, and as 
 He has willed, for it is not my doing. The difference is this, that 
 I no longer hunger for the beloved one here, but have followed 
 and found him in his and my God. I do not love him less. 
 Ah ! no. But I hope I love God more. And so Peace has 
 come, though sorrow is never far off, and too ready to return. 
 
 We cannot accommodate ourselves to the dreadful change in 
 our lives till we are changed too, and that comes, like all God 
 does, slowly. 
 
 I have reasoned very much, as I told you, on the laws of 
 sorrow. There is no such a force, and as it is stronger than we, 
 we can only feebly direct it to the right uses, and leave the issue 
 to God. It finds us one thing and it leaves us another, or rather 
 it continues to dwell with us as a friend, not as a torture. Be 
 not afraid that your heart should ever relax its grasp on the be- 
 loved one ; but it becomes a grasp which is reconciled with
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 185 
 
 union with God, and therefore with His Peace. Be patient with 
 yourself. You will say in time, " All is well," and not say it 
 merely by rote. Ever, dear friend, yours affectionately, 
 
 ELIZABETH EASTLAKE. 
 
 June II, 1879. 
 
 DEAREST MRS. GURNEY, I can only include you always 
 among my prayers for "those suffering the great anguish of 
 bereavement." But how willingly would I be at your side, giving 
 and taking the peculiar experience which only your and my posi- 
 tion supplies ! To me there is nothing in this world to com- 
 pare with it in intensity of interest. In Shakespeare, Constance 
 says that Grief takes the place of her little Arthur. But the 
 next stage is that God should take the place of the grief. And 
 in studying that I seem to study Him. We are the nearest 
 beings to Him here, and when our hearts are broken and con- 
 trite, nearer to Him than at any other time. Indeed, sorrow 
 is a revelation one of much to bear, to fight, and to learn. 
 Be patient with yourself, I say again. If ever God works in us 
 to will and to do, it is in these times. Ever, dear Mrs. Gurney, 
 yours affectionately, ELIZ. EASTLAKE. 
 
 To ELLEN MARY GURNEY. 
 
 3 ORME SQUARE, Ascension Day, 1879. 
 
 Can you ascend in heart in mind? I cannot to-day. I 
 thought I should. It has been before me all this month, as the 
 day for seeing the Bow in the cloud, and the silvered wings of 
 the Dove. But lo, I am imprisoned in thick clay ! I am now 
 going to lay my cross of flowers on my grave. Afternoon and 
 evening I hope to spend in church. The morning service was 
 very sweet; but I seemed to hear it overhead, while I was an 
 earthworm beneath. The sound of many quiet passers-by, going 
 up and down, to and from the altar, sounded to me like a gather- 
 ing up out of the graves, while I could not stir. But what does
 
 1 86 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 it matter ? The Spring is persistent, spite of cold winds and 
 poor soil 
 
 I doubt whether we are ever consoled on the level of our 
 grief. I think the Consoler has to lift us out of it, partly by 
 taking us into other scenes, to give our minds and hearts tone, to 
 receive later spiritual consolations. And during this time we 
 have to be perfected in patience. 
 
 I feel what you repeat to be indeed true that if we dig deep 
 enough we shall find Christ at the very root of our being. It is 
 beautiful to have it connected with that verse, " Other foundation 
 can no man lay than that is laid." And wherever our need makes 
 a delved-out tunnel, whatever faculty wants feeding by Him, 
 there I suppose He does flow up, but only the faith mouth opens 
 to receive. 
 
 From Lady MOUNT-TEMPLE to E. R. G. (after a severe 
 illness of Lord MOUNT-TEMPLE in Ireland). 
 
 STANHOPE STREET, 
 Midnight, December 21, 1880. 
 
 Singing praises to God in our hearts ! 
 
 All has been arranged so kindly and miraculously for us. Sea 
 smooth, wind favourable, sun shining all beautiful, and enjoyed 
 through our cabin window. Green waves, seagulls descending 
 like doves. Glorious sunset among Welsh hills. Comfortable 
 invalid carriage in which he slept nearly all the way. Blissful 
 arrival ! M. in tears and smiles, opening to us the door, to a 
 vision of comfort and beauty. " It must be supper in Paradise," 
 I said, when I saw lilies, lilacs, and roses, all in heavenly white- 
 ness, white and glistening, with the crimson word of Love. " It 
 was from Mrs. Gurney," says M. ; no need to tell me. And how 
 could she know we were coming, for I kept our journey dark, 
 fearing to make her anxious, and meaning to give her a surprise 
 to-morrow ! 
 
 Oh ! if this is all so full of joy and sweetness, what will it not 
 be when we are welcomed to our Father's Home ?
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 187 
 
 The two letters which follow, and one written from 
 Jerusalem, are a slight record of a friendship with Mrs. 
 Owen, wife of the Rev. Richard Owen of Cheltenham, 
 and the author of some very suggestive writings, among 
 which are, " Keats, a Study," and a small volume of 
 " Poems." The intercourse between the two friends was 
 warm and intimate, but lasted only three brief years. Mrs. 
 Owen died in 1883, during her friend's absence in Pales- 
 tine. 
 
 To Mrs. OWEN of Cheltenham. 
 
 AYLESTONE HILL, HEREFORD. 
 September^, i88o(?). 
 
 It was indeed delightful to me, my dear, new-found friend, to 
 receive your affectionate and most interesting letter ; and I thank 
 you very heartily for the little book of poems, and for your Keats. 
 The F.'s in the former I seized immediately with avidity ; they 
 are lovely with youth-loveliness and melancholy. It is easy to 
 see that Music claims you for her own, by these sweet, measured, 
 flowing cadences. I have not yet read the Keats, but in cutting 
 its leaves I have caught sight of much that is full of alluring 
 interest in your thoughts. How wonderful the attraction of an 
 unread book, like an unread friend, is ! Another unfolding of a 
 vision of the Infinite One. We don't know what we may not find 
 there to awaken something within that has been long waiting for 
 the Voice. I am sure I feel it about you, and I know, if I could 
 wait and listen, you would make sleeping chords awake. I do so 
 congratulate you on having heard Beethoven's Mass in D ; I did 
 not even know about it. Thank you for all you told me. And 
 I do respond to your saying that music means more than words. 
 Just now I am quite in the mood to say Yes to that ; for last 
 evening at the cathedral, an anthem exquisitely sung (one of 
 Goss's) gave such magnificence to the words from Joel ii. 21-26, 
 that it literally seemed to me for a few minutes that the Kingdom 
 was come. Surely it is the spiritual one language, in which Par-
 
 1 88 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 thians and Medes, &c., each one hears his own tongue. Yester- 
 day was a wonderful anniversary in my innermost life, six years 
 ago, and those words and that music summed up the backward 
 glance at them from the Mount. Such glimpses, which rarely 
 come, give one an intense conviction of one's life being an 
 organic whole, and of Chribt being in the midst. You will find 
 this more as the heat and burden of the day passes. In the 
 meantime, the pressure must often be up to the very uttermost 
 that you can bear. 
 
 I feel so much for you, in having a gift which seems to you in 
 a measure uncalled for, and which the circumstances of your life 
 leave you no time to cultivate. This must often seem such a 
 fretting anguish. Yet I am convinced it will be restored to you, 
 increased from being driven underground into its root. The 
 Blessed One is with us, knitted in with each life, and disposing 
 of us within and without, for the growth of the Body. Adieu, in 
 very blessed memories and in one hope. Yours ever, 
 
 EMELIA GURNEY. 
 
 To the same. 
 
 Easter Day 1882 (?). 
 
 It was your birthday this year, and you feel in accord with the 
 day! 
 
 How grieved I am that I let the days slip without sending 
 you a greeting ; though, indeed, on Saturday I thought of you 
 much and often, and read my little verses for you, against which 
 you had written your name that happy Sunday at Stoke. They 
 were, " I said in my haste, I am cut off from before thine eyes ; 
 nevertheless, Thou heardest the voice of my supplication when I 
 cried unto Thee. I called upon Thy name, O Lord, out of the 
 low dungeon, hide not Thine ear at my breathing. I had fainted 
 unless I had believed to see the goodness of the Lord in the land 
 of the living." It all seemed so like the words in your dear hand- 
 writing before me, " I do feel worn out, and sometimes I think 
 there is not much longer for me to bear it." But we cannot, 
 cannot give you up into that passing out of our sight your desire
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 189 
 
 aims at. Into the great Peace yes ; but it must be here, still 
 within the prison bars ; for they let through the air from the ever- 
 lasting hills, and the Branch blossoms within them, you see ; and 
 have I not seen the blossoms in your hand ? Your own, yet the 
 tree of the Lord's planting, full of sap, and the glorious fruit will 
 be yours and His. Oh, I long also for you to quite rest, and to 
 enter into fruition, and to be at one, and to eat and drink abun- 
 dantly in the kingdom. But I think there is still more here to 
 be gathered into your dear, large heart, and I am certain, from 
 my new friendship need of you, of what you must be to others 
 who have had you longer. You see I am so frightened at your 
 at all willing to lie down in the sepulchre. How strangely illness 
 and pain have been hunting you since we met. If you could but 
 disentangle your spirit from these shadows ! But who shall say 
 what are the times and the seasons but the Lord of Life ; and the 
 Passion-tide must go on here till the feet have emerged, as well 
 as the head, from the earth conditions. I hear the travail cries 
 everywhere, yet seem strangely insensible to them just now. The 
 very gradual but persistent Spring has so impressed me, and it 
 has been vividly borne in upon me that the Seed contains all 
 within itself in God's great Now. . . . But that the unrolling of 
 the long sad days, the mystery of Time, is the bringing forth of 
 His sons into glory, the partaking of His self-sacrifice, which 
 makes Love and Power and eternal substance sentient. 
 
 May the Love Life within, above, around, beneath, cherish 
 and nurture you. Your grateful friend, EMELIA GURNEY. 
 
 To ELLEN MARY GURNEY. 
 
 HEREFORD, 1881. 
 
 I wrote to your dear Aunt L. on her farewell day at the old 
 house. What a wrench for her to turn out of that long home. 
 We are always stepping deeper and deeper into the mortality 
 which must be completed before we can he swallowed up of life. 
 And now the snowdrops are gone. I see their thin, grey heads, 
 almost skeletons, tipping their lanky stalks. But the daffodils 
 have sprung up in "jocund companies."
 
 1 9 o LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 To the same (referring to the death of a young maid who 
 had been dear to her). 
 
 October 1881. 
 
 How much better I like the word " burial " than " funeral." 
 The burial is just the fulfilment of our latest prayers. "None of 
 self, and all of Thee." The poor pettiness of that which is not 
 living and loving, and so glorified in Him, all buried away ; and 
 nothing precious in His sight and so in ours can be buried there ! 
 I do not wonder at your feeling the concentrated fragrance of 
 that dear violet life much more in its gathering than you possibly 
 could do before. Every going away must bring this before us, 
 and we need indeed the power of the Holy Spirit to enable us 
 more and more to feel the fragrance in present lives, in which 
 there is always so much to hide or interrupt 
 
 To the same. 
 
 HEREFORD, December 1881. 
 
 I trust you will have received J. Fran9ois Millet's life, which 
 has so delighted me, perhaps more than it will you (for, indeed, 
 there is but little expression of himself in it, and that is sad). 
 But what there is, with the illustrations, and with my setting here, 
 of country lanes, and dumb labourers, and sheep, and my own 
 autumn life, just verging upon winter, it has been an epitome of a 
 good deal to me, and has awakened chords that echo harmoni- 
 ously with it. Then that Sower in the frontispiece is the most 
 joyous thing I have seen for long. There is, indeed, Knowledge 
 and absolute Hope there that the seed cannot fail. And more 
 than any attempted representation of our Lord, it has brought 
 Him before me as the Divine Husbandman. " In due season 
 shall you also reap, if you faint not." 
 
 To the Rev. ANDREW JUKES. 
 
 HEREFORD, Eve of St. Andrew's Day. 
 
 It is blessed to have saints without as well as within the veil, 
 to whom we may hold out our hands in thanksgiving for all the 
 blessings they have conveyed and ever convey to us ! I came
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 191 
 
 upon your track last week at Stoke, and found you in some 
 echoes you had awakened, a little solace for having missed meet- 
 ing you there. And it rejoiced me to hear you had seemed so 
 well, and to find how truly and deeply your presence had been 
 valued. The years are coming round so fast now, that one is almost 
 surprised at the remaining in sight of a long-prized landmark. 
 
 The subject presented to us first at Stoke was very much 
 your own The New Man. But it was unfolded as the perfect- 
 ing, first, of the Son of Man in His sympathetic union with all 
 mankind ; second, as the Son of God in His oneness with the 
 Father ; and third, as mounting the three steps of His Melchise- 
 ciek throne, Death, Resurrection, and Ascension, to become the 
 Perfecter of His brethren. Your grateful and affectionate, 
 
 EMELIA GURNEY. 
 
 To ELLEN MARY GURNEY. 
 
 HEREFORD, 1882. 
 
 Shall you take that Sunday walk you did with me, where we 
 heard the nightingale ? Do you not feel on looking back to such 
 moments, when our existence seems to be worthily environed, 
 and our ears purged to hear some mysterious echoes, not to be 
 put into words, that at such times one has approached very near 
 indeed to the Holy of Holies ? But it is in the backward glance 
 always, I find, that the fuller consciousness awakes, of what it 
 was rather than what it is. 
 
 To Lady MOUNT-TEMPLE. 
 
 1882 nearly gone ! It has not been an unkind year to us, has 
 it? I think we know more of God, and that He has shone 
 through the tangled web of this existence, with more of His light 
 and heat rays. At least there seem to me added grounds for 
 trusting Him bound up with the accumulated integral sinews of 
 our life. As it were, the moss that we have gathered in our pro- 
 gress seems all to tell the same story of the dews and the warmth 
 and the darkness and the light, of a loving care even to minute- 
 ness. So that this year just adds to the message of each previous
 
 192 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 year, with further force and significance, "Yet your heavenly 
 Father careth for you." Toiling and spinning does nought apart 
 from that. With Him above, around, within, we may just from 
 each region abandon ourselves to trust. 
 
 Oh, fear not, for I have heard the Sentinel in the dark whis- 
 pering, " All is well." 
 
 To the same. 
 
 Oh, we are hearing faint echoes here and there of the extended 
 meaning of Immanuel. God suffering, God baffled, God im- 
 prisoned, sick and thirsty; whom God hoping, God believing, 
 God enduring, is redeeming ! Not to worker God while He in 
 His heaven is unmoved, but to work with Him, to undo the 
 strange spell that hinders, and freezes His Love life-blood from 
 circulating freely in all things above and beneath ! 
 
 We need not draw a line anywhere between ourselves and our 
 Root of Love, knowing that nothing can separate us, but that all 
 that is not of Him, which makes us ache, or which ossifies and 
 brings mortification into us unconsciously, will by His prevailing 
 life-growth utterly vanish. 
 
 From the Rev. ANDREW JUKES to E. R. G. 
 
 WOOLWICH, Saturday Morning. 
 
 MY DEAR MRS. GURNEY, All good things be with you on 
 your proposed journey. I shall hear how you are going when I 
 see you. It is a journey full of interest throughout. At least it 
 was so to me, and I think must be to you, for every spot is con- 
 secrated by the most hallowed associations. Yet why should not 
 our daily path of ordinary life always be to us as interesting, see- 
 ing that it is the reality of which the journey from Egypt to 
 Canaan was but the figure. I fancy that to the angels who watch 
 our steps, all the daily toil and conflict of life are objects of cease- 
 less and unfailing interest. But the scenes where others have 
 lived heavenly lives are special calls to us to follow their steps. 
 
 May your visit to the Mount of Olives, and Gethsemane, and
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 193 
 
 the Hill of Ascension, all be to you, as they have been to some 
 others, finger-posts reminding you afresh of the one way of God's 
 elect to heaven. It is our own fault if they do not all say some- 
 thing to us. All good things be with you. Yours ever truly and 
 affectionately, ANDREW JUKES. 
 
 Towards the end of March 1883 a little party of four 
 friends started for Palestine. Mrs. Russell Gurney, Miss 
 Keary, the Rev. Rowland Corbet, and the Rev. Douglas 
 Guy. The following are extracts from such letters as 
 Mrs. Russell Gurney was able to write during this 
 journey, which was full of charm for her, in spite of the 
 drawbacks of fatigue and illness. 
 
 LETTERS DURING A JOURNEY TO PALESTINE 
 
 To ELLEN MARY GURNEY. 
 
 PORT SAID, March 30, 1883. 
 
 . . . We had a dear little Easter Sunday. It was not quite 
 like that day, or particularly appropriate. It was more like a rest 
 on the verge of a new stage of existence a rest from the past 
 and undefined expectation of the future. . . . 
 
 The third day of our voyage everything improved, and we 
 could sit out all day. We had waked at six to behold Crete and 
 the snowy heights of Ida in the background. It was a lovely 
 vision, and we had glimpses through the mist of the shores of 
 the Morea. E. K. was enraptured. She has the freshness and 
 delight of a child about everything, and the spirit of a Mark 
 Tapley for discomforting circumstances. Thursday morning, the 
 zgth, was the first really fine day we had had since we left 
 England. And for the first time we could go upon the clean 
 upper deck under the awning, and pull out our maps and get 
 book and Bible, and compare notes about Jaffa, and determine 
 whether or not to go to Lydda, for it makes the story more complete 
 
 N
 
 I 9 4 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 about Peter and Dorcas and the vision later. Well, that Thurs- 
 day was really a happy one, and then the nearing Alexandria ; 
 the big ship making its way surely along to its destination, all 
 the forts pointed out, and the realisation of the great semicircle 
 of our fleet's position was very interesting. R. [courier] managed 
 us very nicely, spied the Austrian boat we were to go by the next 
 day, and boated off the bulk of our baggage there, and then took 
 us with the rest to shore. They examined our passports at that 
 strange place do you remember it ? with all the swarming popu- 
 lation in a great conglomerate of bronze and blue around. When 
 the official asked if we were going to Jerusalem, did not a thrill 
 of wonder pass through my being as I answered, " Yes." The 
 sights in the streets as we drove to Hotel Abbas seemed to me 
 even more strangely bewitching and picture-like, dream-like, what- 
 ever it is that is the very contrary to our everyday, practical world, 
 than I expected. Then we drove through the burnt-down quarter, 
 such a scene of miserable desolation, like a huge Pompeii. 
 
 The best hotel was in the midst of this. E. and I both spent 
 a sleepless night, the variety of sounds we had come amongst 
 utterly scaring it. First, there were the howling dervishes, who 
 never ceased till three o'clock. Then the cocks were the shrillest 
 and strangest, and thought it their duty to perform about every 
 hour from twelve o'clock onwards. The cries of life, altogether 
 so different from our own, seemed to vibrate in wild and unex- 
 pected ways upon one's nerves. Well, we came on board this 
 Austrian Lloyd, and expect to reach Jaffa at nine to-morrow 
 morning. There seems no doubt we shall land, the captain 
 thinks. Jewish pilgrims are on board on the lower deck, with 
 their beds and bundles. There is a dervish also, his dark brows 
 under a deep hood of brown. All kinds of wonders attract our 
 gaze. . . . 
 
 To the same. 
 
 JERUSALEM, April 5, 1883. 
 
 We have been brought here. Our feet have stood upon Mount 
 Zion. I do not know when I wrote to you. All space and time 
 seem destroyed and swallowed up in the glory of our inheritance.
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 195 
 
 Well, it was a very near point as to whether we could land at 
 all. The little boats that came to meet us were often buried out 
 of sight between the waves. In one of these was Herbert Drake l 
 with an Arab crew, and he amidst the rest had to struggle and 
 fight in a writhing mass as he swarmed up the rope and ladder 
 to get on board. What vociferations, what exhibition of incompre- 
 hensible energy, and what crowds ! . . . 
 
 Our feet stood on the land. I could not kiss the ground, 
 but picked my way as carefully as I could over it, and we walked 
 along that long bewilderingly picturesque street and reached the 
 bewitching little inn in the midst of orange groves, their luscious 
 odour entrancing us as with a Solomon's Song. . . . 
 
 Well, we were so enchanted with Joppa, we thought we must 
 remain over Monday. On the Sunday morning after breakfast 
 we found out the roof top, such a lovely, clean spot from which 
 to see that magnificent extent of sea and the line of coast, and to 
 hear that gurgling, shoaling sea in the rocks which must have 
 soothed Peter's senses away so that the heavens opened and bore 
 him the message of universal cleansing. We read our three 
 or four chapters together, and how living and thrilling it all 
 seemed. I must not dwell upon it. We went again the next 
 day to gather up all thoughts and sensations we could ; and then 
 later on Monday we walked along the Jerusalem Road and turned 
 off a sandy lane, through those thick, old, tall fortifications of 
 cacti, and ever oranges and lemons peep over them and suffuse 
 everything into poetry. Why so much more beautiful than in 
 Italy or Florida, I do not know, but never have I imagined such 
 loads of flowers. There were wells of water for irrigation. There 
 was a dear, matter-of-fact, good-natured old Franciscan and Nea- 
 politan, most glad to chatter to us in his own tongue. He had 
 been eleven years tending this garden, and they sold their pro- 
 duce because there were not faithful enough to support them. 
 Well, alas ! we had to leave Jaffa on Tuesday morning. Once 
 more we breakfasted on our little wooden balcony over the orange 
 
 1 A young English priest, who had been introduced by Mrs. Russell 
 Gurney to General Gordon, and had gone with him to Palestine.
 
 1 96 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 flowers, and at eight the tumbling-to-pieces char-a-bancs, with 
 three horses each, came. You have enjoyed those dusty roads 
 through cacti, and you know what it is to emerge into the plain 
 of Sharon, but you did not tell me it was like the Campagna in 
 beauty ! The long ranges of the hills of Judah, the bright green 
 sweep of the plains at tneir base, the sheiks' tombs, with water 
 and camels drinking, and pilgrims and sycamore shade as fore- 
 grounds. Then we came to Lydda. What a place ! There 
 Eneas was raised, and from there disciples were sent to Joppa. 
 We saw the old church of St. George in the rabbit warren of a 
 town, all restored, very little of the old crusading time. I should 
 like to photograph everything on my mind and the four French 
 pilgrims who came in, belonging to a pilgrimage of 450 that are 
 just finishing off, and two American ecclesiastics with whom I 
 conversed while attempting a little recollection of a sketch. Then 
 into the char-a-bancs again, and onwards, upwards towards Jeru- 
 salem ! The next morning, yesterday, began all that wondrous 
 ascent to Jerusalem, through tier after tier of locked, stony heights 
 literally stony, but at first how thickly clothed with lovely 
 underwood and many flowers ! Surely nothing in the world can 
 be so impressive as this approach to Jerusalem. Kirjith Jearim 
 do you remember it? The most dignified stone walls, the 
 square, massive, simple remains of the church built in the time 
 of the Crusaders, where there had been a French convent, all 
 deserted now. But the way that village nestled and clung to the 
 hillside ! the remains of massive foundations. Some think it may 
 have been Emmaus ; I feel so sure it was. And then here, too, 
 the Ark rested ; and from here onwards we went our way in the 
 track of the march of the Ark. We could feel how naturally 
 Uzziah put out his hand to save the Lord's Ark : such a parable 
 of what we are so inclined to do now ! 
 
 We loved Kirjith, and yet perhaps even more the blessed 
 little spot where we rested for two hours. It was called Colonia, 
 and had no sacred associations ; but it seemed the most Sabbath 
 resting-place I ever had. On the stone balcony we sat and had 
 our little meal; and a passion-flower was on the trellis above,
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 197 
 
 and white doves circled round us, the first we have seen here ; 
 and there, straight before us, lay the upward road over barrier 
 hills to Jerusalem. We read our chapters, we talked one with 
 another. The pomegranates' ruddy leaves glowed in a mass 
 beneath, the grey olive beyond, and some white pear trees in 
 blossom ; and as we went onwards and looked back with regret 
 and fondness it was even more beautiful. Then our thoughts 
 more and more were all towards the Holy City. It seemed to 
 us the most wonderfully symbolic scenery the rugged bare 
 ascent. We said our Psalms of Degrees all together ; never did 
 they seem so beautiful. And why did it not reveal itself after 
 all this ascent ? Still for ever hidden ! Of course we got down 
 to walk when they told us we should soon see it, and we walked 
 in such awe-struck expectation ! but the moment never came. 
 We were in the outskirts and surrounded by modern, neat 
 German buildings ; but the Holy City was not to be seen. And 
 so it went on, and on, and only a bit of the walls beyond these 
 buildings came in sight, then more and more, and we were at 
 the door of our modern, German prosaic inn. After a little 
 arrangement E. and I stole out alone, and went outside the walls 
 of the Mount Zion part, and past the Armenian burying-ground 
 and convent. What exquisite colouring was on the hills of Moab 
 in the distance ! The Vale of Hinnom, so much more of a vale 
 than I expected, at our right ; in the afternoon light it looked a 
 deep descent in shadow. And then as we returned we met R. 
 with letters, and he said, "Would you like to go to the Holy 
 Sepulchre ? " and we went, and it seemed to me just exactly like 
 the pool of Siloam : the poor, the sick, the miserable, crowding 
 round the spot, all longing to be helped. And we so gladly 
 crowded in with them to the little nook that holds just six at a 
 time, and knelt before the stone that has been the symbol for a 
 thousand years to so many needy ones of the Death and Resur- 
 rection of the Healer and Helper of poor suffering humanity. 
 No superstition or clamour revolts me ; it all seems a picture of 
 the true state of things. It was dusk when we came out. We 
 thought there was a wonderful atmosphere of expectant longing 
 about the place. Your own, E. R. G.
 
 198 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 To the same. 
 
 JERUSALEM, April 9. 
 
 To-day I am only just able to write you a line. The fact is, 
 the long conversations with H. D., with General Gordon, with 
 H. D.'s sect., besides with our own party, who have each their 
 special companionship to be carried out, leaves no time for 
 sketching or writing or anything. And wonder and delight, I 
 feel, is a little frittered by this, but they are all aboundingly 
 interesting. 
 
 Jerusalem has disappointed me in nothing. With what in- 
 terest I have looked at the beautiful Damascus Gate, outside 
 which you encamped when the wind drove you from beloved 
 Olivet. I see the sun rise over it every morning, and there is 
 the dome of the Rock straight below it. 
 
 Gordon is sure that Adam was made out of that Rock ; that 
 it is the Rock out of which we were all hewn ; that it is the Rock, 
 of course, of Abraham's sacrifice, and of the Burnt Offering altar. 
 
 We were on Friday at the Wailing place. There must have 
 been 300 or 400 rubbing their faces against the wall, the veil, is it 
 not, that just hides them, Gordon says, from the Water of the 
 Laver just beyond, and the Table of the Lord (the Burnt Offer- 
 ing). To-morrow we set off encamping. Ever your most privi- 
 leged of old pilgrims, E. R. G. 
 
 To the same. 
 
 JERUSALEM, July 17. 
 
 Did I write to you just before starting on the Jordan expedi- 
 tion ? How I did wonder whether our camp was near the spot 
 you had been on, near that little round head of the spring that 
 Elisha sweetened. A Bedouin black camp was close by, and a 
 Mahomedan camp, and an American camp, so we were not quite 
 so quiet as we should have liked. . . . 
 
 But the interest of this expedition beats all description (and I 
 am so glad I have not to describe it to you, but only some day to 
 talk it over, and enjoy our recollections together). It is true the
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 199 
 
 great wall of Moab seems to sink as one descends into the plain ; 
 but how wondrous is the colouring, and that evening, as we clat- 
 tered along that stony descent after leaving those savage defiles, 
 with the brook Cherith cutting its narrow way amongst them, 
 how wonderful it was to look down upon the line of luscious 
 verdure tracking Jordan in the midst of that sandy plain, and to 
 see four little tents pitched against some of the green tamarisks ; 
 and then the crescent moon and luxuriant stars as we went from 
 our bedroom tent to our saloon one. But the scenes them- 
 selves far outdid the adventure of tents ! We returned to the 
 same place again, after the ride of the next day to the Dead Sea 
 and Jordan ; and the third day made our way back, and this was 
 the most precious thing to me, along the upward path He came 
 when Martha and Mary sent for Him ; and at last there was the 
 very spot where their messengers looked over the brow of the 
 hill, in anxiety and hope, and finally despair. And on that brow 
 our camp was pitched, and there i the evening light was the 
 longed-for Bethany, just below. 
 
 To Mrs. OWEN. 
 
 JERUSALEM, Tuesday, April 17, 1883. 
 
 Here your dear letter came to me yesterday, telling me in 
 your own beautiful way of your visit to Mr. Shields and his 
 spiritual pictures. Every word you say finds its echo in us. 
 St. James with the reversed cup was indeed a wondrously blessed 
 revelation ; and Obedience bound to the horns of the Altar, I 
 thought Michel Angelesque, so powerful in every line. 
 
 But when did I write last ? To thi^k how we have passed 
 from the sea waves to the luscious orange groves, and thence up- 
 wards through stony heights to Mount Zion ; that we have knelt 
 under the venerable olive in Gethsemane, and passed over the 
 top of Olivet, in thought of the Ascension, looking towards the 
 ethereally coloured Moab wall over the blue cloud of the Dead 
 Sea. And we have made our way down the defiles of thieves, 
 guarded by a Bedouin chief, to Jericho, and encamped by the
 
 200 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 sweet stream that Elisha healed, and tasted the bitter salt of the 
 Dead Sea, and sprinkled ourselves with the sacred Jordan water, 
 and then have reascended the stony heights. Oh, what a path- 
 way for beasts to stumble up, passing crowds of Greek pilgrims 
 hastening to Jordan, and two poor dead mules left by the way. 
 And making our last ascent we saw our camp people looking 
 over the brow of the hill down upon our way, and we knew it 
 was just there that Martha and Mary must have sent watchers to 
 look for Him who kept them two days waiting while the life of 
 the beloved ebbed away. And I think that it was just where a 
 spring bursts forth amongst the stones that He and His disciples 
 stayed to refresh themselves after the toiling travel, when Martha 
 came to meet Him. 
 
 We encamped a stone's throw from Bethany, a little ravine 
 between it and our little platform. It is all and more than one 
 could wish for, the framing of that one spot of home-life the 
 one pillow for the weary life of those three years. Such dear 
 little unexpected dells, and winding paths round knolls, and little 
 green flats, with grey stones shutting them off, and breezy uplands 
 around, looking over sweeps of varied country ; and the mul- 
 titudes of little flowers peeping and smiling up everywhere, the 
 never-failing scarlet poppy and deeper crimson anemone, con- 
 stantly reminding one of transfigured blooddrops. 
 
 Early on Friday morning (i3th), oh, did you not feel us ? In 
 these scenes, our table in our tent decked with these wild flowers, 
 we partook of the Holy Feast ; and the interpreter read aloud the 
 names of our bereaved ones, and of our dear ones who find not 
 the Home here for their hearts. You know your name was not 
 omitted. Your very loving, E. R. G. 
 
 To Lady MOUNT-TEMPLE. 
 
 7 o'clock, May 8. 
 
 Sea of Galilee. In the hinder part of the boat ; the breeze is 
 over, the sail furled ; three rowers, making the cleaving sound of 
 the sweet waters. We have left Tiberias and its ruined towers 
 behind us ; to our left ahead is the opening of a valley between
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 201 
 
 some rocky heights, and distant, lilac, cloud-like hills. At the 
 edge of the opening there is flat green, and the few little houses 
 still called like Magdala, Majdel. The little plain of Gennesaret 
 lies behind it. We feel on this spiritual element more like tread- 
 ing in His footsteps than anywhere, and the visionary beauty of 
 everything round takes one out of hard matter into the glassy 
 sea, where all is transfigured before the Throne. It is such a joy 
 to find it so beautiful ; the mantling, enfolding hills fine in their 
 form and in colour most wondrously translucent. The nearer shores 
 rising into cliffs of warm grey, mixed with golden and green turf. 
 Little nestling places quite at the edge. " Children, have you 
 any meat ? " still resounds in His morning voice, after our toiling 
 nights. As we came along His Nazareth road to this, the wind as 
 it moved the corn whispered as never before, yet I could not hear 
 what it said. Oh, the sweet monotony of these plashing oars ; 
 the dark faces and free movements spoil no associations. Now 
 there are little screaming birds dashing into the water, and then 
 skipping along it, grey and white. Our boatman stopped to 
 drink of the water of the lake. Interpreter said, what a symbol 
 of the Way this element is. It bears us along, sustains us, and 
 refreshes us. 
 
 This lake must have been to Him like the whole vale of 
 Baca used as a well. 
 
 Our tents were pitched a quarter of a mile from Tiberias, on 
 green just above the white pebble brink. We watched the sun- 
 set hues creeping pinker and more golden over the hills of Gilead 
 on the other side. 
 
 Then we all sought for shells beneath the grey stones. And, 
 I thought, these will be nice precious things, and make little 
 charm necklaces for one or two who might care. It was too 
 soon dark. But there were the stars, and then arose the wind 
 and fluttered our tents all night. At five we were up, and at six 
 stepped into this dear boat. It is taking us to Ain et Tin, per- 
 haps Capernaum ; and there our horses meet us, and we are to 
 ascend to Safed, and shall look upon this dream once more. No 
 spot have we so longed to stay at ; but, alas ! we are now straitened
 
 202 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 to get to Damascus and then Beyrout. This interfering Time, so 
 difficult to take any account of here. // is the matter of faith 
 here! 
 
 To ELLEN MARY GURNEY. 
 
 DAMASCUS, Whitsunday, May 13. 
 
 Here, just arrived, I find one letter awaiting me ; it is from 
 you, of the 24th of April, answering back my hasty scribbles 
 from Jerusalem. The newness of the world one is in seems to 
 bewilder so much, and to fatigue so much, that the moments in 
 which one can write seem to fly, and to race with one so dis- 
 tractingly, that one does not know how to form one's words even 
 in one's brain, much less with pen and ink. I wonder whether 
 the multitudes of impressions I have received will ever organise 
 themselves into any distinct whole, or whether they have been 
 so emotional as to leave no permanent trace in heart and brain. 
 The " lust of the eye " has been so satisfied, has the spirit been 
 fed ? I know not. 
 
 But you will want to know our history, and I cannot re- 
 member how much I have told you, so I won't attempt anything 
 like a journal. 
 
 The tent life was always reminding me of you. Was the 
 howling of the dogs at night as horrible to you as it was to me ? 
 Never shall I forget the awful sounds at Geba and at Jezreel. The 
 latter place is, indeed, the most God-forsaken heap I ever beheld. 
 We were frightfully depressed when we read of all the things 
 connected with the place. But how mysteriously, blessedly the 
 strange words of the prophet sounded at last. "The heavens 
 shall hear the earth, and the earth shall hear the corn and the 
 oil, and they shall hear Jezreel." It seems to imply that the cry 
 of deepest need and degradation is at last, 'through some inter- 
 weaving intermediaries, to prevail to unlock treasure-houses. 
 
 It was the plain of Esdraelon that most tired us all, I think, 
 so monotonous in its surface. Yes ; that day we started at seven, 
 and the words were, " Then you will go to Shunem, Nain, Naza- 
 reth." Oh, to have ears to hear and hearts to feel would be a
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 203 
 
 boon under such circumstances ! Was not the hill a nice, swell- 
 ing, homely one under which the great woman lived ? Could you 
 not see the reaping fields below the village where the boy said, 
 " My head, my head ! " And was it not curious to think of Nain, 
 where the other restoration took place, being just on the other side 
 of the same hill ? Nain was very evidently the place. The gate must 
 have been just there. I did not mind the little white Franciscan 
 deserted chapel being there. It did not seem to interfere 
 with the sanctity of the natural spot, as many shrines do. We 
 all went and knelt there some time, and then rested half-an-hour 
 outside in its shade, and then again took to the plain, with the 
 site of Nazareth before us, though hidden by its embowering 
 heights ; and what climbs those last were, up and down and 
 over, you know, and the sun beating hotter and hotter. At 12.30 
 we reached the convent. Our tents were pitched were yours ? 
 just above the Virgin's fountain. There the young and old were 
 struggling, later in the day, to fill their beautiful water-pots, 
 while their pink and yellow draperies fluttered about them. 
 Tuesday, April 2ist, we had our Holy Communion, and re- 
 membered the young ones we cared for. It has been very 
 sweet to connect different places with dear names of those we 
 would naturally lift up our hearts for, and with Him whose Life 
 is the reason of our confident trust for them. How cradled in, 
 how embowered in fold after fold is this home for the secluded 
 boyhood and youth and early manhood of the growing, anointing 
 Priesthood and Kingship of the Saviour ! That place will cer- 
 tainly be a heritage for ever ; how glad I am you also have it. 
 
 I did sketch a little from my tent door. You know one can 
 never choose a sketch here ; only seize what is presented opposite 
 to where one must needs be posted and planted in some proper 
 shade. 
 
 It was May ist, Ascension Day, when we left Nazareth. Of 
 course my heart was full of those who had accompanied so many 
 Ascensions in my fulness as well as my emptiness ! The day 
 felt peculiarly halcyon. I thought the birds sang ro me much 
 more than on any other day. There was a wearisome bit of
 
 204 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 Esdraelon ; but then such a park, with what they call oaks here, 
 for our midday resting-place. Then the descent into the plain 
 of Acre, and there were the tents, at last, in grassy meadow land, 
 close to Kishon, and oleanders ; and the long, long ridge of 
 Carmel in evening shadow stretching to the sea. 
 
 Did you encamp, as we did, the next night on the platform 
 sheer over the sea opposite to Acre, in the convent precincts ? 
 Did you go on from Haifa, where the chanting voice of the 
 muezzin called as we passed in the golden afternoon to prayer, 
 along the white sand of the shore, treading on lovely little shells, 
 with fringing palms rising on our right? Did you grudge to 
 strike inland over sandy dunes? But at Ber Jedru we were 
 again on thick grass carpets. To see those tufts cropping under 
 bed and table is exquisite, is it not? The sun was low there. 
 The shadow of Carmel was creeping fast over the golden plain ; 
 the people were gathering at that old picturesque well of Joseph. 
 Dinner comes too soon. No doffing of riding-dress ; then, after- 
 wards, a little Bible reading and talking. . . . 
 
 Well, the Sea of Galilee has been to me the jewel of all. 
 The descent upon Tiberias seemed to me to exceed in loveliness 
 of evanescent colour anything my earthly eyes have ever beheld. 
 Old, rugged, earthquaked Tiberias spread out below, with the 
 sapphire lake rising high behind, and, fringing that, those dove- 
 wing mountains of Gilead. And we were encamped at the very 
 edge of the white pebbled beach, and could hear the tiny lap of 
 the wavelets all night against the shore ; and three hours on the 
 very bosom of this blessed above all water seemed to me more 
 to hold one in the earthly life of the Lord than any other place ; 
 and the green, retreating little plain of Gennesaret, with Mag- 
 dala there, and the places where Capernaum, Chorazin, &c., 
 once were. 
 
 The next day, after leaving the glory of Galilee, we entered 
 the glory of Hermon, as seen across the valley, with its little 
 family of young, glistening streams. We had lunch in a thicket 
 of oleanders, bowed with their blossoms, close upon the rushing 
 stream of young Jordan. Yes, Banias that evening was all you
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 205 
 
 described the romantic bower of the land ; how we grudged 
 leaving it, the last footstep of our Lord ! And now what a 
 different character has appeared in the scenery. 
 
 I shall probably be following this letter quickly. Your own 
 much dowered though unworthy one. 
 
 To ELLEN MARY GURNEY. x 
 
 CHELTENHAM, 1883. 
 
 It is good to be here ! And, strange to say, the longing for 
 the sound of the voice, and the touch of the vanished hand, does 
 not too much overshadow with gloom, but permits one to seek 
 the Presence in the present, rather than sit down in the ruined 
 past. " Evermore " seems more hinted at than " Nevermore " is 
 emphasized. And the abiding home, though still hidden, as 
 Jerusalem was, by stony hills, though so near, is in very truth at 
 hand ; and we can afford to press onwards, without turning back 
 to gaze and stretch out longing hands for our unripe happy hours 
 behind ! 
 
 To her Aiece, KATHERINE GURNEY. 
 
 HEREFORD, 1883. 
 
 I have as yet very little capacity for loving ! I think and 
 hope it is true that plants, to awaken our love and for it to form 
 round, are just sown in our hearts ; and we shall find these plants 
 again beyond, with some of our love-sap intermingled with their 
 life, and our severance from them will have deepened the sap in 
 our hearts and theirs, and when we behold them again there will 
 be such a reciprocity and intermingling of the here frozen, but 
 there ice-freed, abounding, intermingling streams, that we shall 
 understand that wondrous miracle, that we are loved, and that 
 will loose us to love again. " We love Him because He first loved 
 us." True it is, we can only be loved into life. And now this 
 reminds me of some words in a beautiful letter of dear noble 
 Hannah Pearsall Smith. " I am full of an opening I have had 
 
 1 Referring to her friend, Mrs. Owen.
 
 206 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 on that blessed word, ' God is Love.' It came to me like this : 
 that here we are all crying out, ' Oh, that I could find Him ! ' and 
 all the while the key to the knowledge of Him has been put into 
 the hands of every one of us, of every human being that ever 
 lived. For there is not a man, woman, or child on earth, who 
 does not know something at least of love, and therefore some- 
 thing of God. For whatever love is, that God is, for God is Love. 
 Consequently, whenever we have a glimpse of love, either in our- 
 selves or others, we have a glimpse of God, and must say to our- 
 selves, ' Yes, that is just what God is.' I cannot tell thee what 
 wonderful vistas of blessedness have opened up before me as I 
 have contemplated this. For / know something of what love is, 
 and since God is Love, I therefore know something of what He 
 is, and I find that He is altogether lovely. I am afraid I cannot 
 make my meaning as plain as I should like, but I do want thee 
 to recognise thy place and thy possessions, and to realise that 
 thy long quest is ended, and that thou hast found God at 
 last. Found Him in the love that fills thy own heart and life. 
 If I should use one word to express my sense of thy need, it 
 would be simply this recognition." 
 
 To the same. 
 
 I am glad you enjoy Maurice's " Kings and Prophets." It 
 was an era to me when I read it. I want to read it again, and 
 see how I like it now. 
 
 " Uarda " was just a find. I wondered whether those who 
 had not been to Egypt could enjoy it as I did. And now have 
 you seen that her father Rameses, and her aunts' and ancestors' 
 bodies have all been found ? Hidden away from the valley of 
 the tombs, in the time of the Persian invasion, I think. Oh, if 
 we had only time and energy, and formed habits for digging away 
 into any of the mines of interest on either side our path all 
 along, how rich we might become ! But I can only stand on 
 brinks, and see what jewels the dear delvers bring up.
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 207 
 
 To the same. 
 
 I can only say about the Inferno, that we must have the 
 dark abyss, the sulphur, the salt, or the art conception of the whole 
 would be wanting. We must have the knowledge of evil, or for 
 us (Eve having eaten of that tree) there would be no knowledge 
 of good. I believe the Inferno is evil as it is subjectively, made 
 objective, (not appropriately punished or seen in its consequences), 
 but just its mal semo dissected and laid bare. And it must 
 needs hurt the eyes of its beholder (Dante), and he must needs 
 either be soiled or made cruel by it, being in the body that casts 
 a shadow. 
 
 Some of the loveliest Nature touches are in it. And what 
 portraits, Farinata, &c. ; and what tragedies, Rimini and Ugolino. 
 What exquisite paternal and filial feeling in the midst of the 
 revolting horror of the hate between Ugolino and the Archbishop 
 eternal hate in contrast to eternal love. For one thing, it shows 
 one it could not be in the same personalities; the devouring 
 appetite could not continue, for there is no fresh spring in it, all 
 growing out of the bygone acts of the long past. 
 
 What words for the hypocrites in the "O etemo faticoso 
 manto ! " "La gente stanca." What could so express the over- 
 powering effort of living a life that seems rather than is ? Its absurd 
 long suicide of the true. Then the monster neither two nor one ! 
 The manifestation of union for evil being the complete loss of 
 personality. 
 
 No, I won't have even the Inferno run down. And I will 
 have the Purgatorio as artistically the highest, because to us 
 the manifested is the region of art ; whereas Paradiso notwith- 
 standing dances and lights, is the revelation which can only be 
 made from thought to thought in words, not in pictures. 
 
 To Lady MOUNT-TEMPLE. 
 
 How true what you say about the good and evil is. Evil 
 working against itself through a yet responsible agent, but good, 
 or the Good One, counteracting and " carving out of the defeat
 
 208 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 a victory." Sometimes we catch a little glint of it, and it makes 
 one feel as if somehow evil was a necessary nidus for the birth 
 of good. 
 
 I hope you will receive this on Monday, Gordon's birthday, 
 and that you will send up protecting prayers for him. I want 
 the rumour of him to go before him amongst those tribes, like 
 the dream in the camp of the one little barley loaf that over- 
 turned it, Gideon's allegorical designation. What a funny little 
 inadequate, inappropriate dream the officer would have thought 
 who heard his soldier recount it. " Converse in the Lord forms 
 thought that ripples beyond and beyond and beyond." There 
 is no knowing where it ripples, I think, or who it is making to 
 dream, or to preach, or to fight for a good cause. 
 
 To ELLEN MARY GURNEY. l 
 
 ORME SQUARE, 1885. 
 
 I think of you with such pleasure at Bournemouth, with 
 your spring blossom. And before you, too, is the awful muta- 
 bility of these eternal possessions pictured by the recollection of 
 the lovely boy of four years old, once there in your very hand as 
 well as heart. And now in the prosperous course of nature not 
 vanished, not dwindling even. Yet where is that precious jewel 
 that made your being thrill with joy ? Are you to find that again 
 in his angelhood and yours ? Certainly the changes in this life 
 are more perplexing to faith than the change made by the clean 
 sweep of beloved objects from this life. 
 
 BROADLANDS, October 1885. 
 
 Here I am in the deserted shrine. Sitting in my beloved 
 Ladye's seat. It seems rather sad that she should be called to a 
 funeral on this her birthday [the funeral of Lord Shaftesbury on 
 October 8]. I am certain it will make her tremble for her 
 beloved. 
 
 Well, it is all trembling now, as far as this world goes, and to 
 
 i Referring to a baby niece, and to the babyhood of a nephew ten years 
 before.
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 209 
 
 hear, " I am the Resurrection and the Life," is the only joyful 
 sound. 
 
 To the same. 
 
 BROADLANDS, October 10, 1885. 
 
 Would, would you could have seen those two last night [Lord 
 and Lady Mount-Temple] when they returned from St. Giles's, 
 Lord Shaftesbury's Dorsetshire place. Their radiance was so 
 heavenly and their account of all things so deeply touching. 
 There was not very much to tell, but the impression received 
 from all around servants, poor, and family with all the teeming 
 testimonies of grateful love from the poor and oppressed of all 
 sorts and conditions. And the sweet little anecdotes that cannot 
 be repeated of his humility and love, though there was a great 
 deal of pride about him too. There were many paradoxes, as in 
 all great men. He seems to have been almost as afraid as 
 Gordon of looking back at anything he had accomplished, and 
 realised almost as vividly that he was but an instrument in God's 
 hand. He said he owed the aim of his life to the impulse given 
 by his nurse. I thought this would be such a nice thing to tell 
 to all young nurses. His father was a strong, and I fancy con- 
 temptuous, opposer, and so were his brothers. And his own 
 children afterwards had no sympathy in his special objects, so 
 that he always had to swim against the stream. Did you see in 
 the paper that the costermongers sent him a watercress wreath ? 
 We thought it so nice of them not to have subscribed to get a 
 wreath of the ordinary kind, but to have sent the one they could 
 gather themselves out of the little brooks. Once lately he said 
 to some one, " He knows I have intensely loved Him these fifty 
 years." 
 
 They felt the service in the Abbey most exquisite, and the 
 look of all the faces waiting in pouring rain in crowds. 
 
 To the same. 
 
 Here are these verses from " In Memoriam." This unifying 
 of past and present, finishing and beginning, silence and motion. 
 
 O
 
 210 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 The rhythm of life, which yet gives us so much pain, " la puntura 
 della rimembranza," which is felt in such different degrees of 
 acuteness by our fellow-creatures. The sound of the closing of 
 the door, I suppose, has not even been listened to by some 
 of us ! 
 
 " Sad Hesper o'er the buried Sun, 
 
 And ready, thou, to die with him ; 
 Thou watchest all things ever dim 
 And dimmer, and a glory done : 
 
 The team is loosened from the wain, 
 The boat is drawn upon the shore ; 
 
 Thou listenest to the closing door, 
 And life is darkened in the brain. 
 
 Bright Phosphor, fresher for the night ; 
 
 By thee the world's great work is heard 
 Beginning, and the wakeful birds ; 
 
 Behind thee comes the greater light : 
 
 The market boat is on the stream, 
 
 And voices hail it from the brink ; 
 Thou hear'st the village hammer clink, 
 
 And see'st the moving of the team. 
 
 Sweet Hesper Phosphor, double name 
 For what is One, the first, the last, 
 
 Thou, like my present and my past, 
 
 Thy place is changed ; thou art the same." 
 
 To the same. 
 
 ORME SQUARE, 1885. 
 
 Yes, it is true. We must go on. The things must be left 
 behind whenever they possibly can be ; and a certain lapse of 
 time, it has been decreed, shall make the possibility. It is faith- 
 fulness, not faithlessness, to our precious ones, that bids us look 
 less at what they were to us than at what they are in God, and 
 to what they shall be, consciously and fully to us in Him, when 
 our veils are removed.
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 211 
 
 To the same (after spending two months in Italy together). 
 
 HEREFORD, Trinity Sunday, 1886. 
 
 A solemn grey sky. Smoky mist swamping all the distance. 
 Great branches of a copper beech waving ; a Scotch fir still and 
 firm ; the sloping field of grass, sorrel-mixed, a lovely soft des- 
 cent ; birds flitting, or fussing, or skimming, or hopping around 
 and above and about. Sunday stillness throughout. This is 
 where I am. 
 
 I look back on this day fortnight, under your roof and wing ; 
 and then to Lucerne together, while the lake sparkled and the 
 mountains dreamt before our eyes. And from thence I go back 
 to Siena, and the hills, and the cypresses, and bulwarks, and 
 accacias, and nightingales. What a phantasmagoria encircles 
 our rooted being ! May we know how to preserve this double 
 consciousness of our peaceful rest in God, while the changing web 
 of our outward Time-life engages our active faculties. 
 
 From the Rev. ANDREW JUKES to E. R. G. (after the death 
 0/Lord MOUNT-TEMPLE). 
 
 UPPER EGLINTON ROAD, WOOLWICH, 
 October 17, 1888. 
 
 MY DEAR MRS. GURNEY, One line of grateful thanks for 
 your letter. The world, the seen world, must henceforth be 
 colder to us. But what is real never passes away. We cannot 
 lose what we truly love. And the love of which Broadlands has 
 been the centre and witness will never leave us, though we may 
 not see them. ... I am increasingly sure that our Lord's words 
 touching Himself, " It is expedient for you that I go away," 
 are true of all those to whom to live is Christ. Through their 
 outward departure we get, even from them or through them, 
 what we never got while they were with us visibly. Surely they 
 yet are with us. " We are come to the spirits of just men made 
 perfect." But you know all this. You have been through the 
 waters. Even if we did not know and see this, the time here is
 
 212 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 short. Therefore, let those who weep be as though they wept 
 not. Yet I feel the chill and blank the last few days have made. 
 How many others, too, will feel it. Yours ever affectionately, 
 
 ANDREW JUKES. 
 
 The spring of 1889, from March till June, was spent 
 by Mrs. Russell Gurney in a Sicilian journey, with Miss 
 Keary as her companion, and some lingering in Italy 
 on their way home. In August she started again for 
 Baireuth, with her nephew, Alfred Gurney, and Miss 
 Olive Birrell, to hear and behold the Parsifal Play. 
 
 From Mrs. PEARSALL SMITH to E. R. G. 
 
 BABBACOMBE CLIFF, TORQUAY, 
 May 5, 1889. 
 
 I have heard some of thy letters to our blessed Ladye (Lady 
 Mount-Temple), and am brought so near to thee thereby, that I 
 cannot help sending thee a little love-greeting from this place 
 of beauty. As I look out over the bay this morning while wait- 
 ing for breakfast, the lovely water shows all the colours of the 
 rainbow in the most exquisitely subdued tints lying across it in 
 great lines of beauty. It is so like the Mediterranean that it is 
 hard to believe I am not again on the Riviera. How exquisite 
 Sicily must be ! What a temple ! What a pathway to reach it ! 
 And what a vision after ! [See letter about the Temple of Segestce 
 in the Sicilian letters.] I have intensely enjoyed it all. And I 
 shall never be satisfied till I have seen that temple with my 
 own eyes. 
 
 ... I have had an " opening " on what it means in the Bible 
 to be satisfied. It means just what we mean when we say to a 
 friend, " I shall be satisfied with anything you do for me." We 
 may not like what is done, but we are satisfied with it because 
 our friend does it, and in the end we generally come to the point 
 of liking it. Now we must be all of us satisfied with what God
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 213 
 
 does, because we know He must do the best ; and it is in this 
 sense that Paul says, " I am content with such things as I have." 
 I believe it is a matter of loyalty for us to be satisfied with what 
 God provides, and when we begin with being satisfied we very 
 often end with liking. It seems to me anybody can be content 
 who gets down to the bottom of things in this way, and looks 
 upon satisfaction as being thus an act of our wills rather than a 
 condition of our emotions. Thy sister, HANNAH. 
 
 From Mrs. PEARSALL SMITH to E. R. G. 
 
 July 8, 1889. 
 
 The sight of thy handwriting on an envelope with an English 
 stamp was balm to my soul this morning. I heard thee was at 
 home, but this was more tangible, and established a closer link, 
 and I am so glad to have thee back. England has felt as if 
 partly bereft of its charms with thee out of it. Now I say to 
 myself, even when I do not see thee, " Oh, but she is here ! she 
 is here ! " And this is just the way it is about God. We do not 
 see Him or feel Him, perhaps, but we have His letter with the 
 human stamp on it, and we say jubilantly, " Oh, He is here ! He 
 is here ! " Christ is our letter with the human stamp, and there 
 is no possibility left for us to doubt that God is with us. And 
 this includes all. 
 
 To ELLEN MARY GURNEY. 
 
 BAIREUTH, August 5, 1889. 
 
 I feel more dumb than I can tell you. There seems nothing 
 to be said, and so infinitely much to be felt and thought and 
 lived after beholding this life-drama. I think I must try to write 
 you some of my impressions, in order to keep them more in con- 
 sciousness ; but not to-day, for a sense of fatigue paralyses my 
 pen, or my will power, perhaps from the lassitude that comes after 
 the intense excitement of supreme hours. The day of perfect 
 summer warmth, refreshed by tender breezes, was just fitted for
 
 2i 4 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 our drive to the theatre and back, through the pretty, leafy, gently 
 ascending road ; and between the acts we could stand, and stroll 
 about in the grounds. Our seats in the theatre were the best 
 that could be chosen, in the midst of the building, so that we saw 
 admirably and heard every note. I experienced no shade of 
 disappointment, and am unable to criticise anything. The music 
 floated around the ideas and scenes suggested, as the atmosphere 
 which belonged to them. I cannot say what I should think of it 
 in itself. I can only think of it in relationship to those ideas and 
 scenes. The whole thing seems to me a divine inspiration, and 
 I count among the very highest privileges of my very enriched 
 life to have heard and seen and felt it. 
 
 I have been living on the thought of " Parsifal " since Sunday, 
 and only sent you such a bare scrap, so dry you might hear it 
 rattle. I continue astonished at the miracle of this wondrous 
 revelation of Art, as the minister of highest moral and spiritual 
 teaching, breathed through its own atmosphere of music, which 
 bears it into the senses and soul of hearers. It speaks, " and the 
 ear comes out to hear." 
 
 To Mr. FREDERIC SHIELDS. 
 
 NEUHAUSEN, RHEINFALLS, SCHWEIZ, 
 August 1 8, 1889. 
 
 I can never tell you how much I enjoyed "Parsifal." It was 
 like a celestial revelation. A life-drama, indeed, with spiritual 
 life flickering through all the mysteries of growth, through inno- 
 cence, temptation, deliverance, the overcoming in God, and the 
 glory through this overcoming of being made a deliverer to 
 others. It seemed to me a miracle that in this age, when " Art 
 for Art's sake " is the motto, such high and indeed spiritual teach- 
 ing should, be the inspiration of the grandest work of musical 
 conception of our day.
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 215 
 
 To OLIVE BIRRELL. 
 
 AYLESTONE HILL, HEREFORD, 
 January 12, 1890. 
 
 DEAREST OLIVE, I have been struggling out of dumbness 
 towards you for a week, and now I welcome the voice which 
 provokes though it kindly disclaims an answer. 
 
 I am riveted by all you tell me of Mrs. Walter Hughes. It 
 is beautiful to see how her prayer has been answered, that she 
 might help her fellow-creatures, though by the mutilation of the 
 very instrument that she wanted to help them. That's so like a 
 way of God's, I think. You seek to do something in a certain 
 way, and God disables you. 
 
 Do you know, I find the lovely ordinary country sounds and 
 scenes so exquisitely helpful and hopeful, I don't know how to 
 slink back into the wicked town. This morning my fly did not 
 come as ordered, and I walked half a mile before sunrise, the 
 moon still tenderly brilliant and the birds not in the full madness 
 of spring joy, but still most happily expectant : it all seemed on 
 the very verge of wonderful revelation; and then, the feast of 
 memory and hope and presence in the little Lady Chapel of the 
 cathedral ! I never remember such a day in January certainly, 
 and I dare say nipping cold will come and blight me, and send 
 me humbly content to creep into my shell. But it's a great 
 thing to have seen and heard such wonders, and I take them as 
 good auguries for you and me, this year and on and on. Ever 
 lovingly yours, EMELIA GURNEY. 
 
 To the Rev. ANDREW JUKES. 
 
 AYLESTONE HILL, HEREFORD, 
 May 21, 1890. 
 
 You have always shown a dear interest about my beloved 
 uncle, John Venn, and have often sent him a message, and I 
 ought before this to have written to tell you he was safely across 
 Jordan. I am thankful, indeed, for the wonderful privilege of 
 being beside his bed for the last month of his life. He suffered
 
 216 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 a good deal during the last week. It was a very silent, very 
 patient, very loving, very thankful dying bed. From the first he 
 seemed to me impressed with the mystery and wonder beyond 
 words of that into which his spirit was entering. I send you a 
 local paper with a little sketch of his past life. 
 
 Now please, beloved friend, do not answer this. I know your 
 heart. And your head and pen must not be overdone. Your 
 ever grateful and affectionate EMELIA GURNEY. 
 
 To EDWARD CLIFFORD. 
 
 3 ORME SQUARE. 
 
 Do you remember Browning's poem about the Boy and the 
 Angel? Even God wanted Theocrite's special note in all Crea- 
 tion's chorus. This subject you will see touched in Rose 
 Oliphant's Sympneumatic H. She says, " Love is known only in 
 the giving." I think it is giving and receiving. I think in the 
 Incarnation Christ says, " Lovest thou Me ? " and craves our 
 love, the kiss, the anointing by the called by name, and suffers 
 till it is given. I think love does and must suffer here by its 
 very nature and by these conditions ; do you ? The root question 
 has, I think, to do with that difficult one is personality eternal ? 
 As we believe in the Divine Personality, I think we cleave to the 
 personal in each unit ; even our own, as well as that of each 
 other and that of the united whole, the Bride of Christ. Only 
 He can have eyes to see what that Personality is to which each 
 member contributes its atom. And only the saints as one whole 
 can see what His is, though each atom may see the blessed vision 
 of Him that his own purged eyes are capable of beholding. I 
 think, on the whole, however, you will find Mrs. O. very searching 
 and stimulating almost terrible, yet salutary. Yours in memo- 
 ries, love, and hope, E. R. G. 
 
 To the same. 
 
 3 ORME SQUARE, January i, 1891. 
 
 " I needed you." What a joy-bringing word that is to the 
 human heart, and I venture to believe it is to the Divine Heart.
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 217 
 
 I think, too, no one human being utters it with any deep truth to 
 another (except on a purely material plane), unless in that other's 
 heart the response has ready grown, and / needed you. Your note 
 gave me one of the new mercies that is an earnest of His mercies 
 being new every morning through this unproved year. Ever 
 affectionately yours, EMELIA GURNEY. 
 
 To the same, 
 
 HOTEL DE FRANCE, PAU, BASSES PYRENEES, 
 May 6, 1891. 
 
 How strange that Time should meddle so much with every- 
 thing in us, and yet be after all nothing. By its means we are 
 stretched out to experience the most extraordinary medley of 
 emotions. I wish to keep them all. I should like to keep 
 everything living in fulness of life that I have ever felt, only each 
 in due proportion of colour. Sometimes I can believe that every 
 moment of life is a heart-beat of God straight into our hearts, 
 and know its infinite preciousness, and fancy what it would be to 
 be absolutely awake to the import, beauty, and passionate love of 
 it all. 
 
 I think it was the day I received your note that in the evening 
 hour we went for a stroll. We bordered fields of high grass full 
 of large daisies and scabious and flowering grasses. Through 
 them or by their side were little brooks, not so hasty and joyous 
 as those on the slopes ; they only whispered. The sun was low, 
 and his broad lights and deepening shadows were all veiled over 
 with deepening mist We sat on some stones and looked into a 
 broad dashing stream that emerged from deep shade of over- 
 bowering trees, and was lost again just below us under the bridge. 
 The sound seemed monotonously to shut out the very memory 
 of din. Then from a quarter of a mile further along the road 
 the sad, strange voice of a church bell, not tolling, not ringing, 
 but in broken numbers, smote on our hearts, and in a dreamy 
 way we were conscious that two or three women had come along 
 a path that joined the descending road in their Sunday beautiful
 
 2i8 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 costume of long black cloaks falling from their heads nearly to 
 the ground. We turned and watched them gather along the 
 road near the church down the hill. All women, in long black 
 cloaks twenty, I should think, of them ; and half of them, I 
 suppose, were carrying a bier from the church, headed by flicker- 
 ing candles in the hands 01" some, and two chanting priests ; and 
 white was over the bier, so we supposed it was a young girl who 
 had found the evening so early in her day, and was being carried 
 by women's hands across the road to the waving grass of the 
 little cemetery. But all was veiled by distance and twilight, 
 mixed with the faintest beams of struggling sunshine amongst 
 the woods and beyond on the heights. It was just a scene on 
 the magic mirror of life, and all nature was in harmony with it. 
 A little ripple on the waters of life and death ; no name, no asso- 
 ciations had marked it for us as more, and that seemed to increase 
 the pathos which is not grief. 
 
 Argeles is a dell that creeps around and around into our 
 hearts. Its quiet, its isolation without any savageness or stern- 
 ness, its birds, its ever-changing clouded heights and nest-like 
 inings of downy greenery, surpasses any place I ever stayed in, 
 and yet I have told you nothing to help you picture it. I am not 
 sure that it is just what your artist eye would wish to picture ; 
 you would better like to rest from picturing. 
 
 I hope you have read every word of the lives of L. and A. 
 Oliphant, though I don't quite like the way she has handled the 
 forsaking the world for the unworldly hope. It is beautifully and 
 very judiciously written, I think, and the most interesting episode 
 ever written ! Your affectionate AMIGA. 
 
 To the same. 
 3 ORME SQUARE, July 26 [her birthday}. 
 
 I cannot help telling you how to-day, a day of lifelong memo- 
 ries to me, and of, now, such loneliness as to sight and touch of 
 the beloveds who loved me from my youth upwards, you have 
 supported and ministered to me fresh and gracious tokens. And
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 219 
 
 then the abundant gift of those jessamine and that lily; I 
 cannot tell you what they meant to me on this day ! And 
 then the picture revelations of summer and winter, epitomising 
 more than words can say, but all gathered up in the chant if amour 
 that must be my motto for the evening years ; for life has indeed 
 been this love-song to me, Triste et joyeux tour a tour. The 
 believing, the knowing that it comes from the heart of love and 
 is leading us back thither is the wonderful truth to make us 
 endure, is it not ? 
 
 This morning I thought, " I wish I felt more exactly as I should 
 feel of thrilling joy at the thought of fourteen years of exile being 
 over since my R. went and twenty-one since my mother went, in 
 the so much nearer reunion. Supposing I were on the eve of 
 setting out to meet them at some place across the seas, how I 
 should then be anticipating and counting the days, and planning 
 to take what they liked and I needed, &c." But heavenly shops 
 for humility and divine knowledge are, alas ! dimmer in their 
 deeper reality than outfitting and booksellers' ones. Your affec- 
 tionate E. R. G. 
 
 To the same. 
 
 Holy Thursday, 26th. 
 
 I am always so fond of Thursdays the feet-washing day, 
 the Holy Communion Day, the Ascension Day. And the 
 coupling of those third and fourth verses of the thirteenth of St. 
 John seems the most marvellous of all combinations, and at the 
 same time is the very key to life ; the Ideal and Actual at one in 
 that supreme knowledge of our origin and destination. 
 
 To the same. 
 
 3 ORME SQUARE, October 15, 1891. 
 
 What do you mean by saying you are going to Linlathen for 
 sixty hours? You cannot mean Saint Erskine's Linlathen, my 
 Linlathen, the home of my soul. You must at once write and 
 tell me. Why, the very sound, the look of the word polarises
 
 220 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 each atom of my being. Before Broadlands it was my most 
 sacred spot. Broadlands opened just as the door of Linlathen 
 was closing. 
 
 I rejoice to think of your reading your and my Wordsworth 
 to Lady G., and then entering into the magnificent rush and ful- 
 ness of life of " The Ring and the Book." Yes, what passages 
 there are there ! I could not read Wordsworth very soon after 
 Browning : one's heart-beats must subside first ; fiery-red blood 
 must subside into a sort of stiller nature condition, ere one can 
 listen and " lean one's ear in many a secret place " with him, 
 
 October 17. 
 
 I must follow you into those beloved doors, and loiter along 
 that corridor. And look with you at the pictures so dear to 
 blessed Mr. Erskine the "Schoolmaster" especially, and Boni- 
 fazio, and the long narrow Virgin with the ruins of a past 
 Dispensation ; and you will see his study where I often read to 
 him. Your present host and hostess I love also. How they 
 devoted young days to him ! Well, may some of his spirit come 
 upon you ! 
 
 Oh, Death in Life ! the days that are no more. Yours 
 ever, E. R. G. 
 
 From the Rev. ANDREW JUKES to E. R. G. 
 
 UPPER EGLINTON ROAD, WOOLWICH, 
 June 10, 1891. 
 
 MY DEAR MRS. GURNEY, You arer often present to my 
 thoughts, but this week twice, both yesterday and the day before, 
 you were specially brought before me by two notes the one from 
 Edward Clifford, and the other from your dear Alfred the first 
 of which says, " Mrs. Gurney very suffering, I fear ; " the other, 
 " My aunt is deep in Jacob Boehme," or words to this effect. So 
 I am drawn to send you this line, to show that whether you are 
 "suffering" or "deep in Jacob Boehme," my thoughts and 
 prayers are with you. I can hardly think that the solution of
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 221 
 
 the apparent difference between E. C.'s and Alfred's notes is to 
 be found in supposing your suffering results from being deep in 
 Jacob Boehme. I can quite understand any reader of the in- 
 spired shoemaker often confessing that he is out of his depth, 
 and yet not suffering, but rather rejoicing that the stream of 
 grace which we have known, " to the ankles " and " to the knees," 
 has become to us, as to Ezekiel, " waters to swim in, a river that 
 cannot be passed over," of which we can only say, " Oh, the depth 
 of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God ; for of 
 Him, and through Him, and to Him, are all things." More than 
 once in bygone days this has been the feeling with which I have 
 closed old Jacob Boehme's pages. 
 
 But I am wandering from my point, which was, and is, to ask 
 you, if you are equal to it, to send me a line with some tidings of 
 yourself and of what you are learning. I am in a school of wait- 
 ing, a blessed school for poor impatient flesh and blood. Yours 
 ever affectionately, ANDREW JUKES. 
 
 To the Rev. ANDREW JUKES. 
 
 BOVEY COTTAGE, BETCHWORTH, July 10, 1893. 
 MY DEAR MR. JUKES, Your blessed little book has been 
 pouring out of its infinitude for us during the last three days ! 
 So modest in size, it yet presents us with concentrated nutriment 
 for all life. Its simplicity as well as its profundity seems to me 
 so perfect. I look forward to reading each instruction to my 
 little household every Saturday evening, besides, I hope, medi- 
 tating over it myself alone. I hear your dear voice in the 
 Preface and very much through the Epiphany Sundays. I did 
 not know that our natural light (as we call it) was brighter in 
 April and May, when Whitsuntide comes, than any other time of 
 the year. Every parable of Nature to which you point us is so 
 precious ! But the link that binds the succession of Sunday 
 teaching, as well as Epistle and Gospel and sometimes Collect 
 together, as seen by you, we should never (or / should never, 
 with my too careless glance) have seen without you. The
 
 222 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 pleasant size and easy print of the book make it a delightfully 
 convenient channel for your outflow of truth. I cannot help a 
 little greedy longing that each portion had been longer; but 
 you give us enough to stimulate us to seek for ourselves. How 
 much blessing God has showered upon us through your open 
 window ! With deep thankfulness, your truly affectionate and 
 venerating EMELIA R. GURNEY. 
 
 To OLIVE BIRRELL. 
 
 3 ORME SQU ARE, January 16, 1896. 
 
 Oh no, I have not the least desire to convert you to a belief 
 in Spiritualism. Accurately speaking, I should never say I 
 believed in Spiritualism. I should say I believed in spirits in- 
 numerable, those made perfect and those very imperfect, pressing 
 around us, and learning through the Church the mystery hid 
 from former ages before the Incarnation. We build our Faith on 
 utterly different foundations from any outward evidence, even on 
 the intuitions from the God in whom we live and move and 
 have our being, who claims us as His offspring. We are con- 
 firmed in this Faith by our own experience of His drawing, and 
 by the evidence we derive from the outward fruits of this Faith in 
 others ; these predispose us to receive the knowledge of Christ 
 which yet passes knowledge, through the testimony of Prophets 
 and Apostles, through written words and actions. Amongst such 
 records there are so many stories and hints that contradict the 
 judgment of the present Sadducean age, that I think well-proved 
 present-day evidence of facts that point to the non-isolation of 
 such old Christian stories as well as others are or might be useful 
 to many. If such dominion of mind or spirit over matter can be 
 proved now, it may remove some of the barriers felt to make the 
 Gospels unbelievable. 
 
 Then you did indeed send me a grand and touching poem on 
 the " Ladies of Sorrow." I admired it immensely, but I am 
 against your picturing yourself as in the powers of these ladies. 
 And I want to think of them as under the tutelage of the three,
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 223 
 
 che miran piu profondo, as Dante says, who really lead the 
 company to which we belong. Your very loving E. G. 
 
 To a Friend passing through great suffering of body and mind. 
 
 Between 1878 and 1886. 
 
 I have this moment received your touching note, and my 
 heart leaps towards yours with sympathy. Ah ! I know not 
 whether the peace I now enjoy would stand the shock of long- 
 continued wearing pain and terrible apprehension. In the fur- 
 nace there is not always the consciousness of the presence of the 
 Son of God, or the flames would seem but cool fanning breezes. 
 It seems as though suffering must be a terrible reality, the 
 crushing pressure of an immense weight the Cross, indeed, with 
 its accompanying darkness, and if Patience has her perfect work, 
 it seems all that we can look for. Still joy in the very flames 
 may be granted, and you are eagerly looking for this to carry you 
 above the overwhelming waves. You feel, you say, you want 
 more faith, more submission, more of the spirit of prayer, and 
 you say, " How can I get this ? " Are you not sure that if I had 
 the power to give you this I would set off by the first train to 
 give it you? Are you not much more sure that our nearest, 
 dearest, closest One does give, is giving you drop by drop, as a 
 mother her child, all things freely. Can you just lie back in His 
 arms, and receive ? You have asked ; He has given ; and now 
 believing ts receiving. 
 
 A command is sometimes better than a promise. " Fear 
 not." 
 
 You seem to be kept very close to only one thing, the Cross of 
 Christ. I do so respond to what you say, " The difficulty is to 
 persevere day after day, when you get weak and depressed." . I 
 can hardly contemplate the extent of that difficulty in your case. 
 I know what it is in my own little different way. It has been a 
 help to me to realise a truth so brought home to me at Broad- 
 lands last year, in an address I should have called, " Weakness 
 a condition of strength."
 
 224 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 And when I found myself weak, from company, or little 
 worries, or headache, or having to do something I was utterly 
 unprepared for, I have tried to act upon it, and just, as it were, 
 cast myself on this very account upon The fulness^ knowing, 
 assuring myself, with reiterations, that this is God's own chosen 
 condition for the reception of His own strength. " Out of weak- 
 ness were made strong." " My grace is sufficient for thee." 
 What, may I not have a little strength of my own, to help myself 
 to persevere ? May I not have this thorn and its effects on my 
 body and spirit removed in order to get strength from Thee ? 
 No, " Lay down, thou weary one, lay down thy head upon My 
 breast." In just giving up and letting His sweetness and com- 
 forting surround you, His strength also to bear and to do will 
 follow. 
 
 Yesterday I reader you the words of next Sunday's Epistle, 
 " God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tried above that 
 ye are able, but will with the temptation or trial make a way to 
 escape." 
 
 Now I believe in the furnace you are much nearer to Him than 
 I am, and that He is teaching you deeper, higher lessons than I 
 can learn out of it. But I know that sometimes in the furnace 
 the tried one is kept blind and unconscious of all this, and a by- 
 stander may be permitted to minister what the tried one cannot 
 perceive. So I venture to write as I do. 
 
 How unexpectedly God meets us with blessings ! Now you 
 can just lean back, in all the loveliness of God's creation, and 
 breathe in freely His love. For surely, if He gives you the Cross 
 often and for long together, and keeps you from doubting His 
 love in this gift, He would have you take with delight those 
 things He gives you richly to enjoy. 
 
 We also are very happy here, in our peaceful circumstances. 
 The time at Broadlands was truly delightful, though I do not 
 feel I can tell much about it, especially by pen. The union of 
 various minds in Christ Himself, rather than in certain doctrines 
 about Christ, seemed to me very remarkable, and the growing
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 225 
 
 sense, during the four or five days, of His presence amongst these 
 united and longing hearts. The last evening there were three 
 most wonderful discourses, in succession, on the Lord's Supper : 
 the first very broad, a kind of natural theology, but very devout, 
 affectionate, and touching; the second most interesting, from 
 a converted Jew, who dwelt much on the symbolism of the 
 Paschal Ritual; and the third, from one of the highest Sacra- 
 mentarians in the English Church, deeply touching and spiritual. 
 The daylight departed as we sat listening to these wonderful 
 words of faith and love, and the next morning early we almost 
 all went to the Holy Feast in Romsey Abbey. 
 
 There were evangelistic services at the same time, and 
 several appeared awakened to newness of life. God grant the 
 work begun in many souls and carried on in many others may be 
 yet further deepened, and enlarged, and multiplied. There are 
 nights and days, summers and winters, in the spiritual life, and 
 the changes of seasons may be of the " all things " that " work 
 together for good to those who love God." It is blessed to think 
 that our Father is the Husbandman, who prunes and purges the 
 branches in the true Vine, and takes away that which is not of 
 Christ in His members. How wonderful it is to get a little 
 glimpse of the unity of the spiritual body of Christ, and even the 
 "imperfect members," and those that are not, as well as those 
 curiously forming in the lower parts of the earth, are all in God's 
 book. That verse in Psalm 139 came to me with such a new 
 interest after reading in St. Paul of the body of Christ, and we 
 members in particular. That seemed like the utterance of Christ 
 in humanity. 
 
 Yesterday morning, when you were much in my thoughts, my 
 chapter for the day said much for you St. Luke xvii. 5 and 6, 
 and the igth verse: "Thy faith hath made thee whole." The 
 Lord's will and power seem always flowing ; man's faith seems to 
 open the door to their entrance within. Then again, I was struck 
 with the Lord's words to Moses, " Wherefore criest thou unto 
 Me ? Speak unto the children of Israel that they go forward." 
 
 P
 
 226 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 There are moments for prayers, and moments for going forward, 
 in the strength appropriated by faith. 
 
 You seem oppressed with more than you can well bear, and 
 to be casting apprehensive looks forward ; so I gather that your 
 terrible cross is still pressing heavily on you. If you have not 
 come to an end of its pain, you have not, I am sure, come to an 
 end of the peace that comes through it ! I hardly dare call my 
 grief a cross, the finished life of my beloved one, hidden in the 
 blessed Lord ! Yet the lonely path here is the path of the cross 
 too ; only comparatively so very free from the thorns and cares 
 that others have. Still, sometimes I am conscious of just nothing 
 but the absence of the longed-for voice and touch ! 
 
 Well, one may find out many things by feeling what love is. 
 It is perfected and completed by the absence of the beloved, I 
 think. And I know now how I would give my life to help him 
 or please him, and would save him from the slightest pang, and 
 never be content till he was on the way to all he could possibly 
 receive of happiness and sweetness. And much, much more 
 must the love of the Altogether Lovely One be to us, " who died 
 for desire of us " wonderful thought ! And yearns for us now to 
 be with Him above ! It needs all eternity for us to find out the 
 height and depth and length and breadth of that love. Let us 
 give ourselves up to it completely, without the least misgiving. 
 
 A year of my loneliness has now passed away. Often a few 
 hours have seemed to contain an eternity of grief; yet now, as I 
 glance back, it seems short, and I can realise that in the first em- 
 brace of reunion it will all vanish away as nothing. When God 
 wipes away our tears it will be as though they had never been 
 shed, and more than this. I am sure we shall find that every 
 pang has made way for some precious capacity for more abun- 
 dant spiritual life and use and joy. 
 
 In my great, shall I call it sorrow? in the all-absorbing 
 thought of my beloved, interwoven as it is with so many hues of 
 beauty, of pathos, of tenderness, of anguish in the vanishing, no
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 227 
 
 anxiety enters : all is fixed in the calm Eternal Will now ; and I 
 look out from this upon your anxious time of endeavour and un- 
 certainty with much sympathy. I know so well what it is. It is 
 a precious time, as well as a painful time. Fill it with lavish 
 love, I should say. Self cannot be too much lost in our Head. 
 To cheer, to help the man, in his struggle with the depressing 
 earth work and conflict, seems to me now more than ever such a 
 high calling. 
 
 What a thorny path you have had ! I can almost feel as if I 
 had comparatively gained the bliss of heaven. My heart's trea- 
 sure there ; and not so many years, even if my life is prolonged 
 to the threescore and ten, ere I may be with him. 
 
 I feel impelled to write to you to-night, for on looking back 
 on our conversation, I feared I had given a false and exaggerated 
 colour to what I wanted to express. How difficult it is to put 
 these things into words ! I do not wish to affirm more than this, 
 which I think I have learnt : that it is in the most absolute de- 
 spair of self and the creature that trust in our present Lord seems 
 born. That absolute trust in His carrying on His own work in 
 us, by us, and for us, instead of crippling energy and reason, 
 seems to set them free, to be energised by His Spirit. And that 
 filling our gaze with just what He is, and what He whispers, sets 
 at rest the striving and uncertain effort that arises when we doubt 
 as to who is sitting at the helm. I fear that I may have led you 
 to think I am faithful to the directions He gives ; whereas I be- 
 lieve I am often disobedient from heedlessness and indolence. 
 But I cannot doubt that He will overcome my evil with His 
 goodness, and that my hope cannot be put to shame, in looking 
 to the loving-kindness that blots out rather than to the blots I 
 make. In fact, each one in self is nothing but a blot; so 
 the only way is to turn altogether from one's blot to His 
 light. 
 
 As to details, we may be constantly mistaking and stumbling ; 
 but He lifts up and teaches us by these very things, and His 
 patience is proved by them to be inexhaustible. We often seem
 
 228 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 to think we are to be shepherds to ourselves, instead of only 
 silly sheep ! 
 
 Your letter, just arrived, fills my heart with aching sadness 
 for you, and yet with thankfulness also to the loving Spirit who 
 is leading you forth into the land of righteousness. It is one of 
 His wonder-working ways to hold your soul in patience under 
 such a long-continued strain on heart and nerves, and I can 
 only stand still and wonder. We often undervalue the work of 
 our Lord in us ; in fact, I believe our eyes are holden from per- 
 ceiving it, lest we should subtly mix up self with that " Not I, 
 but Christ who dwelleth in me." But those outside can plainly 
 see that the poor little self, I, could not continue in patience or 
 endurance without the Comforter who helps infirmities. 
 
 Patience will perfect you. Let her have her own perfect way, 
 and you will be perfect and entire, wanting nothing. Is not this 
 a glorious hope, that our Lord shall see of the travail of His soul 
 in you and be satisfied '? 
 
 Some one was pointing out the meaning of " compassion." 
 Our Lord's passion on earth is continued, as it were, by His co- 
 passion with His members on earth now. He passions with you. 
 And it is said, " If we suffer with Him or if we co-passion with 
 Him, that we may be co-glorified with Him " (Rom. viii.). I 
 am sure we cannot too much realise and meditate on His abso- 
 lute oneness with us. His being knit in, I mean, bone of our 
 bone, flesh of our flesh, so that every pang is conveyed to His 
 heart and brain. Then, abiding in us, He calls us to abide in 
 Him, which must be brought about through His redemption of 
 us, and needs to be worked out by our conscious reception of 
 the fact. 
 
 In the furnace the Son of Man is with you, and He cannot 
 let a hair of your head be singed. May the God of hope fill you 
 with hope. 
 
 BROADLANDS, ROMSEY. 
 
 Would that I could send you some of the breathings of trust, 
 faith, and utter confidence in our Lord that have been evoked
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 229 
 
 during the last few days here. Would that you could have seen 
 some of the shining faces, and have heard some of the testimonies 
 to the faithfulness of our Lord to these witnesses in their hours 
 of need. Some one has said, " Do not let us walk on God's 
 promises as we do on thin ice, fearing it may give way, but let us 
 step forth as on the firm rock. The more we need, the more we 
 lean, the more we have. Waves and billows may go over our 
 heads, but it is impossible that a hair of our heads shall 
 perish." 
 
 In Jesus there is wisdom for us as well as righteousness 
 " treasures of wisdom and knowledge," hidden, but to be brought 
 out to us especially in our times of weakness and need. I find 
 these men of faith just drawing out these riches moment by 
 moment. They say they have no reservoirs. So, dear friend, as 
 you journey along the way prepared for you, thank God every 
 step is prepared, and our Lord will go with you step by step. 
 You will just see His wisdom and throw all responsibility on Him, 
 and use His strength, and lean on His arm, and sleep and rest 
 when He gives it, without carefulness. And we are not to strain 
 to see with our own eyes and to hold fast, to rise up early and 
 late take rest ; but just believe that He is caring and watching 
 with us. 
 
 " When we are worrying we are not trusting, and when we are 
 trusting we are not worrying." An American lady here tells me of 
 losing her way in a Virginian forest where the path was overgrown 
 with vegetation. She said she found if she was straining her 
 eyes to see it, she lost it ; but if she walked on instinctively, she 
 kept it. Nothing blinds us like over-anxiety. I preach this to 
 you. What would be my condition in your circumstances, I 
 know not. But I think our Lord will keep your necessarily 
 anxious heart in a measure of stillness in Him. 
 
 Alas ! I had hoped the clouds would have cleared at least 
 more than they have done. This persistence of the cross to 
 which you seemed so nailed is indeed very mysterious. A variety 
 of bitter cups you have to taste, my poor friend, and I think with
 
 2 3 o LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 these pangs an hour of darkness seems often the accompaniment. 
 Where is the line 
 
 M With His own hand He seemed intent to aggravate my woe." 
 
 Well, it is not a strange and unprecedented thing, though I 
 fancy the pang that specially aches always appears so to the 
 sufferer. But we know suffering is God's own school, and almost 
 all His children have had to pass through that school. I think 
 the weakness of body and worn-away nerves accompanying other 
 trials must be worse than anything, for that condition really pre- 
 vents the soul from consciously grasping the love and strength of 
 God. But just patiently lying still in God's hands must, I am 
 sure, be very precious in His sight, and work out something very 
 glorious for the poor sufferer. 
 
 Dear friend, I have been so little tried in comparison to you ; 
 yet at moments I feel as if my heart must break with indescrib- 
 able anguish. So do not speak of my faith any more, for where 
 is it when I do not rejoice with my beloved one's joy and give 
 thanks for His deliverance and victory ? Let us lift up our heads, 
 our redemption draweth nigh. 
 
 Mrs. Russell Gurney's warm friendship with Dr. 
 George MacDonald and his family began in London 
 soon after the publication of his poem, "Within and 
 Without," and continued to the end of her life. The 
 following are some of his later letters to her : 
 
 From Dr. GEORGE MACDONALD to E. R. G. 
 
 THE RETREAT, HAMMERSMITH, 
 October 1877. 
 
 VERY DEAR FRIEND, Mr. and Mrs. C.-Temple are coming 
 up to-morrow, and are going to take me to Stanhope Street on 
 Thursday. If you will come and see me there I shall by that 
 time be able to talk a little better to you. I had when you left
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 231 
 
 me the disappointed feeling that I had answered one or two 
 things you said very unsatisfactorily. I knew I had gold (for I 
 had thought much about them), but I could only lay my hands 
 on coppers. I am better, but don't feel better yet. What poor 
 trustees we are ! Sometimes, when we have a whole subter- 
 ranean lake of blessed hope, we are yet fearful about some mere 
 trifle. But at least I am learning to obey, by refusing to be 
 care-full. 
 
 I think, perhaps, the last few years of my life, when I am 
 quite old, I shall be allowed to speak to people about these 
 things. What God will. Affectionately yours, 
 
 GEORGE MACDONALD. 
 
 VILLA CATTANEO, NERVI, GENOA, 
 November 12, 1877. 
 
 VERY DEAR FRIEND, What would you think to see the 
 weather, and hardly anything but weather, on which I am looking 
 out? Ever since I entered Italy last Wednesday nothing but 
 rain, grey sponge squeezed by the hand of the wind. 
 
 But I have a jolly wood fire, the smell of which would be 
 enough to make one feel at home either in the cave of a hermit 
 or a palace of gold and ivory. There must be a home-heart to 
 the universe, seeing so many things tend to soothe and comfort 
 us, and say, " All is well." 
 
 I have not got to work yet. It takes much longer to get 
 over fatigue than it did twenty years ago. When will our youth 
 return? That is hid with Christ in God, and is safe. When 
 He shall appear, that will come with Him. Eternal youth is the 
 redemption of the body. 
 
 What would be the most dreadful thing, do you think ? To 
 me it seemed the other day that it would be for God to let any 
 fault or wrong in me pass ; for Him not to mind, not to care 
 about it. Better hell a thousand times than that. Let Him 
 forgive, splendidly, tenderly, but let it be forgiveness, and not 
 never minding. Let Him make every excuse, every honest 
 excuse for us, for that is but fair; but let not our Father be
 
 232 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 content that one spot should be passed by, or one shade less 
 than His righteousness satisfy Him in us ! 
 
 M. is no better for this weather, but she is only on the wheel 
 of the great potter. Oh, what will not come out of it all? 
 What a good a good so great that I need faith to give me 
 the courage to face it. It is not death alone that is awful 
 without faith ; but life is to me so vast and unknown, that one 
 might well fear that more than death, but for faith in Him 
 who loves us and is our life. 
 
 1877 (?). 
 
 Will you give our love to your husband. I hope he is 
 pretty well. Blessed be the God that makes us love each 
 other. Is not that part of the meaning of the God of Love ? 
 It is the one thing He cares about. I see more and more 
 into the religion there is in our relation to our fellow-men. I 
 come nearer to understanding that if a man does not love his 
 brother, he cannot love God. 
 
 Happy are we that we are utterly in the power of the 
 Father; helpless against Him as the struggling little pulpy 
 thing is in the arms of his strong mother. Sometimes one is 
 tempted to say, Would it were all over, and we altogether in 
 the great thought room beyond ! How one is tethered by the 
 heavy chain of gravitation ! But I do not say it. Let me be 
 just as He wills, for His will is my will. Until we are ripe 
 it is not good we should drop ; then we shall hang no longer. 
 
 I am so glad you enjoy the sound the wind makes in the 
 leaves among which I hang. On the other side I send you 
 a sound of a going, that this letter may be a little pleasure as 
 well as trouble to you. Dear sister Emelia, yours lovingly, 
 GEORGE MACDONALD AND WIFE. 
 
 " O wind of God, that blowest in the mind, 
 
 Blow, blow, and wake the gentle spring in me ; 
 Blow, swifter blow, a strong, warm, summer wind, 
 Till all the flowers with eyes come out to see ; 
 Blow till the fruit hangs red on every tree, 
 And our high-soaring song-larks meet Thy Dove, 
 Bringing Thy harvest home, hearts laden with Thy love.
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 233 
 
 Blow not the less though winter cometh then ; 
 
 Blow, wind of God, blow hither changes keen ; 
 Let the spring creep into the ground again, 
 
 The flowers close all their eyes, not be seen ; 
 
 All lives in Thee that ever once hath been : 
 Blow, fill my upper air with icy storms ; 
 Breathe cold, O wind of God, and kill my canker-worms." 
 
 PORTO FIND, September i, 1878. 
 
 DEAREST SISTER EMELIA, I would have written to you long 
 ago, but I have been pressed with work that has a set time to 
 it, and so have put off too long. I am now seeing a book 
 through the press which I think you will find sympathy with. 
 It is another like " Thomas Wingfold," and will be out in the 
 beginning of November, I think. I do not know that I shall 
 write any more of the sort. The whole thing is beyond writing 
 about ; it is only fit for living. Sometimes the change that 
 must come in me seems so immense, it is nothing less than a 
 birth from above. But if there be One who could call us into 
 thought, He is able for this too. We have but a poor glim- 
 mering notion of what life means. If we were one with the 
 life eternal, the delight of mere consciousness of being would, 
 I think, be something unspeakable. The greatest bliss is just 
 the one thing we cannot do without. As often as we get a 
 little glimmer of truth, we are ready to feel as if now we could 
 get on and be at peace a while ; whereas it is every moment 
 a breathing of God's breath, a walking with God, a thinking 
 of God's thoughts, a consciousness of His presence as our 
 deepest being : this is what we need, to live other than a 
 broken, half-slavish life. Every breath we draw, that, for all 
 we feel to the contrary, might have come from a dead law 
 of existence, and is not the wind, the air, the breath of God 
 to us, is but a kind of death to our deepest self. Only He is 
 behind the death even, and is bringing life out of all death. 
 
 How is your conscious world moving now, dear, lonely sister ? 
 You are now like the creature spinning its chrysalis. That is the 
 use of the world to you. Have patience, and let your wings
 
 234 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 grow. There is no food for feathers like patience. I have been 
 learning a little about patience lately. Ah, what lovely quiet we 
 have here ! But it only gives the more room for severer battle. 
 It is in desert places that the real battles of the world have been 
 first gained. And who can tell ? nay, I think I can almost tell, 
 that now in your loneliness, now that the noise of the surf of the 
 tide of the world has receded, and will recede yet further from 
 your dwelling, you will find more unexpected doors opening 
 around you, and will learn more clearly than ever that you are 
 all the time in the heart of the Father, where your beautiful 
 husband is also. It cannot be very long. We will go on cheer- 
 fully. Our life might be a call to those beyond: "We are 
 coming, friends ! " Christ be with us and teach us. I am gen e 
 rally, I think, perhaps always, sooner or later sent back to Him 
 when I get into a hedge. That He knew God and was satisfied 
 is a lovely comfort If He lived really, all is well, and we will 
 trust even when we cannot get things all right in our thoughts. 
 To what a bliss we are called to be the heirs of God ! I shall 
 one day live in the universe as God lives in it, with a pure, 
 potent, perfect existence, at home with every form of life, because 
 one with the Heart of all life. 
 
 You see I have been talking rather than writing to you. You 
 will take what truth there is in it. How I should like to talk to 
 you many times a day. I should get very sick of myself if I 
 hadn't got God to refer the thing to. I think the moment we 
 feel not near Him we should make haste to lay hold upon Him. 
 It is not my books nor your convalescents that is the first 
 business of the day, but that God should have His own in us, 
 and we, what we cannot live without, or do anything without, our 
 own in God. Yours, ever lovingly, GEORGE MACDONALD. 
 
 BORDIGHERA, December u, 1887. 
 
 DEAREST SISTER EMELIA, I thank your loving heart and 
 generous hand. . . . Only now the days are growing very short, 
 and the night is at hand. But, is it the night ? At worst it will 
 be a sweet twilight, full of hope. Or, even if I find that still I
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 235 
 
 need the purification of loneliness and pain to free me from the 
 phantom of life by me imagined, instead of accepting God's 
 intention of my life, it will yet be full of the hope of sunrise, and 
 I will hope now in the living One, by and in Whom I live. 
 
 My true love and gratitude are bending and holding out arms 
 to you. Your loving brother, GEORGE MACDONALD. 
 
 To Mr. J. H. SHORTHOUSE. 
 
 3 ORME SQUARE, July 10, 1883. 
 
 DEAR SIR, I venture to send you a little book, 1 some parts 
 of which I cannot help thinking will find an echo in your sympathy. 
 
 The letters were written by Mr. Corbet of Stoke, and I 
 obtained his permission to have them printed. Often the words 
 of John Inglesant come encouragingly to my mind in the midst 
 of the gathering darkness. "The sun is set, but it will rise 
 again ; let us go home." Some streaks of dawn and of the 
 home within have seemed to me evidenced by these letters. 
 
 Believe me one amongst the many grateful whom you have 
 instructed and delighted. EMELIA GURNEY. 
 
 From Mr. J. H. SHORTHOUSE. 
 
 LANSDOWNE, EDGBASTON, 
 September*), 1883. 
 
 DEAR MRS. GURNEY, I hope that you will not have cause 
 to regret the kind and appreciative interest you manifested in the 
 more delicate phases of character in " John Inglesant " at break- 
 fast at Denton, when you find that it has involved you in a 
 further discussion. But in thinking over the many pleasant and 
 improving talks of the last few days, I have much regretted that 
 I did not think of asking if you had seen my tale of the French 
 Marquis in Macmillan of July last year. I naturally hesi- 
 tate in asking such a question, and should not do so except to 
 those who will not, I think, misinterpret the motive. But you 
 
 1 " Letters of a Mystic of the Present Day."
 
 236 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 showed such a kind interest in character as character, that I 
 trust you will believe that, as far as I can judge of my own feel- 
 ings, my interest in my own characters is independent (as much 
 as such a thing is possible) of the vanity of the author. 
 
 The character of the Marquis is founded upon the idea that 
 the spirit of noblesse oblige and the chivalry of rank that developed 
 itself in absurd and fantastic and trifling ways in the later French 
 noblesse might be, and in some rare instances was, developed into 
 a far nobler and higher result. The tale has been very favourably 
 spoken of in France, where it has been translated. 
 
 I should very much like to have your opinion on the French 
 Marquis (your real and sincere opinion, of course). 
 
 My wife joins me in very kind remembrances and in the hope 
 that you may be able to spend an evening here before long. 
 I am, dear Mrs. Gurney, yours sincerely, 
 
 J. H. SHORTHOUSE. 
 
 P.S, I think on reflection that the objection you made that 
 Lord Biron should have perceived the truth more readily, which, 
 at the moment, I confess I thought a sound one, will not stand 
 examination. We must remember that Lord Glamorgan was 
 arrested by the King's Council in Dublin, on a charge which 
 seemed to imply an atrocious crime to all Englishmen. That 
 the king repudiated Lord Glamorgan instantly, only doing what 
 every one felt must be the truth, and that even now it is very 
 difficult to get gentlemen to believe in the duplicity of the king. 
 I must, however, in honesty tell you that since the publication 
 of "John Inglesant," Professor Gardiner, the historian, has dis- 
 covered a letter from Lord Biron, written just before the sur- 
 render of Chester, which shows that he was not averse to the 
 Irish being brought over. / say this shows the effect of John 
 Inglesant's diplomacy ! 
 
 One other little matter, if you are not quite tired out. I fear 
 I did not insist strongly enough that the whole of the second 
 volume is intended to prove that Inglesant was right in rejecting 
 Cressy's offer.
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 237 
 
 To Mr. J. H. SHORTHOUSE. 
 
 3 ORME SQUARE, September n, 1883. 
 
 DEAR MR. SHORTHOUSE, It is I who am in great danger of 
 vanity from receiving further communication from you about 
 those deeply interesting creations of yours. It will be such a 
 delight to read again and ask you a little about the Marquis. I 
 quite give up about Biron. If he had been a woman it would 
 have been quite different. She would have seen through all 
 the marks what John Inglesant really was. Character or per- 
 sonality, and the mutual relationships that form it, seem to me 
 the very pith and delight of life. 
 
 With the encouragement you have given me, I hope to write 
 again soon. Very truly yours, EMELIA GURNEY. 
 
 To the same. 
 
 WESTMINSTER ARMS, WEST MALVERN, 
 September 17, 1883. 
 
 DEAR MR. SHORTHOUSE, What pleasure we have had to-day 
 on the hill-side in reading the wonderfully beautiful picture and 
 sublimated essence of noblesse oblige. The Christ-sacrifice after 
 such another manner ! What a revelation to Madeline of all but 
 superhuman nobility, when it was too late. In the life beyond 
 how she would seek him out and long to serve him ! How 
 strange it is that such rarely beautiful results can grow out of a 
 system that for the many involved in it produces only hard- 
 hearted selfishness on one side and abject servility on the 
 other. 
 
 I do not think it impossible, because our life is in God, in 
 spite of all unfavourable conditions ; and it is well for us when 
 our poets and painters can detect these rare and hidden shoots 
 of the Tree of Life, and reveal them to us. How happy it must 
 make you to behold such creations ! 
 
 It was stupid of me not to see that John Inglesant, the man 
 of culture, could not have regretted turning a deaf ear to De
 
 238 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 Cressy. But I have a great weakness for fanaticism, and Mal- 
 volti's latter life, which had more passion in its concentration 
 than De Cressy's, is more attractive to me than even that of the 
 cultured Christian gentleman's. 
 
 You have given to each such an attractive power, that I did 
 not feel sure whether you did not, in John Inglesant's inmost 
 being, hanker after the narrower expression of faith. I hope to 
 be at Edgbaston the end of this month or beginning of next, 
 and to send a line when the day is fixed, to beg for my promised 
 pleasure. With very kind regards to Mrs. Shorthouse, most 
 truly yours, EMELIA GURNEY. 
 
 From Mr. J. H. SHORTHOUSE to Mrs. RUSSELL GURNEY. 
 
 LANSDOWNE, EDGBASTON, September 23, 1883. 
 
 DEAR MRS. GURNEY, I am so pleased that every word you 
 say about the Marquis seems to point in the direction I had in 
 my mind. " The Christ-sacrifice after another manner." This 
 is what I wished to express in the letter from which Lady Welby 
 quotes in her second edition of "Links and Clues." 
 
 It seems to me that human nature is far higher than some 
 of us think. That it is permeated by the Christ-spirit to an ex- 
 tent of which we little dream. That the Zeit-Geist (as Matthew 
 Arnold would call it) is, in fact, the CAm/-Geist. That the 
 perfect Sacrifice has wrought, and is working, everywhere, though 
 we see it not, and that when the veil is lifted we shall see His 
 form and trace His footsteps in places and through scenes in 
 connection with which we have never dreamt of Him. " Verily, 
 God was in this place and we knew it not." 
 
 I should like to work the idea more fully out in the after- 
 history of the Chevalier in the horrors of the Revolution, but it 
 is a work, I fear, beyond my power. Hoping to see you here, I 
 am, dear Mrs. Gurney, yours very sincerely, 
 
 J. HENRY SHORTHOUSE.
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 239 
 
 To Mr. J. H. SHORTHOUSE. 
 
 3 ORME SQUARE, October 27, 1883. 
 
 MY DEAR MR. SHORTHOUSE, I am delighted with the little 
 golden mystic. The silence of Sacramentalism, as you present it 
 to us, is indeed a need of our questioning and controversial day. 
 I see " hard things " also in the little book, but how should it be 
 otherwise in a guide from Confusion into the " Rich Treasure of 
 Inward Peace." 
 
 I thank you much for remembering to send me this little 
 book as well as for the gift itself. I will venture to ask you to 
 give my love to Mrs. Shorthouse. The remembrance of an 
 evening at Edgbaston is glowing very brightly amongst my pos- 
 sessions. Believe me, very truly yours, EMELIA GURNEY. 
 
 To Mrs. SHORTHOUSE. 
 
 3 ORME SQUARE, December 3, 1883. 
 
 At last I will find my lazy pen, and talk to dear Mrs. Short- 
 house about her blessed "Little Mark." Only it seems almost 
 too lovely to speak one's common words about. 
 
 At first I read it without thinking of any interior under-song, 
 as a delightful story complete, in its pictures of an innocent, 
 natural child in contact with worldliness; the trailing glory of 
 his home atmosphere quenched by his exile, so that he must 
 needs die. But as I look again, much beyond was suggested by 
 the story, as well as by the pregnant, precious words of the 
 speakers. Little Mark himself is mostly silent, and cannot 
 explain himself, or Art, or Life. That is beautiful. 
 
 Once I thought the whole was a scene in Man-soul, as Bunyan 
 would call it, and that Mark was the conscience or divinely born 
 spirit ; the Prince the reasoning faculty ; the Princess the earth- 
 born Psyche allied to the outward ; while the Signorina was the 
 Art-winged one, the counterpart of dear, subtle, humorous old 
 Archellino, the etherealised clown, questioning with Mark con- 
 cerning Art and Life so wondrously : was he the human sensuous-
 
 2 4 o LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 perception ? But no, the simple dignity and unity of the poem 
 seem to fritter in such attempts to label. And besides, the death 
 of Mark, the keynote of the whole, becomes less significant if 
 we seek to trace in it perhaps the passing of Innocence into the 
 higher realm of Virtue, rather than beholding in it the true 
 enacted Word of this lifg's mysterious secret, that the innocent 
 one must be and is a sacrifice, conscious or unconscious, for 
 the outer world. Here is the perfume of the Lamb slain, first 
 glimpsed in the bird's death, which awakens the deep pathos in 
 the Signorina's song. 
 
 Isoline's unfolding of the Resurrection power on the world, 
 through the passing away of the outward form, must come home 
 to the hearts of those whose beloved ones have vanished, with 
 intimate pathetic force. And they will know how the actors on 
 this life's stage then remove their masques, and at the same time 
 doubt whether all life is not a masque. 
 
 And oh ! what deep hints there are of the necessity for the 
 clash between the ideal and the small realism and scuffle of life ; 
 regret and irony being struck out of this complex antagonism, 
 awakening the sleeping angel within to weep for the rest in the 
 silence music of heaven, whose words are beyond the heart to 
 conceive. 
 
 But it is dreadful to pick gems out of such setting and such 
 completion. Only I like to talk with you of your beautiful gift- 
 child ; and I have heard that mothers of children, however rarely 
 beautiful, still care to hear admiration expressed of them, even 
 inadequately, even rudely ! 
 
 I am glad to see that the " Little Schoolmaster " is to appear in 
 a more fitting and lasting dress. So finished and perfect a work 
 of art, with meaning in every delicate touch, should hardly be 
 seen in such a casual frame as the pages of a magazine. When 
 you have time, tell me if I have misconceived the story. I know 
 I have not alluded to or fathomed half its suggestions. Please 
 make my greetings acceptable to the Maestro, and believe me, 
 dear Mrs. Shorthouse, yours truly and affectionately, 
 
 EMELIA GURNEY.
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 241 
 
 To the same. 
 
 3 ORME SQUARE, April 2, 1885. 
 
 MY DEAR MRS. SHORTHOUSE, It seems so long since I have 
 heard of you and the " Cotanto Maestro," but I was often re- 
 minded of him in Florence, at San Miniato especially. And I 
 think you will let me send you a tiny memorial of Florence this 
 Easter, in the form of a little old Benitier \ it used to hang by the 
 bedside of some old Florentine. 
 
 I expected to hate the second part of " Little Mark," and was so 
 angry with people for clamouring for it. But, after all, it kept up 
 the high harmony of the first. But the Maestro there, alas ! sinks 
 lower and lower. The name ought not to be used any more 
 for Mr. Shorthouse. 
 
 May you have a very happy Easter-tide. Believe me, always 
 most truly yours, EMELIA GURNEY. 
 
 To Mr. J. H. SHORTHOUSE. 
 
 3 ORME SQUARE, April %, 1885. 
 
 DEAR "COTANTO MAESTRO," The little blessed book full of 
 widest meaning, complete, and yet happily still an unfinished 
 infinite tale, came to my breakfast-table this morning. Is not 
 that gift enough from its author to dazzle me ? But the Sonnet ! 
 What can I say of the tender sympathy of its inspiration ? making 
 even me forget how much too good for me it is, in the tears your 
 thought brings of my beloved one's "loving will" being here 
 " prolonged." 
 
 For such a precious thought one needs another word than 
 " Thank you," though that I do say, but wish it meant much, 
 much more than it ordinarily does. 
 
 Mrs. Shorthouse will guess what your ideal poem must be to 
 me ! An aim, a hope it is " che mi disseta con le dolci stille." 
 Very truly hers and your (May I say?) sincere friend, 
 
 EMELIA GURNEY. 
 Q
 
 242 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 To Mrs. SHORTHOUSE. 
 
 73 GREAT PULTENEY STREET, BATH, 
 November 10, 1885. 
 
 MY DEAR MRS. SHORTHOUSE, How can I thank you and 
 the " Cotanto Maestro " for remembering me still and for sending 
 me another lovely book from the same strong and delicate hand ? 
 It was a surprise to find old Charles Simeon sketched by that 
 hand. I remember him well in my early youth, and his reading 
 " Samson Agonistes " to my mother and uncle, and stopping to 
 beg that the little ones might be sent out of the room, seeing, I 
 suppose, my mother's eyes wander from the reader to her chil- 
 dren ! Does not the episode at the end of the book seem like a 
 vibration from the last story of Bishop Hannington, though that 
 had not yet reached England ? 
 
 Surely such beautiful and noble portraits as Mr. Shorthouse 
 presents us with must enrich our young people with the com- 
 pelling ideal that is so much needed now. 
 
 I hear of so many tears shed over " Sir Percival " ; they will, I 
 trust, water the soil into some blessed fruit-bearing, and so rejoice 
 your heart and that of the Maestro. With heartiest greetings, 
 most truly yours, EMELIA GURNEY. 
 
 To Mr. and Mrs. SHORTHOUSE. 
 
 3 ORME SQUARE, December 21, 1885. 
 
 MY DEAR FRIENDS, On this darkest, shortest day of the 
 year, I thought I might stretch out my hands to you, and show 
 you Burne-Jones' descending Orpheus, which I think so wonder- 
 fully expressive, and Eurydice beyond. And it all expresses or 
 hints at the story that is uppermost in our hearts at this time of 
 year. And then there are some flowers to say that " spring is 
 not far behind." I do so hope you are well and having beautiful 
 thoughts. I have been almost ill. This time of our being 
 turned away from the sun is so very trying for us, is it not ? But 
 I have heard that the imaginative write all their summer-inspired
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 243 
 
 poems at this time. Believe me ever, in such pleasant, affection- 
 ate memory of you, EMELIA GURNEY. 
 
 To the same. 
 
 3 ORME SQUARE, January 2, 1887. 
 
 You can hardly guess what letters are at a breakfast-table 
 where there is one cup, or by the last post where there is silence. 
 But try and fancy what pleasure two such letters gave me on New 
 Year's morning ! Truly and affectionately yours, 
 
 EMELIA GURNEY. 
 
 To the same. 
 
 3 ORME SQUARE, December 26, 1887. 
 
 It is quite the prettiest booklet that ever was made ! The 
 moist reeds and reflected images and happy birds are such delight- 
 ful interludes of dry earth ! And the reeds shaken with the wind, 
 and those lightly murmuring streams come charged with delicate 
 harmonies indeed, from the near relations of the blessed violin 
 player. 
 
 Thank you, dear, kind friends, so much for thinking of me, 
 and letting me take such pretty pictures in my hand associated 
 with your names. 
 
 May every blessing that Star and Babe can bring (for those 
 must be infinite) be yours. Your affectionate friend, 
 
 EMELIA GURNEY. 
 
 To Mrs. SHORTHOU^E. 
 
 3 ORME SQUARE, December 30, 1887. 
 
 MY DEAR MRS. SHORTHOUSE, I send you and the Maestro 
 unspeakable messages by some flowers. Your hearts will read 
 them, and remain unwearied by any poor words of mine about 
 hopes for the coming year. 
 
 Ought it not to be a wonderful year with three 8's in it ? Eight 
 is the resurrection number, beginning again on a new plane, say
 
 244 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 the Mystics. Certainly everything within and without seems to 
 need a new departure ! 
 
 I wish I had been to Italy this year, to bring back some little 
 memento of the land that Mr. Shorthouse has led us into with 
 such delight. With every affectionate good wish, most truly 
 yours, EMELIA GURNEY. 
 
 To Mr. J. H. SHORTHOUSE. 
 
 3 ORME SQUARE, April 8, 1888. 
 
 MY DEAR MR. SHORTHOUSE, On my return from Hereford 
 last night I saw your well-known handwriting on the cover of a 
 book which had not been forwarded to me. I tore it open, and you 
 know that I found my beloved "Violin Player" and the "French 
 Marquis" and other almost equally prized tales and parables. 
 What a delightful companion volume it forms to " Sir Percival," 
 and how glad I am they are rescued (some of them) from the 
 passing character of Macmillan's Monthly. I can only thank 
 you most heartily, and wonder at your kindness in bearing me in 
 mind. 
 
 I have two delightful New Year's letters before me, still un- 
 acknowledged, though Easter is past. Your quickening thought 
 of the great company of unseen as well as seen, in the Mystical 
 Body, and of the Communion of each and all in the One Body, 
 is welcome at Easter even as on New Year's Day. I heard some 
 deeply interesting sermons from Canon Westcott at Hereford 
 Cathedral in Holy Week on the Natural Fellowship of our Race 
 and our Unity in Christ as One Man, which I feel sure you would 
 greatly have liked. Most truly yours, EMELIA GURNEY. 
 
 To Mr. and Mrs. SHORTHOUSE. 
 
 3 ORME SQUARE, December 24, 1891. 
 
 DEAR AND VERY KIND FRIENDS, To think of your coming 
 and picking me up, and dowering me with that unique and most 
 distinguished daughter of the master's brain and heart, " Blanche,
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 245 
 
 Lady Falaise." It did, indeed, quite surprise and touch me when 
 it came through the fog into my solitude. 
 
 Again you bring to us the thought of the sacrificial pain that 
 redeems another soul, just because the love of that soul cannot 
 help itself in any other channel. If it could, my human heart 
 would be a little angry for the sake of that most attractive of all 
 personalities, Lord Falaise. His patience was as divine as her 
 faithful persistency. 
 
 May a spring-tide of fullest blessing come up and submerge 
 you both this Christmas. Your affectionate and thankful, 
 
 EMELIA R. GURNEY. 
 
 To Mrs. SHORTHOUSE. 
 
 3 ORME SQUARE, October n, 1892. 
 
 MY DEAR MRS. SHORTHOUSE, It will be pleasant indeed to 
 welcome you on Friday next, if your purpose holds good of 
 coming to town on that day. 
 
 Alas ! I have been unsuccessful in getting the guests I wanted 
 to give the pleasure of meeting you. So you will have to put up 
 with only my dear nephew and myself. He longs to meet you, 
 and is worthy ; but (I ought not to say but} he is so modest that 
 he is guessed rather than met ! 
 
 ' What a sweeping wave has come upon England since our last 
 communication. 1 It seems such a devastation. Yet he leaves 
 all his best with those who, like myself, were only outsiders. 
 Affectionately yours, EMELIA GURNEY. 
 
 From Mr. J. H. SHORTHOUSE to Mrs. RUSSELL GURNEY. 
 LANSDOWNE, EDGBASTON, December 30, 1892. 
 
 DEAR MRS. RUSSELL GURNEY, I do not know how to write 
 to you, not because I want to strain after compliment, but because 
 it is so difficult to put into words the delicate shades of delight, 
 
 1 The death of Alfred Tennyson.
 
 246 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 the finer affections that meet you suddenly in a common life. 
 Can you fancy a terrible day in the Midlands, not smoky, for 
 Birmingham is not smoky, but terribly raw and chill all day long, 
 piercing to the very bone ; then, can you fancy a little dinner- 
 table, simple, but fair and white, and then suddenly at dessert- 
 time, when the mind is open to all grateful influences, a what 
 shall I say ? visitation of fragrance and light, of creatures born 
 in the fairyland of Alpine meadows (not that they are grown in 
 these, but because they speak to you of something high and rare), 
 and in the fine tracery and lines of their lovely forms telling 
 faint tidings of other meadows long ago, which the Love which 
 still exists on earth, and which inspired the gift which brightens 
 us to-night, planned for men, but surely with an after-thought 
 that the sorrow and the fall made the fair flowers lovelier, and 
 the love that comes with them more precious and more neces- 
 sary to us now? 
 
 My wife joins in love and all best wishes for the New Year. 
 I am, dear Mrs. Gurney, yours very sincerely, 
 
 J. HENRY SHORTHOUSE. 
 
 To Mrs. SHORTHOUSE. 
 
 BOVEY COTTAGE, BETCHWORTH, SURREY, 
 June 30, 1893. 
 
 MY DEAR MRS. SHORTHOUSE, You wrote me a dear, kind 
 note weeks and weeks ago, and I have let such an ungrateful 
 silence succeed its arrival. 
 
 You said to me some lovely encouragements, dear friend, 
 about my pilgrim. But, alas ! that I should so utterly have 
 failed in convincing you that Dante is not so much cruel as he 
 is burning to express his sense of the meaning of moral evil. 
 
 I trust you are both well, and at this moment having tea in 
 your garden. Believe me, silent or penning platitudes, always 
 your and Mr. Shorthouse's devoted servant and friend, 
 
 EMELIA GURNEY.
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 247 
 
 To the same, 
 
 3 ORME SQUARE, December 28, 1893. 
 
 DEAR FRIEND, I had a truly kind note from you two 
 months ago, and I now have, in the Maestro's hand, best Christ- 
 mas wishes from you both. 
 
 I thank you, and think of you, and am so pleased to think 
 you honoured my roof, this year that is dying, with spending a 
 few hours beneath it. 
 
 Some flowers are going to speak without words for me on 
 Saturday. 
 
 I draw very close to you all, as the years that remain here to 
 me must be few. I am immersed in the Life of our dear, dear 
 friend, Arthur Stanley ; in fact, I repossess him and am possessed 
 by him. His ardent, glowing spirit, so affectionate and clear and 
 pure, reveals itself again, and his blessed worthy wife's. How 
 well it was they were spared the pain and depression of pro- 
 longed old age. Adieu. Ever affectionately yours, 
 
 EMELIA GURNEY. 
 
 To the same. 
 
 BOVEY COTTAGE, BETCHWORTH, 
 July 27, 1894. 
 
 I am delighted to hear from you, and you always tell me 
 interesting and human things, and greatly, greatly do I prize your 
 giving me the name of friend. Yes, the almond tree was in 
 blossom when last I wrote, and now the corn is sheaving and the 
 days perceptibly shortening. I grudge each one as it goes down 
 the valley of the year. Varied life-chapters have opened to me, 
 chiefly through others, since the almond blossoms were out. I 
 hope they will not be forgotten in our next Home. I would fain 
 write of them ; but, as the years go on, I find myself more and 
 more inadequate to use recording words, and I think I may also 
 say that words seem in themselves too inadequate to use for 
 expression of the beautiful, pathetic, and joyful pictures one 
 beholds within and without.
 
 248 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 Did I tell you how much I had enjoyed reading Kidd's 
 " Social Evolution " ? It was like listening to the " loom of 
 Time," as Lowell somewhere says. Say something very sweet for 
 me to the Maestro, of spiritual thoughts and spirit-controlling 
 language. And believe your and his devoted friend and admirer, 
 
 EMELIA R. GURNEY. 
 
 To the same. 
 
 3 ORME SQUARE, December 5, 1895. 
 
 DEAR KIND FRIEND, How long it seems since I saw you 
 here ! And since I saw your home and picturesque garden it is, 
 I think, five or six years : a good bite out of our term of life. I 
 find the deeper and deeper taste of old age so very curious and 
 quite unexpected. One knows nothing till one tastes it oneself. 
 At anyrate none do but strong imaginations, and even these, I 
 suspect, leave out some special touch which, when the real thing 
 comes to them, makes the distinction of the reality. 
 
 I have a reader, and have been hearing many Lives. Bishop 
 Heber quite worth, I think, going through. How strangely it 
 shows the change of our age ; surely, in many ways, much im- 
 proved one way, regarding prosy moralisings. Matthew Arnold's 
 Letters are now in progress. It is surprising how he has 
 managed to keep every touch of genius and poetry out of them, 
 and every suggestive and brilliant thought; but simple, affec- 
 tionate goodness prevails throughout, for which one is thankful. 
 
 All Christmas-tide flow into you from many hearts, and from 
 mine with them. Yours and his ever affectionately and admir- 
 ingly, EMELIA GURNEY. 
 
 To the same. 
 
 3 ORME SQUARE, March 27, 1896. 
 
 No, I never did see anything so freshly lovely as those dar- 
 ling springlings from your fairy haunts. I am sure they aspired 
 more than ever to vibrate in the spiritual atmosphere of " Little 
 Schoolmaster Mark," " Countess Eve," and other music that
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 249 
 
 stirred their roots ! And it is so lovely to have them, through 
 your very kind thought, by my bedside in a bronchial attack I 
 have been afflicted with the last ten days. 
 
 I am better to-day, and I think they will help me turn a 
 corner. 
 
 Do you know any legend about the ass on which our Lord 
 entered Jerusalem being blindfolded, and why, as represented in 
 a mediaeval picture I hear of? 
 
 Dean Church's " Pascal and other Sermons " is, I think, very 
 exquisite. 
 
 I read every word of Cardinal Manning by Purcell. Whether 
 he is a personal betrayer, and unfair, I won't decide ; but the 
 wire-pulling of Rome is a wondrously candid revelation indeed, 
 and renders the visible Church almost invisible to me at least. 
 
 Adieu, dear friends, and thanks, and thanks, and thanks. 
 
 E. R. G. 
 
 From her Nephew -, ALFRED GURNEY, to E. R. G. 
 
 ST. BARNABAS PARSONAGE, PIMLICO, S.W., 
 New Year's Eve, 1883. 
 
 I have a sermon to prepare for the midnight service, always 
 a rather heavy burden ; so letters have to be put away. But, 
 for lack of anything better, I send you a timid little song, " pip- 
 ing low " as usual ; yet a love-song, and a hope-song, and a joy- 
 song my heart would sing if it could, recalling the blessings 
 dispensed by your hands during years that are past, not dead, 
 I think, and countless treasures of great love. And more abun- 
 dant harvests wait to be gathered in with coming years. So we 
 will sing a Te Deum together, and have great hopes for 1884. 
 
 A. G. 
 
 FOR 1884. 
 
 No ache can be without relief 
 When Love Himself draws near; 
 
 No cup can empty stand, no grief 
 Spoil God's incoming year.
 
 250 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 Time's footsteps quickly die away, 
 
 Soon emptied is his glass ; 
 We look for an oncoming day 
 
 That nevermore shall pass. 
 
 So all the years and all the days 
 
 Our waiting hearts shall be 
 The harps that tremble with His praise 
 
 Whose is Eternity. 
 
 A. G. 
 
 From her Nephew^ ALFRED GURNEY, to E. R. G. 
 
 ST. BARNABAS PARSONAGE, PIMLICO, S.W., 
 New Year's Eve, 1888. 
 
 How different would my past years have been without your 
 love ! and I feel it is a foundation-stone upon which to build 
 for all the years to come, because resting on the Foundation. 
 May our Lord and Lover, so wonderful in His dealings with the 
 children of men, as Christmas declares Him to be, more and 
 more abundantly reveal Himself, His love, in you. Your 
 loving ALFRED. 
 
 From her Nephew, ALFRED GURNEY, to E. R. G. 
 
 SIENA, April 27, 1894. 
 
 BELOVED AUNT EMELIA, It would indeed be refreshing 
 and soothing to have a day or two with you at Cheltenham ; 
 but I shall be very busy when I get back. I might, I dare say, 
 manage a night ; I will make a push for that. 
 
 The day before yesterday I was at Orvieto how beautiful ! 
 And my thoughts were of you ; for years ago you gave me the 
 loveliest little picture, which hangs in my room just a group out 
 of that wonderful painting of the saved receiving their crowns, 
 by Signorelli. I do not suppose I should have discerned its 
 exquisite loveliness but for that long preparation ; the huge 
 pleasure it gave me was due, in large measure, I felt, to you. 
 It is so in my life how often ! Again, and again, and again. 
 Your loving ALFRED.
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 251 
 
 From her Nephew, EDMUND GURNEY, to E. R. G. 
 
 December 6, 1 886. 
 
 MY BELOVED AUNT EMELIA, Your Christmas gift quite 
 took my breath away; it will make everything easy, and will 
 enable Kate to realise at once sundry schemes which she has 
 deeply pondered, but which had no prospect but to be deferred. 
 It is an abounding token of the love and sympathy whose abound- 
 ingness is, and has been, one of the central facts of my universe. 
 I hope that what I feel about that fact makes me in some mea- 
 sure deserving of it ; and I hope that the being whom you men- 
 tion l may come in time also to realise it, and may be far more 
 deserving. Your very loving E. G. 
 
 From the same, 
 
 26 MONTPELIER SQUARE, S.W., February 21. 
 MY DEAREST AUNT EMELIA, Your dear letter was scarcely a 
 surprise, for I had felt all that it expressed yes, I believe, really 
 all when we were together ; but it was none the less sweet to 
 get it in palpable form. 
 
 I like to owe something musical still to you, for it was you, 
 you know, who practically introduced me to Beethoven. I sup- 
 pose I should have come across him some way or other ; but it 
 was through you that I came across him at a particularly impres- 
 sionable age, and my love for him is linked always with that 
 memory. 
 
 Bless you for that, and for even better things. Your loving 
 
 E. 
 
 From the same (on her reception of his book, " Phantasms 
 of the Living"}. 
 
 ST. BARNABAS PARSONAGE, PIMLICO, S.W., 
 November 5, 1886. 
 
 DEAREST AUNT EMELIA, Your letter was a most welcome 
 welcome on my arrival here last night after a fortnight of 
 " psychical " business in France. 
 
 1 His daughter, aged five.
 
 252 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 It would be difficult to go on quite without sympathy ; and 
 when sympathy concentrates itself in such a pure and beautiful 
 flame as yours, it makes the vulgar glare of. ordinary worldly 
 success seem a very poor thing by comparison. 
 
 I am honestly glad to have done this piece of work (not that 
 it is done, only begun) ; but I am afraid, when you see it, you 
 may be much disappointed. The book is written with pains and 
 candour, but it contains no direct spiritual illumination. I am 
 not a source for anything of that sort, and its tone is purely 
 scientific. Of course, I think the /^direct bearing on spiritual 
 matters, the knocking of a brick out of the prison wall, is exceed- 
 ingly important ; but as to this, the reader will have to form his 
 own view. I do not profess to help him. Some people, happily, 
 know nothing of prison walls. Some will be glad of the hole 
 made in the wall ; but, looking through it, will see very different 
 things. / see little but rolling fog ; but, after all, rolling fog may 
 imply light, air, and infinite space. 
 
 As for the sort of personal credit you so lovingly give me, I 
 simply do not deserve it (though Kate fully deserves her share). 
 I do this sort of work as a beaver makes dams, from instinct 
 rather than motive. The beaver makes dams by necessity it 
 cannot make palaces ; and if I could have made palaces and 
 written either poetry or music, I should not have taken to dams. 
 But if you and Lady Mount-Temple, and others like you, can 
 use the dam as a prop for your palace or a stay in the golden 
 bridge flung from this to the other shore, and if so the chorus of 
 hope is swelled, I am consoled for my selfish aches in the sense 
 of personal dumbness. 
 
 I was amazed at the Times article. The book had only 
 reached the Times office twelve hours before the paper was pub- 
 lished, so one could not look for very instructive criticism ; and, 
 in fact, the criticism was very stupid. But that the subject should 
 be treated with respect in such an organ is in some degree, as you 
 say, a sign of the idea beginning to tell. I have not seen the 
 article in the Spectator which you mention. Your very loving 
 
 E.G.
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 253 
 
 From E. R. G. to a Friend in great trouble during a Sister's 
 dangerous illness. 
 
 3 ORME SQUARE, February 1886. 
 
 . . . How much I feel for you in this terrible furnace in 
 which your sisterly and filial love is tried, I cannot tell you. We 
 shall be bound together in looking to the one unfailing Hope in 
 this time of utter need, and our utter incompetence in helping 
 her will shut us into our fortress and her fortress. As I opened 
 the morning Psalms, the first for the day came like a stream of 
 life: "Truly my soul waiteth still, or is silent, upon God; from 
 Him cometh my salvation " (what a large word !). " He only is my 
 Rock and my Salvation ; I shall not be greatly moved ! " . . . 
 
 It is wonderfully mysterious that our God, who is Love, permits 
 such seven times heated furnaces for His poor, frail creatures; 
 but He must know that His gold will bear it and come out with 
 a loss of only its hindering dross. . . . 
 
 Though we cannot understand the Atonement, what a look 
 of recognition we get at such times from the Cross ! 
 
 To the same, under great trial. 
 
 3 ORME SQUARE, January 6, 1887. 
 
 I think when any one is beckoned, as you are, into the very 
 inner torture-chamber, all words about God and His love and 
 dealings seem beside the mark. When with you I feel and 
 understand how hollow every word must strike upon your heart. 
 You must think, " Oh, if your soul were in my soul's stead, you 
 would know what nonsense you are talking, what songs you are 
 singing to a broken heart. Still, we cannot but say again and 
 again, God is, and He knows all this. There must be a solution, a 
 slowly growing answer to our cry ; and when the hour of desolate 
 darkness in some measure passes, you will be able to say again, 
 " Father, into Thy hands I commend my spirit." . . . 
 
 ... I think you will be kept just able to hold on ; bare faith 
 is called upon, and you will be very faint, yet kept pursuing. 
 Comforts from God, or people, or things, few and far between ; 
 yet just the ray of light in the darkness, not disappearing.
 
 254 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 Oh, it is a long time to wait till "afterwards," a long "exercis- 
 ing thereby." Yet one can fancy opening one's eyes in another 
 sphere, and seeing it was but a moment. I read somewhere 
 that the words about the Temptation, Satan showing the king- 
 doms, &c., in a moment of time, would be literally a stigma of 
 time; and one may believe that time has just to brand us to 
 stigmatise us into personality for some real life of service, which 
 life will be glory. " Ought not Christ to have suffered these 
 things," &c. 
 
 Yes, such parables as you describe are most depressing, for 
 they seem to speak with a certain authority of fact. There seems 
 to be duality everywhere, light and darkness ; and I think " God 
 with us " is light in darkness, and the light can only be perceived 
 by the single eye of faith. Have you remarked the proximity of 
 those two verses, the paradox of them, in St. Luke xxi. 16-18? 
 " Some of you shall they cause to be put to death. . . . But there 
 shall not a hair of your head perish ! " I suppose Christ clearly 
 saw the abiding quite untouched by the accident of death and 
 suffering. It may be the same with the poor, tender, bruised little 
 sea-creatures, as He saw that the Father was with ever-falling 
 sparrows. Suffering and death may be the door for all creation 
 to pass a step upwards. 
 
 To the same. 
 
 April 1887. 
 
 MY VERY DEAR SUFFERER, I can only look at you on the 
 Cross in that supreme hour of darkness. It seems impossible 
 for me to do anything but kneel beside you. It is inexpressibly 
 touching to receive from your hands those exquisite tokens of the 
 renewed earth in which you cannot rejoice, whose resurrection 
 message you may not read till travail pangs have had their hour, 
 their season I know not what that is ; long and short is not in 
 the Father's, calendar in whom these times and seasons are ; they 
 are not known to Christ even. Patience, and drop by drop, is all 
 you can have in your agony. I can never say, " Look forward in
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 255 
 
 hope," but I think He says, " Look deeper for hope, even into 
 My heart." There's not often a shining Christ manifestation ; it 
 is oftener, "Can ye drink of the cup I drink of? Ye shall in- 
 deed." At least, that is to some of the Christ's followers. 
 
 Will you come on Thursday and let us share and receive what 
 we can from His hands ? Poor miserable comforters are we all ! 
 
 To the same. 
 
 DEAR TEMPEST-TOSSED FRIEND, Many thoughts came to me 
 to-day for you ; at least, not exactly thoughts, not any more rea- 
 sonings with the thoughts and questions that tear you in twain. 
 Even if such could be answered satisfactorily, others would arise 
 in their stead ; for the root of all is in that dark mystery concern- 
 ing the entrance of that which is against God's will into the uni- 
 verse He governs ; it is beyond us, and so we can but fall back in 
 childlike trust upon His heart and weep there while we know that 
 His deepest will to overcome evil with good must prevail. 
 
 The details of our lives, as they affect us, must be of the all 
 things which are to work together for good, and each soul is His, 
 and will be dealt with wisely and in judgment and mercy. Let 
 us stay ourselves on Him in quiet waiting upon Him. It is His 
 peace which is to keep us in the knowledge and love of God, and 
 only in that peace can we learn of Him and help our fellow- 
 sufferers and sinners, I think. I find these words for you : " I 
 have satiated the weary soul, and I have replenished every sor- 
 rowful soul ; upon this I awaked and beheld, and my sleep was 
 sweet unto me !" -Jer. xxxi. 26. 
 
 Well, I don't feel I can answer your dear note ; it is unanswer- 
 able. All you say is sensible, clear ; what remains for you to do ? 
 I don't know. How can you throw the complication of sin on to 
 God ? I can only say I believe that one absolute conviction of 
 our God in Christ Jesus, as the light of our life and the love of 
 our hearts, and the absolute Ruler everywhere and in everything 
 as Wisdom and Love, permitting, in order to conquer, every
 
 256 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 darkness, compels the soul to rejoice in Him under every possible 
 circumstance ; in fact, however much suffering circumstances may 
 cause, they do not involve our relationship with Him at all. How 
 to get this glimpse I know not. 
 
 thinks it depends on an act of the will, a concentration 
 
 of the whole being on Him instead of on circumstances. You 
 say, if it were anything but sin it might be possible. Yet there is 
 hardly a trial in which sin is not mixed. We lose our pre- 
 cious ones' lives by some wicked carelessness that God might 
 have prevented. The poor starve to death, when they feel it the 
 sin of the rich to deny them food. Some mother's sweet little 
 child is kicked to death by the brutal father. Hearts are broken 
 by the forsaking of those who led them astray. I don't see how 
 we could ever rejoice in, love, and trust God, if it was to be 
 because we did not see and feel sin rampant. If He has not 
 taken that into account and provided against it, He is no God 
 for us in these conditions, and whether these worst things happen 
 to you or me makes no difference in their reality (though a good 
 deal in their smart), and reading them in the daily papers might 
 well make atheists of us, without perfect confidence in Him. 
 
 I feel as if you might just shut your eyes to all, and drop into 
 His arms like an infant, making the venture of faith, saying, " I 
 do trust Thee, my God." 
 
 To the same. 
 
 HEREFORD, September 23, 1887. 
 
 We did meet on the Saturday at Stoke, and had a most 
 delightful time. Mr. Corbet and Sister Hannah both mount 
 up with those eagle wings, glorying in their God and claiming 
 their heritage in Him for every emergency. Mrs. Smith makes 
 most of our exertion of will power ; Mr. Corbet of the com- 
 pelling power of the Vision of God. The two sides being thus 
 presented, I think very valuable. I am come away with an 
 increased sense of our wonderful liberty in God. Just the 
 liberty we feel with some friend who thoroughly loves and 
 understands us : we need explain nothing, and seem set free to
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 257 
 
 be our true selves. We had a beautiful sermon from Mr. Corbet 
 on singing of God's " faithfulness in the night season." 
 
 Adieu, dear, terribly tried friend. I read in the lesson for 
 the day for you, that your vines were to come out of the wil- 
 derness and your door of hope was to open from a valley of 
 mourning. Hosea, ii. 
 
 Yours in much, but would it were more, sympathy and love 
 and admiration, and in the one Hope, E. R. G. 
 
 To the same. 
 
 I have longed to hear from you of your Florentine experi- 
 ences, and shall greatly enjoy some time seeing your photographs, 
 and hearing of the impressions you received from the originals. 
 If you had not such an insane dislike to French, I should beg 
 you to read V. Cherbuliez' " La Nature et 1'Art," in the last four 
 or five Revue des deux mondes. It has made me very forcibly 
 realise how much one owes to those men with opened eyes and 
 constrained hands, as interpreters to us, who are blind and im- 
 potent, of God's secrets. Truly God-given men in one sphere, 
 as God-given as the Prophets and Apostles in the sphere of 
 spiritual truths. 
 
 When your note came to me I was reading over and studying^ 
 I may say, Wordsworth's " Excursion." I used to think Words- 
 worth's religion cold, and only nature-inspired ; now I think it 
 full of white heat (restrained) and God-inspired. Whether it 
 was because Wordsworth's lines were present in heart and eye 
 when your note came, or whether there really are remarkably 
 answering chords to your sighs, I know not ; but read over, pray, 
 Fourth Book of the " Excursion," " Despondency corrected." I 
 sometimes wonder whether we are right to form to ourselves a 
 distinct ideal or conception of what a "vision of God," after 
 which we long, would really be, or feeling ourselves " nearer to 
 God " ; or do you think we can feel ourselves " growing in holi- 
 ness " ? I do not think so. We have no spiritual thermometers, 
 and I don't think our feelings in the matter are worth much. 
 
 R
 
 258 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 The following letters from General Gordon, with 
 whom Mrs. Russell Gurney had had valued intercourse 
 both in London and, in 1883, in Jerusalem, were written 
 early in 1884. 
 
 Those written in January refer to the project pro- 
 posed to him by the King of the Belgians, but not 
 destined to be carried out The two later ones, 
 which she felt greatly privileged to receive, were from 
 Khartoum. 
 
 From GENERAL GORDON to E. R. G. 
 
 January (?) 1884. 
 
 Privately, I will tell you how I am situated. A week ago 
 King Leopold asked me to fulfil my promise made in 1880, to 
 go to Congo and succeed Stanley, so I have asked leave from 
 Government. I do not think the Government will grant it; 
 if they do, I shall go ; if not, I think I shall come home, and work 
 in East End, but am not sure at present. 
 
 The Temple was the shadow of the Heavenly Temple ; "see 
 that you make it after the pattern."
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 259 
 
 The shadows meet the true at the altar. The Cross is the 
 ladder Jacob saw. I have been working hard at these things. 
 The River in Ezekiel comes down from above the Brazen Sea, 
 then to Mediterranean and Dead Sea the sacramental stream 
 of Baptism ; while the altar has the sacramental stream of blood. 
 Believe me, my dear Mrs. Russell Gurney, yours sincerely, 
 
 C. E. GORDON. 
 
 BELLEVUE HOTEL, BRUSSELS, January 2, 1884. 
 
 MY DEAR MRS. RUSSELL GURNEY, Thank you very much 
 for your kind letter, December 27. I got here on January i, 
 at dawn. You were prayed for earnestly while in the train, 
 that your union with our Lord may be increased this year 
 (1884); that is the greatest blessing one can wish for. 
 
 Thank you for your kind invitation, but I fear I cannot 
 come and stay, for I do not mean to stay long in England. 
 I have not yet seen the king. I go to him to-night. He did 
 not, it seems, know that H. M. G. had refused me leave to go 
 to Congo. I will let you know when I see him. But I expect 
 he will press it, and then comes the question of giving up my 
 nationality. Believe me, yours sincerely, C. E. GORDON. 
 
 BRUSSELS, 4/1/84. 
 
 Many thanks for kind note. It is all ruled, and I am glad 
 to go. I did try to escape, but the way was hedged, and now 
 I am contented and willing. I hope to be over in a day or 
 two, and leave Lisbon, D. V., on 5/2/84. Kindest regards to 
 you all, C. E. GORDON. 
 
 BRUSSELS, 17/1/84. 
 
 I got your kind note this morning. You and those like 
 you are my joys, therefore there can be no effort to remember 
 you.
 
 260 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 There can be no birth without blood. Nothing good can 
 come to us but by travail of soul and sorrow ; it is the plough 
 to prepare for the seed : so in spiritual, so in earthly things, 
 and our Lord will rule all events in Soudan for good. If we 
 do not allow this, we deny His being Lord of heaven and 
 earth, and make Him a negligent Ruler. 
 
 Stanley and I will, D. V., halve the district I know no 
 books on the Congo. Good-bye ; many thanks for all your 
 kindness. Thank God, He has greatly blessed me, and I 
 have hosts with me, through the prayers of my many friends. 
 Yours ever sincerely, C. E. GORDON. 
 
 KARTOUM, 18/2/84. 
 
 Just going into Kartoum. We left London 18/1/84. I 
 was very sorry not to have seen you and our Jerusalem friends 
 before I left for these lands. My kindest regards to you all. 
 You are never forgotten, in spite of all I have had to do, for I feel 
 the force of your united prayers on my behalf. May our Lord 
 be glorified, these peoples blessed, and I humbled to the dust, 
 for then I will know more of the intense blessing of His in- 
 dwelling in me. I like to think all we pass through are as 
 shadows of future ; it is as it affects us individually, that events 
 are of importance. Our work here is to despise the world, 
 and to know Him as our joy and delight ; whether in Soudan 
 or in Orme Square, it is the same lesson to be rid of self. 
 Yours sincerely, C. E. GORDON. 
 
 KARTOUM, 11/3/84. 
 
 MY DEAR MRS. RUSSELL GURNEY, Thank you very much 
 for your kind letter, 5th July, received to-day, also grateful 
 to receive note of those who have interceded for me. It is 
 my only support. My feelings are not for success or honour. 
 I feel for the peoples who are here, exposed to such a danger ; 
 but our Lord is Ruler of heaven and earth, and my part is to 
 accept His will, however dark that will is to me. Thanks, then,
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 261 
 
 for your kind prayer-meeting. All will be done to me in love 
 and mercy, for nothing can happen but by His will. 
 
 Remember that our Lord did not promise success or peace 
 in this life : in it He promised tribulation ; so that if things do 
 not go well after the flesh, He still is faithful, and what we 
 have to do is to bind our will to His in all things. Kindest 
 regards to you all, my dear Mrs. Russell Gurney. Believe 
 me, with excuses for a short note, yours sincerely, 
 
 C. E. GORDON. 
 
 In her later and more suffering years Mrs. Russell 
 Gurney found in the study of Dante a fount of con- 
 tinual interest, and also of consolation in dark hours. 
 Two of her nieces will ever be grateful to have had the 
 gate into this treasure-field opened to them by her, and 
 for her guiding hand among its difficult paths. 
 
 The way in which she was attracted and inspired 
 by the deeper spiritual teachings of the Divina Commedia 
 is shown in her " Dante's Pilgrim's Progress," the pre- 
 paring of which absorbed her much during a year of 
 great physical suffering and weakness, the interest of 
 the task giving support, and at times carrying her above 
 the sense of pain. 
 
 Among the following are a few of the letters she 
 received after its publication. 
 
 To ELLEN MARY GURNEY. 
 
 I have had two or three very pleasant notes about the " Pil- 
 grim " this week, expressing the deep interest, and one the 
 benefit felt in going through it. My prayer has been that just 
 one weary soul might find the Christ-given drop of cold water 
 there ; and I think this has been answered, and I hope there may
 
 262 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 be one of whom I may never hear, for that is the best unconscious 
 honour : one's petty, self-appropriating Adam-mixture being so 
 apt to clutch and spoil. 
 
 From E. R. G. to Dr. KER, of Cheltenham. 
 
 3 ORME SQUARE, W., 1893. 
 
 I cannot thank you enough for having so kindly written to 
 me. Because, by doing so, you have conferred upon me that 
 wonderful, half-unbelievable joy of knowing that one has been 
 permitted to pass on to another a cup of blessing very precious 
 to oneself. Through Dante, in long hours of corroding grief, 
 that obscured earlier visions of faith, old truths gradually again 
 took a deeper hold on me, and spiritual life became in a measure 
 a present reality. Yet it seemed to me very audacious to meddle 
 with such a supreme work of art as Dante's ; and perhaps still 
 more, to touch with my words the eternal truths he brings before 
 us. With such a misgiving, you may judge how deeply thankful 
 I must be to receive from one like yourself the reassuring ex- 
 pression of your sympathy in my presentation of the spiritual 
 pilgrimage the pilgrimage which I cannot but think Dante feels 
 to be the evolution not only of one soul or some souls, but 
 of the whole human race. Thank you again and again for letting 
 me know that your meditations with Dante have supplied you 
 with some mental and spiritual nutrition. Please let me send 
 you Longfellow's convenient literal translation, in case you have 
 it not. It will help you very soon, with your knowledge of 
 French and Latin, to make the original your own. 
 
 From Mr. J. H. SHORTHOUSE to E. R. G. 
 
 LANSDOWNE, EDGBASTON, 
 Low Sunday, 1893. 
 
 DEAR MRS. RUSSELL GURNEY, My wife has read to me, and 
 I have read to myself many passages in your beautiful book. I 
 confess that I have not appreciated Dante as some have, mostly,
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 263 
 
 I think, because the intense medievalism of consciousness has 
 repelled me. But in the light and guiding of your pregnant 
 paraphrase and comment, I seem to find a solution of some 
 enigmas which are puzzling until we read them in the light. 
 I seem to feel that you have penetrated through Dante's 
 medievalism till you have revealed to us the core of the whole 
 matter ; not as to the past or to the future, but as to the insistent 
 moment the relation of the human consciousness to God. For 
 when we think of it, this surely is the issue of life, that " righteous- 
 ness is righteous," in spite of the "wolf" within ourselves, "the 
 wild beast's ravin and the hunter's cruel guile." 
 
 I have in my mind as I write clear perceptions of the pos- 
 sibility of carrying these ideas to heights, the spurs and stairways 
 of the Mount of God. These heights are not for me, but the 
 suggestion and the assurance come to me from your words. 
 
 It is the Christian Nirvana, this truce and peace of God, for 
 which we, wandering in this selva selvaggia ed aspra e forte, long, 
 and to such, travel-stained and weary, your words bring nearer 
 the great vision of the Mount of God. I am, dear Mrs. Russell 
 Gurney, Yours ever sincerely, J. HENRY SHORTHOUSE. 
 
 from Mr. FREDERIC SHIELDS to E. R. G. 
 
 SIENA HOUSE, LODGE PLACE, N.W., 
 April 27, 1893. 
 
 I have read somewhat of your beautiful and discerning 
 comment on Dante, and look to enjoy more yet, and profit 
 thereby. I saw Christina 1 last week, and she spoke very warmly 
 of the originality of your plan, as presenting Dante in an aspect 
 that will invite many to commune with his spirit. And she 
 admired the way in which you had kept your project before 
 you, undiverted by any of the seductive episodes of the Divine 
 Comedy. 
 
 I see and hear so little, that I know not if any appreciative 
 reviews of it have appeared, but there must be some come. The 
 
 1 Miss Christina Rossetti.
 
 264 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 right reader will fall across it with avidity, and give forth his 
 pleasure in some fervently outpoured critique. Yours very 
 sincerely, FREDERIC SHIELDS. 
 
 From the Rev. HERBERT JEAFFRESON to E. R. G. 
 
 115 CLIFTON HILL, N.W., April 23, 1894. 
 
 MY DEAR MRS. GURNEY, I lent your "Dante's Pilgrim's 
 Progress " to an old Dante student, Dr. Pope, feeling sure that 
 he would consider it one of the most precious handbooks to the 
 hidden treasure of the poem. He was no less delighted with it 
 than I expected him to be ; and in returning it, offered me the 
 pleasant task of asking you to accept his translation of an Indian 
 hymn, in which he sees a spirit somewhat like Dante ! 
 
 It is, I suppose, very difficult to us, who are ignorant of the 
 Tamil language, and also of Indian thought and association, to 
 enter into the real delicacy of a religious poem, which would lose 
 half its beauty if it discarded allusion, and were restricted to direct 
 statement. What would " Rock of Ages " mean to us, if we had 
 not grown up with the Psalms and the Gospels ? I have (what 
 you have not) a similar difficulty with regard to Dante, in conse- 
 quence of my great ignorance of his language. Believe me, yours 
 very sincerely, HERBERT H. JEAFFRESON. 
 
 To the Rev. ANDREW JUKES. 
 
 3 ORME SQUARE, April 5, 1893. 
 
 DEAREST MR. JUKES, How often I have thought of you as I 
 have been, too audaciously perhaps, preparing the book I now 
 venture to send you. 
 
 You will therein find many of your own thoughts diluted 
 through my brain and pen. For eight years the Divina Corn- 
 media has been my delight, or rather, I should say, has unfolded 
 things of deepest interest to me. I have only thought of writing 
 for the last year and a half, and it has been done in much weak- 
 ness and with quite an untrained pen, as you know.
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 265 
 
 My great desire has been to present the idea of the whole 
 poem as the evolution of the race through the indwelling Spirit 
 of Christ 
 
 I believe Man and God in the Incarnation is Dante's under- 
 lying theme. 
 
 I shall be very much obliged to you if you will read, straight 
 ahead, the Preface, the Introductions to the Inferno, the Purgatorio 
 (with its last chapter), and the Introduction to and last chapter 
 of the Paradiso, without any of the intervening steps. And will 
 you not write to me till you have taken this half-hour's trouble ? 
 If you can tell me that you think I have brought out this idea in 
 some measure I shall be very glad. If it is not clearly apparent, 
 I should still be most thankful to know it, as it is just barely 
 possible that after a time it may reach a second edition, and I 
 might profit by any hint you may kindly give me. 
 
 You will see on the page of Illustrations the interpretations 
 of Mr. Shields' mystic signs on the outside of the book, as well as 
 in the Preface the description of the chromolith. 
 
 From the Rev. ANDREW JUKES to E. R. G. 
 
 UPPER EGLINTON ROAD, WOOLWICH, 
 April(> t 1893. 
 
 MY DEAR MRS. GURNEY, What can I say of the lovely book 
 which you have sent me, but " Lovely," " Lovely," " Lovely " ? 
 As yet I have only read the Preface, the Introductions, and the 
 last chapter. I turned to them, as you desired, and they have 
 all simply delighted me. Dante has not been a stranger to me. 
 A well-worn copy of Wright's translation is generally within my 
 reach, and not a few of the visions of the Divina Commedia have 
 in bygone days helped me. But till I read the passages in your 
 book, which you call my attention to, I little entered into the 
 reality of Dante's work ; though the thought of Hell, Purgatory, 
 and Paradise, as present realities and stages of our life, has for 
 years been not only familiar to me and part of my creed, but the 
 very substance also of my experience. Have I not been in Hell,
 
 266 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 and said, " Thou hast laid me in the lowest deep, in the darkness, 
 and in the depths " ? Have I not known something of Purgatory, 
 the " fiery trial which is to try us," where waves of fire and water 
 have gone over me ? Have I not had glimpses, and even heard 
 echoes of the Paradise, out of which we were driven in mercy, 
 and to which, like St. Paul and so many other saints, we may be 
 " caught up, to hear unspeakable words, which it is not possible 
 and even lawful to utter ; " when one could only fall down, liter- 
 ally fall down, and cry, " Holy, Holy, Holy " ; and all this spite 
 of the wretchedness and vileness and corruption of the "old 
 man," who is so very slow to die in most of us ? To me for years 
 Hell has been darkness, the darkness of distance from God, with 
 its false dreams. Purgatory, the vision of one's self; Paradise, the 
 vision of God, or at least the approach to the beatific vision. 
 This is what (if I understand you) you see in the Divine Comedy, 
 but which without you I might not have seen there. 
 
 To the Rev. ANDREW JUKES. 
 
 3 ORME SQUARE, W., April 7, 1893. 
 
 I must write one word in answer to your letter, just to let my 
 heart overflow in the gratitude and joy you have awakened within 
 me. I have had many kind expressions about the book. Its 
 outside has proved very engaging, but no one has, as you have 
 done, just taken the kernel and pith of it into sympathetic and 
 completely comprehending touch. It is just wonderful that poor, 
 old, small me should have been permitted to do anything that 
 you approve in this matter. Thanks be to the wonder-working 
 One, who may pick up an old worn-out and, at the same time, 
 unaccustomed, untrained pen to scratch on a signpost pointing 
 through beloved Dante to never worn-out truths. 
 
 I know j/0# will lift up your blessed heart for the dew from 
 Heaven on this endeavour of weakness ! 
 
 Pray do not take the trouble to write again, for you have said 
 as much as even my greedy heart can crave for. I must not let 
 the "bestia senza pace" lord it over me, with the "bramosa 
 voglia chi dopo 'I pas to ha pitifame che pria."
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 267 
 
 From the Rev. ANDREW JUKES. 
 
 April g, 1893. 
 
 I have again been reading your book, and though I do not 
 wish to make "your hunger hungrier than before," I must say 
 again that your book is most refreshing, and must, I think, throw 
 fresh light not on Dante only, but on some who are making 
 the journey he describes so wonderfully, who are still in the 
 Inferno or Purgatorio stage of the appointed Pilgrim's Progress, 
 without a glimmer of understanding as to why they are troubled 
 as they are, or that a Paradise will, through God's mercy, be the 
 end of the journey. Your book is really true theology as well as 
 poetry. Till I read your notes on the extract you give from the 
 beginning of the Inferno, I never understood the pilgrim's dis- 
 covering that he had lost his way. 
 
 As to the " poor, old, worn-out, untrained pen " that has been 
 used to write it, commend me to such pens. Where are they to 
 be picked up ? At all events, the pen is just the pen to write of 
 these things. 
 
 Forgive such a line. But your book has made me glad, and 
 I feel I must attempt to express my thankfulness for it, and for 
 what the Blessed Giver of all has given you in it for other weary 
 souls. Yours ever affectionately, ANDREW JUKES. 
 
 From the Rev. ANDREW JUKES to E. R. G. 
 
 WOOLWICH, Ascension Day, 1893. 
 
 MY DEAR MRS. GURNEY, My note did not deserve an 
 answer, but I am glad to get your answer and the little pros- 
 pectuses of your book, which I will try to send into really sym- 
 pathising hands. Your book is too good for the crowd. Think 
 of the welcome Christ met with. It is the welcome which all 
 higher truth must receive here, while the world is what it is. 
 
 Yes, to-day is Ascension Day, never to be forgotten by those 
 who once met on this morning, years ago, now parted for a little 
 while by the waters of death, which yet are waters of life also,
 
 268 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 and who shall surely meet again to thank God for all sorrows 
 and for all joys. With all love, yours ever affectionately, 
 
 ANDREW JUKES. 
 
 From the Rev. ANDREW JUKES to E. R. G. 
 
 UPPER EGLINTON ROAD, WOOLWICH, 
 June 2, 1893. 
 
 MY DEAR MRS. GURNEY, I feel that I must again write you 
 a line to say what a real delight your book has been to me during 
 the last few weeks. I have read and re-read it. Every page is 
 really a poem and a sermon. 
 
 It shames me to think how I could have read Dante in days 
 past, and been so blind to the deep spiritual teaching which you 
 bring out so clearly. Of course, no one who knows anything of 
 mediaeval religious thought can possibly read that wonderful 
 poem, which you have so lovingly commented on, without seeing 
 in it not only some of the deepest Christian teaching of those 
 days, but also answers, or at least suggestions as to what must be 
 the answer to the riddle of the discipline and trial of this life, 
 and of the mystery of sin and evil. But till I read your notes I 
 did not clearly see how Dante has anticipated us, both in his 
 seeings and in his experience. But, indeed, our seeings come from 
 our experiences ; and the road, whether for Dante or for us, is 
 one and the same, from self to God through Jesus Christ our 
 Lord. 
 
 I would, but cannot now, write more. This line is only to 
 tell you how glad I am to have your book, which has refreshed 
 and delighted me. Yours ever affectionately, 
 
 ANDREW JUKES. 
 
 To the Rev. ANDREW JUKES. 
 
 3 ORME SQUARE, June 3, 1883. 
 
 DEAR, DEAR MR. JUKES, I don't believe that any young 
 aspirant to literary fame was ever more delighted with being 
 couronne by the French Academy than I, on another plane, am
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 269 
 
 rejoiced at heart by your dear and most kind letter received this 
 morning. That you should have again taken the trouble to write 
 to me, and that you should have yourself found words you can 
 set your seal to in my book, seems almost a miracle. It makes 
 me believe that I have not been unaided in the work, and that it 
 was not altogether of presumption and of the impetuosity of the 
 flesh that it arose in my heart to do this. But you know so 
 infinitely more on all the subjects treated than I do, both by experi- 
 ence and by learning, and yet there you are, ready to receive in 
 this divine way ! 
 
 I know your fatherly goodness, and how fathers are the ones 
 who stoop to receive from their children, so perhaps I ought not 
 to be surprised. 
 
 I am just come back from Cheltenham, where E. K. and I 
 have been spending six weeks, and we have been both greatly 
 gratified and really uplifted by seeing the work done in spiritual 
 yes, really spiritual education by Miss Beale in the midst of her 
 900 pupils and teachers at the Ladies' College. There is such a 
 spirit of earnest thought and pursuit of truth, combined with 
 such reverence and humility, as I hardly thought was to be found 
 in the present heiresses of all the ages ! There are hard times 
 coming for them, and this little cohort seems to me blessedly 
 preparing for the conflict. 
 
 Again thanking you for your letter and for years of outgiving 
 of good things. Believe me, your very affectionate and grateful, 
 
 EMELIA GURNEY. 
 
 To the Rev. ANDREW JUKES. 
 
 3 ORME SQUARE, June 23, 1893. 
 
 It was, indeed, an indescribable boon to find you again on 
 this side of the hiding veil, and to gather up in your dear pre- 
 sence many of the truths you have so livingly bid us partake 
 with you. Now, to get your letter and to be assured by it of 
 your loving kindness (that of which the two words together speak 
 as in the io3rd Psalm, as you pointed out) is an added joy and 
 possession.
 
 270 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 Your words about my " Pilgrim " could only spring from such 
 a combination. I am indeed grateful for them 1 Your teaching 
 has helped the pages of notes to be what they could not have 
 been unaided by you, and I dare to hope that a breath of the 
 Divine Spirit has given some vital power to the seed which you 
 so plentifully sowed. Tn deep affection and gratitude, yours (I 
 trust) ever, EMELIA GURNEY. 
 
 An account of that which was the chief and absorb- 
 ing interest of the later years of Mrs. Russell Gurney's 
 life is best given in the words of Mr. Frederic Shields, 
 in his little book entitled " The Chapel of the Ascension ; 
 its Story and Scheme." 
 
 " It was on one of the many precious visits paid to my studio 
 by Lady Mount-Temple (whose friendship I owed to Dante 
 Gabriel Rossetti's mediation), that she brought with her a lady 
 whom she introduced as Mrs. Russell Gurney. The name was 
 well known to me, and at once I understood I was in the pre- 
 sence of the widow of that Recorder of London who had magni- 
 fied his office by the nobility with which he had filled it. 
 
 " This lady very quietly proposed a commission to paint certain 
 subjects on the walls of a country church. All my interest and 
 gratitude arose to meet her desire ; but I was compelled to plead 
 that my word bound me first to complete the designs for the 
 decoration of Eaton Hall chapel, with which, through the recom- 
 mendation of Alfred Waterhouse, R.A., I had been generously 
 entrusted by his Grace the Duke of Westminster a large and 
 lengthy task. Mrs. Russell Gurney consented to wait my liberty 
 to serve her. But it was so long ere this was obtained, that I was 
 quite prepared to learn that the lengthy postponement had cooled 
 her purpose; for I had not then proved, as since I have, the 
 strong enduring friendship and tenacity of purpose which gradually 
 led me to regard Mrs. Russell Gurney as a living incarnation 
 of courageous fidelity. The direction of the commission was
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 271 
 
 changed, only to carve for it a wider channel. It now welled 
 forth as a desire to plant in some great highway of London a 
 place of rest for wayfarers and for prayer and meditation, wherein 
 body, mind, and spirit, oppressed with the hurrying roar of the 
 city's life, might find repose and a refreshing feast ever liberally 
 spread upon its walls for whosoever willed to enter. Long ago 
 the hope of building such a place had been aroused by a small 
 chapel she had seen in Florence, where few services were held, 
 but simply set apart for meditation and prayer, and always open. 
 Her visualisation of this idea was distinct. It embraced two 
 courts : ' an outer one, with seats for wayfarers' rest, having a 
 fountain in its centre overflowing and its walls haply painted with 
 deeds of brotherly kindness ; and in the inner courts those very 
 acts in the new creation from whence these spring through the 
 one perfect Head.'" 
 
 The following letters were written during this 
 period. 
 
 LETTERS TO MR. FREDERIC SHIELDS. 
 
 3 ORME SQUARE, September i, 1887. 
 
 DEAR MR. SHIELDS, I have set two agents to work. There 
 is hope, or rather possibility, that I might get a bit of that 
 hideously placarded bit of frontage in Bayswater Road the 
 corner opposite a large public-house, nearly opposite the entrance 
 to Palace Gardens. I should like the site to stretch backwards 
 enough to permit two little halls or chambers the first rather 
 square for sitting and resting in ; the innermost for prayer, half 
 the size. Perhaps in the outermost there might be represented 
 deeds of brotherly kindness, and in the innermost biblical en- 
 couragement to prayer. Please inwardly digest it much. As I 
 leave so soon for Hereford, I should be so glad if the idea could 
 sufficiently shape itself to set things going. 
 
 Next Thursday I could go to you, and we might then speak
 
 272 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 further of this. Who would be the best architect and what kind 
 of fagade ? First y what material ? 
 
 From Mr. SHIELDS to Mrs. RUSSELL GURNEY. 
 
 SIENA HOUSE, LODGE PLACE, September 2, 1887. 
 
 MY DEAR MRS. RUSSELL GURNEY, All this is beautiful and 
 felicitous beyond my thoughts, for yours is the conception and 
 the swift steps taken to nurse it into being. I tremble with 
 desire and fear towards the idea's fulfilment fear to fall short 
 in a matter that involves we know not what wide issues ultimately 
 in the service of art and piety. 
 
 " Oh, send Wisdom out of Thy holy place, that, being present, 
 she may labour with us," and so, as her children, justify this 
 our deed. 
 
 The little spot should be pure, a shrine into which anything 
 that defileth, if it entered, should feel itself abhorred. And 
 it should be lit from the roof, shut out from all but heavenly 
 eye, closeted from the tumultuous world's surging around. 
 And this also to economise wall space, precious in so small 
 a temple. 
 
 By Thursday next my brooding will, I hope, have hatched 
 some thinly fledged idea of a scheme, and we can compare our 
 views. I cannot speak of the matter yet to any one ; it seems 
 a sacred dream, not to be told till fulfilled. 
 
 From Mrs. RUSSELL GURNEY to Mr. SHIELDS. 
 
 HEREFORD, November 5, 1887. 
 
 What happiness there is in meeting in a common purpose ! 
 I cannot tell you, my dear friend, how I am rejoicing in 
 the thought of your growing work, which is to make manifest 
 precious things. And is it egotistic to feel a great added glad- 
 ness in being permitted to contribute to it, even in the lowest, 
 most material form ? 
 
 You are suffering, and it^seems as if your thoughts and ex-
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 273 
 
 pressions would be more liberated if you were not in the furnace. 
 But God's way seems to lead His chosen through the fire. 
 
 I think we might give it the name of a " Resting-place for 
 Wayfarers " ; that is quite simple and quite true. 
 
 As I was travelling here, I seemed to see in the outer room 
 the four stars or cardinal virtues presiding over their kingdoms 
 of acts, and in the shrine " The Three that gaze more deeply," as 
 Dante said, in glistening white, in verdant green, and flaming 
 red. Yours ever, I trust, in enduring bonds, E. R. G. 
 
 AYLESTONE HILL, HEREFORD, 
 November 18, 1 888. 
 
 DEAR FRIEND, I thank you for two kind letters. I shall 
 quite understand that there must be delays, and I don't want to 
 hasten the appearance of those green shoots whose downward 
 roots must first take firm hold and strengthen under the pres- 
 sure of the over sods. This last is a very burying kind of sod. 
 / must, and you will help me in this, keep quite firm to a plan 
 or form of building that we, you and I, approve. 
 
 Do not feel you must write to inform me of the ins and outs 
 as they go on. I shall now bide in patience, only glad no con- 
 tract is signed, and that we are free to be off ! 
 
 3 ORME SQUARE, November 28, 1888. 
 
 I want you not to feel tied and bound by anything that has 
 passed if, as time goes on, your heart is not towards that work. 
 You will see how life unfolds to you ; and I know, if it is well 
 that so it should be, some of your inspirations will be breathed 
 forth on that wall. But it may be well that they should be 
 transfixed elsewhere, where more might be taught and rejoiced 
 by them. 
 
 Mr. Shields' narrative continues : 
 
 " The whole purpose was committed to the will of God, but 
 counsel was asked of friends, and the balance between their
 
 274 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 views and her own calmly weighed, with the result that she came 
 to question, ' Is it wiser to give up the precious vision as unsuited 
 to our English people, and to our Londoners especially ? ' Miss 
 Octavia Hill wrote that she thought that only the associations 
 of a church would keep visitors at all in order, and that there 
 were few who would look at solemn pictures without a living, 
 exponent voice. 
 
 " At this discouraging moment a suitable site appeared within 
 possible attainment on the Bayswater Road; but after months 
 of wearying attempts to come to agreement with the landholders, 
 all fell through. 
 
 " Yet at this crisis Mrs. Russell Gurney wrote : ' I feel no 
 wavering ; on the contrary, my conviction is strengthened that 
 we are to try this plan for silence and rest in the presence of 
 spiritual suggestions received through the eye.' 
 
 " The conditions of many other situations were explored, but 
 every effort appeared destined to extinction. . . . 
 
 " It was at this juncture that her courageous perseverance 
 received new stimulus through a suggestion made known to me 
 by the architect, Mr. Herbert P. Home. Mr. Kegan Paul had 
 pointed out that the disused, decaying mortuary chapel of the 
 old cemetery on the Bayswater Road, attached to St. George's, 
 Hanover Square, was a site that might possibly be acquired if 
 proper advances were made to its governing board. And thus 
 arose a brighter vision than any that had faded away. 
 
 " The situation was perfect on the great highway, just removed 
 from one of the busiest convergent parts of London's traffic, and 
 yet enough withdrawn from the noise and hurry to and fro to 
 meet the central purpose, never abandoned, of fitness for rest 
 and meditation, surrounded as it was by a green, silent God's 
 acre. 
 
 " Mrs. Russell Gurney wrote : ' I covet that site ; for such a 
 site I would spend more on building. It might be lovely. Do 
 find out whether an application to the Bishop of Ix>ndon would 
 be of any use.' 
 
 " The Burial Board met the application in Mrs. Gurney's name
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 275 
 
 with ready entertainment, and slowly it loomed forth that all our 
 schemes had been thwarted that we might rejoice in a better end 
 than we had ever dared to conceive possible. As she had sub- 
 ordinated it all to the will of God, 'yea' or 'nay,' so now it 
 seemed His ' yea ' beyond her hopes. 
 
 " The many legal difficulties were one by one surmounted, and 
 permission to erect a new chapel formally accorded, the Burial 
 Board electing the generous donor to a seat on their consulta- 
 tions. Finally, in the latter end of 1890, the Bishop of London's 
 chancellor sanctioned the erection and conditions of the present 
 building. 
 
 " Mr. Home was then instructed to prepare designs ; and at 
 Mrs. Russell Gurney's desire and cost, architect and painter 
 visited some of the northern Italian cities, and primarily Pietra 
 Santa, in the Carrara district, where the beautiful facade of the 
 principal church was indicated, as suggestive of the kind of de- 
 sign desired by Mrs. Russell Gurney. 
 
 " This journey had much influence upon the views of the young 
 and observant architect, and the result was the present edifice, in 
 connection with which he had the difficult task of preserving the 
 old chapel on the one side and the caretaker's dwelling on the 
 other, the space for the new chapel being thus strictly narrowed 
 in limitation, and its interior controlled by the imperative neces- 
 sity of subjecting its design to the unbroken wall-spaces required 
 to receive the painted subjects. 
 
 " That within these restraints Mr. Home has succeeded in 
 producing a chaste and fitting shrine will be freely admitted by 
 all who are sensitive to simple, dignified, and refined qualities in 
 architecture. 
 
 " Mr. W. H. Burke, of Newman Street, who had executed the 
 mosaic designs for Eaton Hall chapel, undertook the erection of 
 the Chapel of the Ascension, and threw all his fine experience 
 and enthusiasm into the practical working out of the plans, and 
 with Mr. Home frequently held consultations with Mrs. Russell 
 Gumey, wherein she showed an admirably clear, exact forethought 
 for every detail and all the multiform requisitions of warming,
 
 276 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 flooring, roofing, lighting. Four years later, when I expressed 
 some shrinking from the great cost incurred, she wrote, ' What a 
 privilege for me, out of the mammon of unrighteousness, to have 
 been permitted to set forth your long-repressed aims ! ' 
 
 " Her trust, once gained, was absolute and enduring ; and as 
 the chapel slowly rose into actuality, her vision taking outward 
 form and substance, the exulting joy she manifested in every 
 point she approved, and her frank, undisguised disapproval occa- 
 sionally, were alike the emanations of a spirit singularly sincere 
 and incapable of polite disingenuousness. From the beginning 
 an invigorating, inspiring force welled out from her ; her letters 
 vibrate with the most respondent, sensitive sympathies, and are 
 quick with the inspiration of holy influences and devoted earnest- 
 ness. Enthusiastic resolution inspired all her plans, while yet a 
 wise, calm caution held all in rein. 
 
 " Often a sweet, playful vivacity breaks through in her letters, 
 or again a tender, enthralled delight in the beauties of the country. 
 She writes of taking her past year's diary with her to Pau, 'to 
 talk with her past hours, and ask them what report they bore to 
 heaven.' 
 
 " Stoutly maintaining her own conclusion, she well knew how 
 to render courteous entertainment to the opinion of opponents. 
 
 " Beyond any whom I have known, she rejoiced with them that 
 rejoiced, mourned with those who wept, strong was she to com- 
 fort and uplift, and full of delicate tact in helping. 
 
 " Since it was most inexpedient, by reason of the shortness of 
 life, to await the completion of the chapel building and the pre- 
 paration of its walls for strictly mural painting, it became neces- 
 sary to decide on some medium which would allow the paintings 
 to be carried on in the artist's studio simultaneously with the pro- 
 gress of the builders. 
 
 " So after inquiry and thoughtful care, the painter decided that, 
 all things duly weighed, oil-painting, when placed in favourable 
 conditions and carefully preserved from any form of artificial 
 lighting, offered in this country, at least, the longest probabilities 
 of endurance.
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 277 
 
 " But the object was kept in view to avoid anything like framed 
 pictures, and to obtain as far as might be, by the omission of all 
 moulding, the general aspect of an unbroken wall of decoration. 
 
 " In consultation with the architect and Mr. Burke, the plan 
 was formed of riveting blocks of slate to the walls, leaving an air- 
 chamber behind, and then to affix the paintings to the slate with 
 a composition of white lead, &c., after the manner practised by 
 M. Puvis de Chavannes at Amiens. 
 
 " Gas having proved most destructive to oil-paintings, it was 
 provided in the deed of gift that no artificial light should ever be 
 introduced into the Chapel of the Ascension, the hours of day- 
 light being sufficient for the purposes contemplated. 
 
 " Thus also, with the addition of an iron door to the organ-loft, 
 every possible precaution has been taken against the calamity of 
 fire. 
 
 " The south wall over the organ-loft was next painted, in the 
 severe cold and fogs of the winter of 1894, upon a lofty scaffold, 
 painting day after day by the light of a small oil-lamp, and in 
 such confined space that only a crouching position was possible. 
 In the frieze of child angels around the arch, Mr. Innes Fripp 
 most ably carried forward my designs, expediting the work, Mrs. 
 Russell Gurney manifesting the keenest interest in every step." 
 
 E. R. G. to Mr. FREDERIC SHIELDS. 
 
 HEREFORD, April 30. 
 
 I can in some measure imagine the bewildering dazzle of 
 infinity in which you must lose yourself ere you can distinguish 
 and seize the main lines of the mystic Tree of Life, so as to 
 portray them to the senses, or rather so as to awaken the ap- 
 prehension of them through the senses in others. If, as you say, 
 and as I know, you are driven under the Sycamore Tree, we are 
 sure the Master has found you. 
 
 3 ORME SQUARE, December 26. 
 
 MY DEAR FRIEND, How late I am in saying a blessed 
 Christmas to you ! But happily for us it is an abiding birthday.
 
 278 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 Ever coming, ever come, all the days. Never leaving or for- 
 saking us. But it is nice to have our fixed day for union in the 
 thought of the Babe, and in passing on our greetings to one 
 another ; and so I'm sorry I failed to send you a pressure of the 
 hand. Thank you for yours, and for telling me that on Saturday 
 we may perhaps take another step towards our Hope. Ever 
 affectionately yours, EMELIA GURNEY. 
 
 To Mr. SHIELDS. 
 
 3 ORME SQUARE, September to, 1889 (?). 
 
 MY DEAR FRIEND, I write now because I want to express to 
 you something of the pleasure the two autotypes have been in- 
 creasingly giving me, ever since I set them on my mantelpiece. 
 Sometimes Jonah, sometimes St. Andrew and the little lad, 
 appeals to me most. Jonah in his typical character, triumphing 
 over death and destruction, is, I think, quite magnificent, and 
 such a resurrection song. " O grave ! where is thy victory ? " 
 
 3 ORME SQUARE, November 19, 1889. 
 
 Yes ; la turba, la turba I It is everywhere till that is formed 
 which the Spirit longs unutterably to draw forth. How strange is 
 all this long process, ere the prepared body can be projected for 
 your spirit's inbreathing ! 
 
 3 ORME SQUARE, October 21 (?). 
 
 How Peter's failure and Peter's shame and love have been 
 given to your expression ; and in that the Breast upon which all 
 was flung has, indeed, been revealed ! Many have thanked God, 
 and many more will thank God, for His revelations through you. 
 Surely such can only pass through suffering hearts. 
 
 3 ORME SQUARE, October 17, 1893. 
 
 DEAR FRIEND, I rejoice that you are able to give forth your 
 living thoughts again on canvas, though I wish, indeed, you could 
 speak of pain departed. I ought to have sent you back your
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 279 
 
 scroll before this. There is only one suggestion I should like to 
 make. It is in the Noah, who in his white garment represents 
 the cleansing of water-baptism. Might he not speak as John the 
 Baptist did of the further purification needed of the Holy Ghost 
 and Fire (St. Matt. iii. 2) ? It seems to me that the Annuncia- 
 tion of those two great Baptisms at the commencement of our 
 series is very important ; and as Enoch has prophesied of Judg- 
 ment, the note of Noah might be its Object, Purification, or 
 Righteousness. The Dove also promises this. 
 
 You cannot think how thankful two or three of my friends, as 
 well as myself, have been for the triumph of Life out of Death, 
 pictured in your magnificent Jonah ! Every one delights in 
 St. Andrew and the little lad, but my elect rejoice yet more in 
 Jonah. 
 
 It is impossible to say how much your wonderful creations 
 delight and feed and touch me. They are unspeakably pathetic, 
 both on the paternal and the offspring side. (Referring to the 
 two lunettes on the outside wall of the chapel the return of the 
 prodigal.) 
 
 3 ORME SQUARE, June 30, 1894. 
 
 I left your studio yesterday quite uplifted with thankfulness for 
 your blessed given-gift for the entrance of our little shrine. You 
 cannot think how it spoke to me. It cannot fail to bring to many 
 hearts a fuller appreciation of the wonderful parable it points to. 
 
 Then when I came home there were all the autotypes to go 
 through. We were astonished at their variety of expression and 
 teaching, and this variety one can appreciate more in seeing them 
 in succession and on a small scale, perhaps. At any rate, they 
 have done more, I think, than confirm the intense impression 
 almost all the large pictures had made on my heart. 
 
 I trust many, multiplying and increasingly, will thank God 
 with me for the fulness of His that has been outpoured through 
 your hands. Your grateful and affectionate 
 
 EMELIA GURNEY.
 
 280 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 WYASTOXK, BAY'S HIM., CHELTENHAM, 
 
 January 22, 1895. 
 
 Indeed, dear friend, it is very beautiful of you to feel as you 
 do and say about that small lint in the chain of the outward and 
 inward Providence that fits you to the work of manifestation. I 
 glory in being permitted to be that link. And what do you think 
 I may well feel of gratitude to you for the exercise of such gifts as 
 yours, and for all your zeal and goodwill in it ? 
 
 3 OB.ME SQUARE, September i, 1895. 
 
 MY DEAR FRIEKD, Indeed you might well say, " I am the 
 man that hath seen affliction 3 " Body, soul, and spirit, I think, 
 have been placed in the crucible. And all the petty work you 
 have had as well as the great travail You have been Clerk of 
 the Works and what not \ 
 
 I am now so hoping that after this week's grand launching, 
 you will take a month's respite in some delicious air. 
 
 I want you to send one line, one word would do, after you 
 have seen a picture glued to its slab and slipped into its place. 
 Just " successful " would be enough. 
 
 3 OXME SQCAEE, October 4, 1895. 
 
 MY DEAR FRIEND, I have been twice in " la Sainte Chapelle " 
 since you were there. Yesterday with Dr. M., just returned from 
 I wrote to beg be would not attempt to peep into our 
 without me. Every time I go the whole effect and 
 the details grow upon nae amazingly, and I felt Dr. M.'s immense 
 = .-:;.:. i:- -__-.-_ :. proCOtkm. W* EM :.'.: tMjeflhfll JH Wwl 
 and miracle ; its deep harmony of colour, so full of continuation, 
 if I may say so ; its tender vibrations as well as its full chords, 
 and this besides its spiritual import. St. Peter is far grander than 
 be was in your studio, indeed each one is. Your affectionate and 
 grateful friend, EMELIA GUI
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 281 
 
 3 Oman, SQPBJOX, Mmmier 7 (?). 
 
 Your words, " the pbot to ocr wmeelof hie," are tlwillmg r ,and 
 almost convince me that to embody them in Ait is beyond the 
 power of man. And I have more and move felt what yon said 
 about Duality. We cannot hate fife without death ; their inter- 
 change is, of coarse, expressed in every pactnre on die watts. And 
 if we could suggest the triumph of Ae Life as die eternal end of 
 the process, as the " Pivot of the Wheel, 9 it wooM indeed be 
 splendid. But, perhaps, thai can only be the vision in the inner- 
 most shrine of the heart. Affectionately yonrs, 
 
 EM ELLA GOOCBT. 
 
 Mr. Shields' narrative continues : 
 
 " The later years of Mrs, RnsseH Gurnets fife were crossed by 
 much physical suffering and weakness, through which her con- 
 stitntional buoyancy of spirit so often carried her to convalescence, 
 that it seemed to me that the tear she once expressed when hurt 
 by some vexatious delay, "I shail never Hive to see it done,' was 
 premature. Still, the despondent words painMly lingered in my 
 mind, so that I bent all my powers to press die work on to such 
 a point, that some visible earnest of die fulness of her idea might 
 be set forth. Hence, within a years space we had reached die 
 end of all the p a "tiffg f^gdkfll to be done for scaffolding, which 
 was at length cleared away, so thai March 18, 1896, 1 could say, 
 'Come now'; and I had the long-desired Joy of teaming my 
 most patient, though expectant friend, and of i^Miyiug her 
 ecstatic delight in what had been accomplished, 
 
 " The morrow had been appointed for the first of a series of 
 lectures by the Rev. Rowland Corbet, TPjm*"^ i Q*y of the purposes 
 of the chapel decoration, to which Mrs. Russell Gamer had 
 invited many friends. 
 
 She had hoped to be present at the succeeding lecture*. 
 
 But this opening day, when for the first time she was able to 
 demonstrate that she had not lightly counted the cost of die 
 plan which all her friends had at first discouraged, and that
 
 282 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 though the top stone was not yet brought forth, still there was 
 visible evidence it could now be hoped that grace might be 
 invoked on its eventual completion this day was the very last on 
 which she stood within her 'treasure-house' dedicated to God's 
 glory. The next day she was stricken down with illness, which 
 after seven months of lingering suffering took away her whose 
 gracious presence I had trusted would have long remained my 
 stimulating impulse and encouragement upon a lonely and toil- 
 some path. 
 
 " That it may be known what manner of head and heart com- 
 bined to utter her ' Well done ! ' these extracts from her letters 
 are given : 
 
 " ' I have been living in the remembrance of the shrine, only 
 feeling that I had but half expressed what an impression it has 
 made upon me.' 
 
 " ' An atmospheric harmony, audible, visible, sensitive, like a 
 nature scene, that exists of itself in perfection of unity and 
 detail. It has been a sort of communion with the Soul of 
 Things.' 
 
 " Again the generous hand indites but a few months before the 
 opening of the chapel : 
 
 " ' I have seen your perfectly beautiful night scene of our Lord 
 and Nicodemus, and the prevision that lights the beyond. How 
 wonderfully that bronze-like colour lends itself to the subjects of 
 the topmost panels ! I am ashamed to say that the more I see, 
 the more does impatience wax.' 
 
 " Again as the work progressed : 
 
 " ' Every time I go, the whole effects and the details grow upon 
 me amazingly. Its deep harmony of colour is full of continua- 
 tion, if I may say so, its tender vibrations, as well as its full 
 chords.' 
 
 " From these brief extracts it may be conceived what drear 
 vacancy this lady's loss leaves in the heart of her servant."
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 283 
 
 To the Rev. ANDREW JUKES. 
 
 3 ORME SQUARE, W., November 27. 
 
 DEAREST ST. ANDREW, Your day is just at hand again ! 
 And though I fear you are suffering much during your detention 
 from your waiting home, we cannot help rather selfish joy in 
 having you within reach of our words. 
 
 I cannot help wishing so much that you could see the little 
 chapel for rest, silence, and prayer that is so growing now in 
 preparation (though very far from completion) under Mr. Shields' 
 most spiritual suggestions on its inside walls. There is a frieze 
 of angels and small subjects over the Apostles and Prophets. 
 You have your patron saint with the lad he brings forward, as 
 your fatherly spirit has the way of doing ; and now I send you 
 the angel over St. Andrew and John the Baptist's heads the 
 kind of young bud of an angel of the dawning Gospel dis- 
 pensation, sounding the eight bells of the sanctuary, with, I 
 think, supreme grace and innocence. I have had these photo- 
 graphs taken to send one at Christmas to each workman 
 employed on the building. Ever, dearest Mr. Jukes, your 
 very lovingly grateful EMELIA GURNEY. 
 
 To EDWARD CLIFFORD. 
 
 3 ORME SQUARE, March n, 1896. 
 
 Will you try and make time to come to one of these 
 addresses? If possible, the first, for I should like you to be 
 present and lifting up your heart with us for a benediction on 
 the real object of the building and pictures the first time that 
 united prayer will ascend within its walls. I send you four 
 papers, on which you might like to write the names of some 
 who have the same object in assembling. It will be more 
 generally open for those who come to view the pictures 
 after Easter. Yours ever affectionately, 
 
 EMELIA R. GURNEY.
 
 284 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 March 19. 
 
 How very welcome to me are your truly sympathetic words ! 
 I am so glad of what you say of the audience, I, being 
 behind them all, could not discern as you did. Yours very 
 affectionately, EMELIA GURNEY. 
 
 From Lady MOUNT-TEMPLE to Mr. SHIELDS. 
 
 SHELLEY HOUSE, CHELSEA EMBANKMENT. 
 MY DEAR MR. SHIELDS, I can hardly believe that I have 
 been so ungrateful as never to thank you outwardly for your 
 splendid St. John. I suppose it is because I have thanked 
 you so much inwardly, that the outer part was taken for granted. 
 What a grand old eagle he is, gazing at the sun. How true to 
 the character and development of the Apostle of love, that he 
 should grow from the Vita Nuova of his youth to the strong, 
 intense seer of the greatest Divina Commedia in his age ! His 
 writings were the true soul-food of my beloved, and I think 
 now he has drunk of the Fountain of life, and has come into 
 the perfect union for which he longed. Yours most truly, 
 
 GEORGINA MOUNT-TEMPLE. 
 
 From Sir NOEL PATON to Mr. F. SHIELDS. 
 
 33 GEORGE STREET, EDINBURGH, 
 January 30, 1895. 
 
 Your beautiful "Angel of the Chimes" did me no end of 
 good, and has since stood within hand-reach of my bed, a 
 pleasanter and withal more efficacious anodyne to my special 
 aches than as yet my pharmacost has supplied. I thank you 
 for it very heartily. What was my pleasure and surprise when 
 a little while ago the photographs of the grand series of designs, 
 of which my Angel forms part, were brought for my inspection 
 by a lady friend of Mrs. Russell Gurney's. 
 
 I knew that you were engaged on a very important work 
 of a sacred character; but I was not prepared to find it one
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 285 
 
 in every way so congenial to your genius, and so fitted to call 
 forth those unique qualities of invention and execution which 
 the grand cartoons for Eaton Hall chapel first revealed to me. 
 How thankful I am that these designs are being carried out 
 under the auspices of a friend evidently so well fitted to appre- 
 ciate their thought, fulness, and beauty. That they will speak 
 to many a listening heart above the rush and roar of London, 
 when we have all passed beyond the dark river, must be a 
 grateful reflection to her and to you. I earnestly trust that 
 strength will be accorded to you to carry the noble task to 
 completion. I wish I could hope to see it even in progress, 
 but it is very certain that I shall never again bring my blue 
 bonnet over the Border. . . . Ever with true affection yours, 
 
 NOEL PATON.
 
 PART IV 
 
 JOURNAL LETTERS FROM JAMAICA, 1865, 
 AND SICILY, 1889 
 
 To Mrs. BATTEN. 
 
 O.N BOARD THE "ATRATO," 
 January 2, 1865. 
 
 IT seemed such a great, strong castle, that it gave us great 
 confidence that the winds and waves could not get at us much. 
 
 The little steamer careering about us, trying to help to tug 
 us round at last let go, and it tossed away to shore again with 
 our most beloved ones ; that is one of the never-to-be-forgotten 
 scenes in one's life. How grey and desolate and stormy the 
 rounding looked ! We paced the great, clean, still firm deck. 
 The water around chopped up into angry little furrows. R. 
 went down to dinner at 4.30. I sat about on the gallery 
 above, and fancied myself at the Grand Hotel at Brighton and 
 the sea at a respectful distance. Some merry children were 
 romping about. I wrote off a note for the pilot a little before 
 6, and was warned by the engaging stewardess that it would 
 be wise and safe to get all ready for the night before another 
 quarter of an hour. Already the great castle, every three or four 
 minutes, seemed to trip over a ditch, and then to scurry on 
 in a tipsy kind of fashion. I had to make haste, for this habit 
 grew fearfully fast on our once firm castle, and then came long 
 lurches and lunges and heavy rolling, and even,' variety of move- 
 ment that the ingenuity of a living creature could devise. Some- 
 times the sea-rnonster did just as Cosette does with your slipper : 
 he took our nutshell of a boat (for that's what she seemed now) 
 between his teeth, shook her soundly, and then tossed her off 
 to a scornful distance ; then for two minutes she lay like a dead
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 287 
 
 thing, and then struggled madly on again at the mercy of some 
 fresh trick of the furies. I wondered often exactly what amount 
 of misery I was suffering. There's always more or less of one's 
 being that holds itself aloof from anything one is going through, 
 and looks on as a stranger, not intermeddling with it; but this 
 unaffected residuum is small and weak when sea-sickness has 
 any firm possession of one. 
 
 The sun shines, a yellow gleam, R. walks up and down be- 
 tween his colleagues and a very pale young man. I managed 
 to walk a little too, and looked at the wake of the vessel, the 
 furrows in the dark blue turning glacier-green, and living, curling 
 snow foam. To-day I felt more inclined to look complacently 
 at the frolicsome waves ; yesterday their rough sport teased me 
 like a jeer. 
 
 Sunday ith. We had such a blessed night untossed, and 
 got up early, had a walk in a soft, moist wind on deck for half- 
 an-hour, and then came down to breakfast, our first meal in 
 company. R. sits on the captain's left, then I. We were 
 up on deck after breakfast, and every one looked contented and 
 peaceable. We saw shoals of porpoises taking flying leaps out 
 of one wave into another. One's preconceived opinions of these 
 creatures are utterly false. I thought they were fat, like alder- 
 men ; quite the contrary : they are slim and joyous, and make 
 a most graceful curve as they turn their somersaults; a kind 
 of glimpse of them one gets reminds one of a hare rushing over 
 hillocks, the two gills standing back like the hare's ears. There 
 were hundreds and thousands frisking along, making the ocean 
 glad by our side. We stood leaning over the deck watching 
 them in a mild wooing breeze, while you were putting on your 
 wraps, doubting whether you should venture through fog and 
 mud to church. 
 
 When we turned from them, the backs of a long range of 
 blue-jerseyed sailors were before us ; all the ship's crew were 
 having their names called over. Many fine manly faces there 
 were along the opposite side of the ship ; officers, stewards, 
 waiters, cook, butcher, 130 in all, marched afterwards down into
 
 288 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 the saloon, and Captain Jellicoe read the service extremely 
 well. 
 
 Miss B., the Creole young lady, is pleasing and intelligent. 
 She is returning to Santa Cruz after two years and a half edu- 
 cating at a school in Bremen. Santa Cruz is near St. Thomas, 
 one of the three Danish islands. She says she loves the way 
 of life there better than the European. They get up at 5 ; ride 
 or walk after a bath and cup of coffee till 10; come in to a 
 dejeuner & la fourchette ; employ themselves in reading, writing, 
 and household matters till 2, when they sleep for an hour ; 
 drive out from 4.30 till 6.30, when they dine, and go out again 
 in the beautiful moonlight sometimes at night. I asked about 
 their negroes. Her dear nurse she loved so much had died 
 She liked a good many and trusted them ; but they were very 
 wayward and like children, she said. They could not manage 
 their children a bit ; and they often said they wished they were 
 slaves again, because then their missus would manage them ; also 
 because when they were too old to work they would be taken care 
 of. They work pretty well in cultivating vegetables. She says 
 the Moravian Brethren have done an immense amount of good 
 amongst them ; the negroes are completely led by their pastors, 
 and would not think of taking any step in life without consulting 
 them. Miss B. believes many have got better cottages and 
 cultivate their land better under the influence of the Moravians, 
 who are raising them out of the savage life into which they had 
 been sinking more and more since emancipation. I shall just re- 
 peat as much as I can, like a parrot, all that different people say 
 about the negroes. 
 
 Monday, January 8/Vfc. The dear sea calmer and calmer. 
 Last night I did not know what was going to happen. I waked 
 hearing the engines labouring heavily, but their beats getting 
 slower and slower, and at last ceasing altogether, and the ship 
 just rolling backwards and forwards with a gurgling of water 
 all about, as if we were going to be sucked in. 
 
 It occurred to me that it might be better to dress to be ready 
 to get into one of the lifeboats ; but the very steady, calm step
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 289 
 
 of a walker overhead reassured me. It is very solemn and 
 strange to wake in the middle of the night and to realise that we 
 are wending our way in the midst of the Atlantic, with such a 
 thin partition between us and the invisible world. We found in 
 the morning that some of the machinery had got a little warm, 
 so said the captain, and had to stop to cool and take breath. 
 
 I went up a little on the dark deck and watched the won- 
 drously beautiful phosphorescent lights by the side of the ship. 
 There were no stars to be seen overhead ; it was just as if they 
 had come down to chase and sport by our side. It was lovely 
 to see them at different distances, as it seemed to me, beneath 
 the water ; some veiled and dim, deeper down, others flashing up 
 to the surface ; some like large globes, others sparkling diamonds. 
 They must be sea-fairies, and a merry life they lead. 
 
 Tuesday, January 9^. A week since we started, and we 
 have gained rapidly in our chase after summer ; our days have 
 lengthened two hours and a half, the air is deliciously soft. The 
 sun, however, is coy, and does not show himself generously, and 
 the clouds are very remarkably English. 
 
 I have just pulled out my nicely prepared work and sat for 
 three-quarters of an hour gossiping with Miss B. I think her 
 mild Creole face very engaging. She loves her home at Santa 
 Cruz, but wishes so much it had a history longs for some old 
 building, or some works of art. We are not at all ennuyes with the 
 voyage yet. Russell is particularly spry, picking up all he can 
 from the captain and the Canadians. 
 
 Wednesday, January loth. Can it really be called January 
 still? If you could but see us, mother, you would be so con- 
 tented for us. At last we have a perfect sky and air and sea. 
 We have been close on the track of summer for three days, but 
 now we have completely caught her, and she is so sweet just here. 
 This would be the spot to choose for climate ; latitude the same 
 as Madeira, the air so fresh and joyous and exhilarating, and the 
 sun not too hot, even without a white umbrella. Before break- 
 fast for half-an-hour we stood at the bows meeting the heavenly 
 breeze ; from 10 to 12.30 I sat in my chair reading. Now I look
 
 290 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 out through the round cabin window and see the dark, dark 
 indigo sea-line against the pure sky ; the nearer water is very deep 
 sapphire, so different from the blue of the Mediterranean, or from 
 the blue of the sea at Brighton on a fine day. 
 
 There are disappointingly few characters on board ; at least, 
 they do not show as such : all behave in an ordinary fashion. 
 Russell amuses me by not getting tired the whole day of chatting 
 to one and another. The great wonder of the nuns is that their 
 caps keep as snowy and unwrinkled as ever; they have never 
 waned for a moment We have talked to-day over your photo- 
 graph as to whether this would have suited you ; we came to the 
 conclusion it would not. I keep sending you messages along the 
 beautiful glacier track behind us, that we are very well and happy. 
 
 January nth. Instead of growing hotter, as it ought to have 
 done, it became cooler ; the wind rose in gusts, and we had to 
 retreat into the captain's cabin. The captain showed me the 
 log, and I found the day described as very squally ; it grew worse 
 and worse, and the night was as bad, I think, as our first night on 
 board, only that we were more practised to bear it. 
 
 To-day, Friday isth, it is bright again. We are looking 
 forward to getting into the trade winds to-morrow. We have 
 been bordering the edge of the Gulf Stream, but no difference is 
 to be discerned in the look of the water. Long garlands of sea- 
 weed are floating on the water ; they are driven here by the stream. 
 No streaks of light and shade, no variety of colour on the whole 
 face of the ocean. I don't much want to take a longer voyage ; 
 and I own I felt it an encouraging sight this morning to see the 
 sailors lugging up the boxes from the hold, and separating them 
 into groups for Vera Cruz, Demerara, &c., &c. 
 
 Saturday i$th. We are in the Sargasso Sea, the great deep 
 of the Atlantic, where beds of seaweed float, the seaweed that the 
 sailors of Columbus thought they were going to stagnate in for 
 ever. I think as I never did before of the wonderful courage and 
 faith of those men pushing on in their small vessel, where none 
 had gone before, across this terrific, apparently infinite ocean. 
 Yesterday afternoon we attained to the trade winds, that always
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 291 
 
 breathe and blow from the N.E. Till yesterday the wind was 
 steadily against us ; now it is just enough in our favour to swell 
 our sails a little ; and this morning before breakfast the clean 
 awning was stretched over the deck, throwing a pretty shade over 
 the groups of people sitting beneath, and giving a little repose to 
 the eye in the contrast to the light and sea around. Oh, what a 
 heaven beneath the sea is ! I have been gazing down into its 
 deep blue flames, swelling up into such exquisite forms, and 
 crumbling out their snows. I saw a fountain in the sea, it was 
 a whale spouting. It is now light after dinner, and we come 
 up on deck again soon after five and watch the sunset. It 
 was not a gorgeous one this evening, but superlatively pure and 
 clear. We could see to read just twenty-five minutes after he 
 dipt in the sea; there was a golden afterglow a quarter of an 
 hour after the sunset 
 
 In the long, low saloon it is a tiresome time after the great, 
 staring, swinging lamps are lighted, and the long tables prevent 
 anything like grouping. I write my journal or read, and listen 
 with one ear to the conversation of Mr. P., who generally comes 
 into our neighbourhood in the evening, and the Canadians who 
 sit opposite. This evening there was a discussion between the 
 North and the South ; the Canadians strongly for the North, and 
 utterly astonished that any one could be so dark as to think that 
 some of the States could have any more right to disunite them- 
 selves than a province has to rebel against a legitimate govern- 
 ment. It seemed as hopeless that either party should see any 
 reason for the ground that the other took, as if they had been 
 arguing on Fate and Freewill. 
 
 Sunday, t^th. The good captain sent to tell me there would be 
 a pretty sunrise, so we were on deck by seven. Dove-coloured 
 streaks of cloud were interlacing themselves over a silvery gold 
 background. Small, grey-fringed, distinct cloudlets were drawn 
 up in array along one part of the horizon. There was no flush- 
 ing, no splendour, only a delicate purity, and a growth into such 
 a perfect day, such a Sabbath morning, such a promise of the Sun 
 of righteousness arising with healing in His wings.
 
 292 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 After breakfast all were sitting under the awning in their 
 clean summer things, the ship gently rocking to and fro. I saw 
 a flight of flying-fishes ; only think, they are dressed in silver and 
 blue every day, with gauze wings ; they seem born of the sapphire 
 wave and the sea-foam. They did not look to me larger than 
 swallows, but one cannot judge of size here ; they are really 
 about the size of herrings. When I expressed my admiration of 
 them to Mrs. Stokes, she said, " Oh yes, mum, I do wish one 
 would fly aboard that you might eat it for your breakfast, they 
 are beautiful eating." 
 
 Amongst the passengers there is a Major G., who is going to 
 his estate in St. Vincent. He is fond of sketching, and has 
 enlightened views on the subject, so we rather fraternised. He 
 said his estate for many years cost him money, but brought him 
 in none ; till three or four years ago he went to look after it him- 
 self during the winter months. The result is that the estate 
 during the last two years has brought in some return, and during 
 this year he expects a larger return. He speaks of the great 
 difficulty of getting the negroes to work. He gives them what 
 is called task-work, but the task-work, which is supposed to be 
 a day's work, is usually got over in four hours. He finds that a 
 great deal may be done by coaxing and chaffing them. They 
 thoroughly enjoy a good-humoured joke. His weeders were in 
 the habit of weeding in such a way that the weeds immediately 
 grew again. He tried to persuade them to pull the weeds up 
 properly and carry them away, but they said that was impossible. 
 After joking with them a little, he said that he would show them 
 how they did such work in England, and immediately knelt down 
 and set to work. The negroes were quite delighted, and made a 
 dance round him, saying, " Look at Massa working ! " And from 
 that time he had no difficulty in getting them to weed properly. 
 He spoke of them with interest and kindliness. He said he 
 thought old men who had been slaves were immensely superior 
 to their sons born in freedom ; there was much more self-control 
 and regularity amongst the former slaves. When he first went 
 out many of them were living, and they received him with the
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 293 
 
 utmost enthusiasm, and seemed to look at their Massa as a father. 
 In St. Vincent they are all Wesleyan Methodists. He thought 
 their ministers had no influence over the morality of their congre- 
 gations ; at any rate, their morality was at an extremely low ebb, 
 but the religious opportunities were well attended. 
 
 To-day, after dinner, the Prussian baron proposed the health 
 of Captain J. in the most spirited capital way possible. After tea 
 this last evening lamps were hung under the awning and a spirited 
 little dance was set going, the band doing its best and Captain J. 
 performing wondrously energetic feats. A German lady whom I 
 had thought elderly stood up after some pressing and sailed off 
 so magnificently; she seemed to transmigrate into a young 
 nymph. 
 
 Tuesday ibth. We were on deck soon after five. Light had 
 hardly begun to dawn. We were unable to see the Southern 
 Cross, for thick clouds were on the southern horizon ; but we did 
 enjoy seeing the day awaken. It was very hot, but just as the 
 sun arose the morning breeze brushed forth. The captain was 
 looking out eagerly for Sombrero, which became visible at about 
 seven a low, little patch of earth, only to be discerned for some 
 time by the breaking of the sea-foam against it ; a dismal little 
 rocky spot, where a few workmen live to get phosphate of lime 
 for manure. There is no water on the island ; they are dependent 
 on getting their supply from ships. Now we have had our last 
 breakfast and all our things are packed, and St. Thomas is just 
 visible on our horizon. It seems miraculous that we should 
 have come out at the right spot on the other hemisphere. At 
 2.15 exactly we steamed into the gay little harbour, walled in by 
 green hills about 600 or 700 feet high, unshapely and without 
 shades, a uniform yellow green. The houses, in two clusters on 
 mounds, were red, yellow, and white, and looked like toys; no 
 projecting roofs or shady nooks. The water was the most brilliant 
 blue green ; several large steamers were clustered together, and 
 multitudes of little boats with blacks in gay shirts were crowding 
 about. Altogether it was the most garish and bewildering scene 
 to those whose eyes had rested only on the solemn ocean and
 
 294 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 sky for a whole fortnight. Several negroes came on board with 
 their wares ; many passengers were going on shore in the little 
 clustering boats ; strangers were looking about us for friends they 
 had come to meet, and the sun broiled and the air ceased. I 
 was disappointed at seeing nothing picturesque, excepting the 
 negroes. I admired them very much in the full sunshine, with 
 bright colours about them. They looked so different from the 
 dismal blacks about the streets of London. A very large pro- 
 portion of them, however, was not the pure negro, and certainly 
 it is a great improvement in their humanity when their complete 
 blackness and their projecting mouths have been mitigated by 
 the mixture of another race. Russell was immediately absorbed 
 with Mr. C., the West Indian mail manager. I began early to 
 take leave of some of our fellow-passengers, and then, the books 
 stupidly being packed, there was nothing to do but to feel how 
 hot it was ! The day seemed never-ending. We roamed about 
 like unquiet spirits, and then lay down for an hour or so in our 
 hot cabins, hearing the everlasting hauling of boxes and the sailors' 
 heaving cry. Then we went up on deck and saw the Southern 
 Cross just above the hills. The stars are about the size of those 
 in the Great Bear, and as there are no others of the same size 
 very near, the Cross stands out very distinctly. I can imagine that 
 the sight of it must have been thrilling to those whose whole souls 
 were filled with a great enterprise. At 4.30 A.M. half-a-dozen of 
 us had some tea with the captain on the stairs in a very amicable 
 way, and afterwards he pioneered us across the plank bridge over 
 the dark, shark-infested waters to the Conway. Our new vessel 
 seemed wretchedly small after the grand Atrafo, and we felt 
 almost like orphans without good Mrs. Stokes. I will not write 
 of Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday ; it seems a long barren 
 tract, a great nightmare of heat and glare over us : no change in 
 the colour of the sea, no strange fishes or birds, no bewitching 
 views of the islands. Yes, there were some very lovely bits of 
 Hayti to be seen yesterday ; but we were not near enough to see 
 anything very characteristic till we stopped about a mile off 
 Jacmel, a straggling, large village lying at the foot of two ranges
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 295 
 
 of very pretty hills a long line of thick palms at the edge of the 
 water of a luscious green. A little boat went ashore to take the 
 letters, and Russell went in it. I tried to sketch, but the steamer 
 did all it could to circumvent me by turning round and round. 
 Those who landed said they were greeted by two of his black 
 majesty's soldiers in the wildest uniforms not uniforms, for each 
 was dressed differently and their passports were demanded. 
 They were, however, allowed to land when they explained they 
 were going to return to the ship in a few minutes. 
 
 And now it is Saturday morning, our nineteenth day of voyag- 
 ing ; we are coasting along Jamaica's shores. Green fields I see, 
 and slopes and hills behind grey in the cloud shadow. I could 
 fancy it the opposite shore of the Lake of Geneva from Ouchy. 
 I am terribly afraid lest I should not discover a distinctive tropical 
 beauty in the island. I could not stay on deck. The heat of the 
 last three days has seemed of an intolerable kind, like what the 
 Ancient Mariner felt on his ship. I crept up at two o'clock as 
 we were approaching Port Royal. The sea had turned from 
 sapphire into an utterly inconceivable green. I peered out of 
 half-shut eyes into the most startling and brilliant scene. The 
 flat edge of the shore seemed set in this brilliant green; there 
 were low wooden shed-like buildings, very tall palms, many ships 
 and boats, two great men-of-war, who lowered their fluttering 
 colours for a moment to make us a bow of welcome. The back- 
 ground was filled in with ranges of shadow-coloured mountains, 
 something like the best views of the Apennines; some great 
 birds the size of eagles were sailing about. Altogether it did 
 produce a new sensation. It was difficult steering into Kingston 
 harbour; there were sandbanks and currents to be avoided. 
 Every one seemed hushed into a breathless state of expectation as 
 we neared the pier ; a crowd of people stood at the edge of it. 
 The descent into the curtseying little boat was less disagreeable 
 than it looked. On landing, we drove in a caliche to King's 
 House, Spanish Town, thirteen miles off. Two nice little nags 
 were driven capitally by a spirited black, and forward we went to 
 try our fortunes. There seemed no road; we plunged over
 
 296 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 mounds and heaps, stirring thick clouds of dust ; but the strange 
 sights bewitched me into forgetfulness of everything else. The 
 little tumble-down sheds by the roadside did indeed look like the 
 habitation of savages : the strange groups of half-clothed creatures, 
 sitting or standing in the doorways, some utterly squalid, some 
 majestic and very well dressed, some carrying baskets of unknown 
 fruits on their heads. I looked about to see if a missionary were 
 not preaching somewhere. It all looked so like an unexplored 
 savage country. Wonderful dislocated Liliputian black pigs were 
 running about thickly. When the sheds ceased, the country on 
 each side the dusty space supposed to be the road looked like 
 botanical gardens utterly neglected and overgrown and dusty. 
 I mean they are the kind of trees you see in a conservatory, only 
 with more abundant blossoms. The road became a road in 
 three miles, and we went at a capital pace. We saw some mon- 
 strous cotton trees with stems growing out like buttresses of a 
 church. Then there were some groups of cocoa-nut palms 
 swinging their huge fronds against the evening sky. We passed 
 a swamp ; there grew new kinds of fat, luscious leaves, some large 
 ferns, rushes, mosses ; and how the frogs did croak ! In two 
 hours, at five o'clock, we came to some more sheds some decent 
 ones, and then entered a square of yellow, long, low houses, or 
 rather buildings ; they looked like casinos of a third-rate Italian 
 modern town, slight, dilapidated-looking places, their Venetian 
 shutters all shut. 
 
 Our driver stopped before a kind of portico of broad steps 
 and pillars supporting a balcony, under which Zouaves marched 
 up and down. This was King's House. 
 
 Russell is very much struck with the way in which Sir H. 
 Storks is setting to work, not only with reference to the inquiry 
 under the Commission, but in order to discover the past abuses 
 that have existed in the government of the island and the fitting 
 remedies that might be suggested. He requires every paper 
 which is brought in to any of the officers in the course of the day 
 to be brought in to him at night, and he makes a point of going
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 297 
 
 through every one before breakfast the next morning. His im- 
 pression is that the whole system has been utterly rotten. The 
 state of society also, they think, from what they hear so far, is 
 equally*rotten. 
 
 SPANISH TOWN, Sunday Morning, January 21. 
 
 The space, the stillness, the repose of having arrived, are 
 more luxurious than you can fancy, after nineteen days' sea- 
 experiences. 
 
 So we slept late, that is, till 6.30. We were down soon after 7. 
 And now, mother, if I give way and do not hold myself in with 
 the tightest reins, you will think I am gone fairly out of my 
 mind. You know that we had heard it was beautiful in the 
 mountains ; but to come upon such a walk within a stone's throw 
 of this much-abused Spanish Town was utterly overpowering. A 
 lane, dusty and stony it is true, led us through wild, uncleared, 
 primeval-looking country, every shrub and tree new to us, down 
 to a clear but sleepy stream, where bronze statues with large 
 vessels on their heads were slowly and statelily gliding to get 
 water. Great weird luscious trees down to the water's edge ; 
 tangled masses of creeping plants covered with pale delicate 
 flowers spread themselves everywhere : some seemed spilt on the 
 ground, others were tangled like traveller's joy in England ; the 
 wide, mauve, delicate tissue flower-cups of a kind of large con- 
 volvulus were spreading towards the sun. A buff tropiola with 
 chocolate eyes was rampant in all directions. A large waxen 
 yellow jessamine, a pure light-blue convolvulus filled the nooks 
 of broken earth. There were great palm leaves against the 
 morning sky. I could not count the wonder flowers. I saw a 
 humming-bird fluttering over some blossoms. The bronze crea- 
 tures in this setting are just what they should be. Some little 
 children, in white muslin little single garments, were bewitching 
 with their wistful gazelle eyes and their sun-moulded pliant lips. 
 
 I own I feel intoxicated with beauty, and overpowered with 
 the sense of the goodness of Him who has so decked for us the 
 world, and has permitted us northern ones to behold what the
 
 298 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 blessed sun can call forth from the earth when he has his way. 
 I keep thinking of the verse : " Then shall the earth bring forth 
 her increase, and God, even our own God, shall give us His 
 blessing." It is impossible not to feel what a type this material 
 abundance is of the putting forth and blossoming of the spiritual 
 world in the true light when it shines indeed when the world 
 shall remember itself and turn to the Lord ; what miracles and 
 prodigies will then become the natural order of things. There is 
 a tree here that grows tired once a year, and its leaves drop off in 
 a day. It buds the next, the buds swell the third day, and on 
 the fourth morning it has burst forth into full leaf. The genapp 
 tree. 
 
 The air this morning was fragrant and almost fresh, and I felt 
 none of the burden of the heat as I have done each morning on 
 the sea. We came in at a quarter to eight, and the sun was then 
 becoming very hot ; thermometer in our room on our return 79. 
 At 8.30 exactly we have breakfast in a room that looks about sixty 
 feet long and fifteen broad ; windows all the way down it on both 
 sides, with wooden Venetian blinds, some open, but most are 
 kept shut One side the windows open on to a covered balcony, 
 on the other on a small garden of trees. I cannot yet tell you 
 the names of the strange trees ; most of them are flower-bearing 
 or fruit-bearing. The boards of the room are stained and there 
 is no carpet or matting. We are eight at dinner, Sir H. Storks 
 in the centre, R. and I on each side. 
 
 We went to church this Sunday morning at eleven o'clock. 
 Happily it is only five minutes' walk from this, so we were not 
 quite killed going or coming. It is a hideous church, like a 
 London one of the time of the Georges, but better inside, and 
 nice and cool It was anything but crowded. The singing was 
 extremely spirited and good, but the blacks have a certain nasal 
 twang in singing as well as in speaking. 
 
 I have been shown a hideous little black idol with a black 
 ribbon crossed round its body, and a carved stick, two serpents 
 twisted together with the wickedest kind of lizard creeping up 
 them. This was taken either from Mr. Boyle or one of his
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 299 
 
 followers. The followers of this superstition are called Obaiahs. 
 The possession of these divining charms is considered a felony ; 
 it is therefore difficult to learn whether many go after these ways, 
 as they are, of course, always concealed. 
 
 I sat drawing in a kind of cloister garden. Behind me, with 
 opening arches and latticed-in Venetians on the other side, sat 
 the aides-de-camp at work. A black man made his way in, and 
 said, " If you please, I saw all the men hanged at St. Thomas's 
 in the east, and got them buried ; I want to be paid for it." 
 
 January 2^th. Last Thursday the Commissioners began their 
 work at ten o'clock, in a large airy kind of ballroom-looking place, 
 in a building that forms one side of this yellow square. There are 
 large open windows on each side and at one end. The Commis- 
 sioners sit at one end behind a large square table. A chair is 
 placed for the witnesses at their right hand. The shorthand 
 writer opposite, and the two Counsel for the Jamaica Commission 
 sit at the bottom. Chairs are placed along one side of the 
 room for the Legislative Assembly and some others belonging to 
 specified classes. A railing partitions off about a tenth of the 
 room, and behind this the common herd are allowed to congre- 
 gate. I thought it was hard there should be so little space for 
 the public, and that there would be crowds wanting to listen to an 
 inquiry of such deep personal interest to so many in the island. 
 But no, they all think here, " There is no joy, but calm." There 
 were not above thirty listless bystanders. 
 
 We drove this afternoon to the Bog Walk, a corruption of the 
 Bocca del Acqua. The road is above a deep emerald river in a 
 ravine, winding, the ravine clothed with magnificent trees, draped 
 with parasites and ferns. They are all full of sap. The large, 
 light-green, graceful bananas wave against rich deep mangoes. 
 The star apple is something like a gigantic orange tree, only the 
 leaves are lined with a burnished copper ; the light coming 
 through them looks like a shower of gold. Grey rocks here and 
 there ; these are crowned with the small fan-leaved palm. Their 
 nooks are filled with leaves of every shape and colour. Many 
 have the trick of lining themselves with a colour contrasting with
 
 300 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 the upper surface colour. All are graceful, except long bristling 
 cacti, that seem like monstrous hairy caterpillars creeping up the 
 stem. The breadfruit trees are wonderfully handsome. But I 
 think that the bamboo, when it grows to a gigantic size, as it does 
 by the edge of a river, is perhaps the most beautiful, like an 
 enormous plume of ostvich feathers. Amongst the cocoa-nuts 
 and breadfruits nestle here and there some little thatched huts ; 
 around them are scarlet poyntsettias. The sun-looked-upon 
 creatures lean over their gates in listless attitudes, but with faces 
 ready to beam into a most responsive smile at the least encour- 
 agement. The old ones say, " Good-day, Massa or Missus " ; the 
 young ones say, " Sar." You would never guess they are speaking 
 English when they are talking together : their tone and accent is 
 so very different ; they chop their words up into short syllables 
 like the chattering of parrots. I began a sketch of a little basket- 
 work cottage. Its young mistress I thought pretty : she was 
 delicately made, and her eyes and teeth were lustrous ; her wool 
 was covered with a gay handkerchief; she had a little girl of four. 
 She looked hardly full grown, and did not know how old she was. 
 Her husband was working on their little piece of land, for which 
 they paid five shillings a month, and for their wretched cabin 
 they paid two shillings. She could not read nor her husband 
 either ; I could make her understand but very little, and I could 
 hardly understand her. When it was growing late she went into 
 the cottage and brought out some clean print dresses and put 
 them on her head, and began to walk away. After a time she 
 made me understand that they were her husband's clean things, 
 and she was going to meet him with them that he might be fit to 
 "pear fore Missus." She offered me very seriously her little girl 
 of four, to take and teach good to in England. They lived upon 
 yams and fruits, and sometimes fish from the river. They carry the 
 most ridiculously inappropriate things on their heads a wine- 
 bottle, or a sickle, a " matchet," as they call it, for cutting the 
 sugar-cane, and if they have nothing else they often carry their 
 hands on their heads. It grew dark before we got home. The 
 golden evening gleams through the tangled draperies of the trees
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 301 
 
 linger on through the short twilight into the dark, and seem to 
 throw a rich reflected glamour over the velvety green foliage. 
 Then the cigalas begin to chirp in chorus, and the frogs to 
 croak, and the great black carrion crow, with a red head, sails 
 homewards. 
 
 On Friday 26th I went off by the seven o'clock train to King- 
 ston. A certain Mr. Alexander Bravo had called upon us, and 
 had invited me in a pressing way to go and spend some days with 
 Mrs. B. I had agreed to go for one day, and he was to take 
 me to see some schools. At the railway station were different 
 degrees of savages : some with only a few rags on ; some in very 
 smart print dresses ; some with vegetables and fruits to sell in 
 Kingston ; others with bunches of screaming poultry, their legs all 
 tied together. The carriages on the train are very dirty and 
 dilapidated. A coloured lad only was in the carriage with me, 
 learning most diligently an English grammar. The views of the 
 mountain ranges are lovely from the railway ; we do not see them 
 from Spanish Town. Mr. Bravo was waiting to receive me, and 
 drove me to his house in the outskirts of the town. The houses 
 are all Venetian shutters and tiled roofs. The front door of 
 Venetian shutters opened into a large square room full of rocking 
 chairs, with slippery stained floor; round this runs a kind of 
 corridor, and the rooms open into it with Venetian shutters, so 
 that the wind blows all through the house. Mrs. Bravo was the 
 daughter of one of the most important of the Spanish slave- 
 traders, I was told, and Mr. B. had a thousand slaves left him 
 by his father. He says he is now ruined, though he received 
 .23,000 compensation; but he says droughts have ruined his 
 sugar plantations, and the reduction in the price of sugar has 
 ruined him, but not emancipation. A comely daughter came 
 in with dark eyes. I talked with admiration of the beauty of the 
 island, and also said I thought the blacks so much better looking 
 than I had expected. I said, " I think some look quite beautiful in 
 the sunshine." At this moment the black footman came in, and 
 the young ladies hooted with laughter, and told him to go and 
 stand in the sunshine that they might see if he looked beautiful.
 
 302 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 They then went on to discuss the blacks. Mr. B. thought them 
 capable of any degree of development ; would not allow that they 
 were so idle as they were accused of being ; thought them trust- 
 worthy and affectionate, with perhaps slightly deceitful proclivi- 
 ties. Mrs. B. was convinced that education ruined them ; there 
 was not a good servant to be had who had been educated at 
 school. They were so conceited they would not have a fault 
 found with them, and so independent they would walk off at an 
 hour's notice. They still had one or two who had been their 
 slaves ; these were much attached to them. She had occasionally 
 used the whip to them, and they had said since, " Ah, Missus, 
 you had no used give us enough whip, you only tickle our faces ; 
 if you had given us more, we do better now." Miss B. liked the 
 negroes on the whole, but thought they could never be depended 
 on ; they might turn against you at any time. She heard most 
 people say they were always pilfering ; but she never locked any- 
 thing up, and she never had lost anything. All their servants 
 had been with them for years. One said she thought they were 
 all a horrible set, and she wished that many more had been 
 executed after the rebellion. Mrs. B. said she did not call it a 
 rebellion, only a mob riot ; whereupon there was a general uproar 
 of different opinions on the subject, which Mr. B. at last silenced 
 with authority, and then turned to me and said that very different 
 views were entertained by different members of his family, and 
 that if I wanted to hear the truth I had better listen to him alone. 
 He said the people were plastic under good or evil influences, 
 that many had been stirred to discontent ; that the local 
 Baptists, sects of ignorant blacks, who had separated themselves 
 from Baptist congregations in order to exercise their gift of 
 preaching, had been the originators of a good deal of savage 
 excitement and mischief. It was then said how wonderfully 
 credulous the people were : their servants had told them that all 
 their friends believed the Queen had sent out the new governor 
 to hang the old one, and then the government would be given 
 into the hands of the blacks. 
 
 At ten the carriage came, and took us first to the Collegiate
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 303 
 
 school, as it is called, where classics and mathematics are taught 
 of which Dr. Milne, a Scotch Presbyterian minister, is the head. 
 There were about fifty boys and youths here, of different degrees 
 of black and white. I was hurried through these to the building 
 behind, of the Woolmer schools. Here there were about one 
 hundred and fifty boys and as many girls ; the schoolmaster, an 
 intensely black clergyman, whom the bishop will not license to any 
 cure here, because he believes him to be seditious. He seemed 
 rather a pompous, humdrum man, but Dr. Milne believes he was 
 perfectly innocent of any seditious opinions or actions. The first 
 class, composed of about twenty-five boys, were reading Macaulay's 
 "History of England" ; they read fairly, as if they understood it, and 
 answered questions in the history well. But the English grammar 
 seemed their cheval de bataille. Mr. B. and the master vied with 
 each other in asking for rules, all of which they had on the tips 
 of their tongues. The girls' school adjoining was very nice and 
 orderly, with a coloured mistress. Mrs. H., Mrs. Milne's mother, 
 who accompanied us, said, pointing to a small leather bag lying 
 on the table, " I don't believe one of these girls would carry that 
 bag to school. If they have anything to carry, they always 
 employ some poorer person to walk behind them with it." 
 
 I heard them read, which they did very much like parrots, 
 and they could not tell the meaning of any of the common words 
 I asked, yet they were almost as well up in their rules of grammar 
 as the boys ; their copy-books were wondrously neat and copper- 
 plate-like. We went next to the Mico schools, wending our way 
 through thick sunshine : there really does seem a substance in 
 it ; you feel it wrapping over you like a plaster, in spite of lined 
 umbrellas. Mr. Martin, the headmaster, is a coloured man of 
 great intelligence, and evidently of some independence of 
 thought. I felt as if one might get more information from him 
 than from anybody I had yet seen ; it, however, remains to be 
 proved whether or not he has the prejudices against the quite 
 black that the coloured people generally have. The department 
 of the school he generally works in is the training of twelve or 
 fifteen youths for schoolmasters. These were all quite black, from
 
 304 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 the age of seventeen to twenty-three. I asked him how many of 
 those he had trained during the last twenty years were doing well 
 and leading useful lives. He said there were several doing well 
 as tradesmen in Kingston, and a few as mechanics ; the greater 
 number had been ruined by becoming preachers. Their chief 
 object in coming to school was that they might preach ; it was 
 their besetting sin, and he had perpetually to be on the watch 
 against their getting out of sight and preaching to one another. I 
 shall see this man again alone, when I can hear more from him ; 
 the youths in training looked pleasant and intelligent. 
 
 We went back to luncheon at two. Mr. Bravo was pleased 
 to find I was homoeopathic, and said he had been practising it 
 for twenty years with wonderful success ; they had quite ceased 
 to dread yellow fever since it had been treated homceopathically. 
 He took me into a little laboratory, where he prepared his own 
 medicines. But his chief object in taking me into this private 
 den was to give the printed account of Gordon's trial before the 
 court-martial, and to beg me to ask the Recorder whether he 
 thought that was sufficient evidence to hang a dog upon. He 
 said Gordon's sister was governess to his children, and he had 
 known Gordon for twenty years. He believed him to be a reli- 
 gious and a political enthusiast, but a sincere man. He was the 
 son of an English overseer and a mulatto housemaid. His father 
 had neglected his education, but he was a clever lad, and he 
 prospered in a business which he got into at Kingston. As he 
 made money he spent it in getting his sisters educated in Paris ; 
 and when his father fell into poverty, he supported him and his 
 wife and their children. It was true he did not pay his debts 
 much, but not one person in ten did in Kingston. He said he 
 thought Gordon had used dangerous language, and he had often 
 remonstrated with him about it. He had great influence with the 
 negroes, and had spent his life in doing them kindnesses ; it was 
 true that he had formed them into clubs and bodies for promot- 
 ing some of his own ends, securing an election, &c., and had 
 talked of the evils and abuses in the Government, but he did not 
 believe he was connected with any plot. He felt convinced from
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 305 
 
 his knowledge of the gentle nature of the man, that he would not 
 have authorised any murders. He was only told he was to be 
 executed one hour before the deed was done. I asked Mr. B. 
 if the distinct races of the negroes could now be at all distin- 
 guished. He said in some instances they could still trace the 
 Mandingoes, who made the best cultivators of the ground, and 
 the Ebos, who were very much the finest race of men. He used 
 to be able to tell all the tribes, thirty years ago, and the old men 
 now he could distinguish. 
 
 There seems no doubt that the Maroons belonged to different 
 races. The meaning of the word in Spanish, Maroni, he said, 
 was runaway slaves. They had lived amongst the mountains in 
 independence for several generations, and had gradually acquired 
 stronger characters than their brethren remaining in servitude. 
 
 Monday, 2gth. I went to return the call to-day of a Mrs. R. 
 Her husband had a large coffee estate. He was educated at 
 Eton, she told me, and had a princely allowance at college. 
 When he was twenty-three he came out here to manage his estate. 
 This was just at the time of the emancipation ; he gradually lost 
 year by year all he was spending on his property, and got no re- 
 turns. Twelve years ago he let the whole out in small tenures to 
 the negroes. His rent-roll he reckons on being from ^250 to 
 ^"300 a year. He says they pay their rents well ; the deficiency 
 seldom amounts to ^12. They cultivate the coffee well, and are 
 mostly living in comfort. He lives in a small house on his estate 
 nine months out of the twelve, only coming to Spanish Town dur- 
 ing the sitting of the Legislative Assembly. He is magistrate of 
 the district of St. Thomas in the Vale ; it is in the mountains and 
 very healthy. They are in complete solitude there, and she said, 
 " You can't think how beautiful everything seems to grow when 
 you are shut up to it alone ; and the people are so simple. The 
 Bible language seems to describe their life, and comes home 
 to one so." I said, " Were you there at the time of the out- 
 break ? " " Yes," she said ; "it was one evening I was walk- 
 ing in the garden with my husband, and he said, ' Well, we must 
 be thinking of going down to Spanish Town soon.' I said, ' I am
 
 3 o6 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 so sorry to go. I never enjoyed a summer more.' As I said 
 this a servant brought me a note ; I gave it my husband to read 
 as I am so blind. He sent the servant away and groaned, ' Oh, 
 this is dreadful ! ' I said, ' Why, what's the matter ? ' When he 
 could speak he told me of the massacre the day before, at St. 
 Thomas in the East, about thirty miles from us, but we lay in the 
 way from parts supposed to be disaffected. I said, ' Well, I sup- 
 pose we shall have to go down to Spanish Town sooner than we 
 thought.' 'No,' he said, 'we had better show no fear, but re- 
 main here ; it is possible I may be sent for : shall you be afraid 
 to stay ? ' ' Oh no,' I said, ' you know I have no fear in me ; I 
 am quite content to stay.' In the evening several of our people 
 came knocking at our door, having heard the wildest reports of 
 what had happened. We told them just what we had heard. Our 
 head-man said, ' I suppose you'll be going away ? ' ' Oh no,' we 
 said, ' we are not afraid of any of you.' ' And you've no need to 
 be, I'm sure,' he answered." 
 
 The next day Mr. R. was sent for by the governor, and as he 
 had to ride through disturbed country, Mrs. R. sent their servant 
 with him. She remained quite alone with two women servants for 
 three weeks. 
 
 Tuesday, $oth. This day month we left Southampton; it 
 seems six months ago ! Our days here are beginning to lose 
 their new aspect, and are sufficiently monotonous to begin to go 
 quickly. I grudge every early morning that goes past. The first 
 going out, the feeling the wonderfully pure, wooingly soft air, and 
 the delicacy of the sky is quite indescribable. This morning we 
 saw a tree that had flushed into full flame-coloured blossoms, that 
 had been bare two days ago. The people going forth to fetch 
 water in their undress look much more picturesque than when 
 they put their hats and their crinolines on. At every turn we see 
 some new tree or plant or flower. To-day D. caught an exquisite 
 humming-bird, of every gradation of deep purple, dark green, and 
 gold. Last night we stood out on the broad steps where the 
 Zouave paces up and down, to wonder at the moonlight. The 
 sky, instead of losing its colour and becoming dark grey, as ours
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 307 
 
 does, is a deep ultramarine blue, and the moon gilds rather than 
 silvers the objects it shines upon. I found I could read small 
 print by its light. In the drawing-room, which was well lighted, 
 the moonlight was nevertheless distinguishable. How strange it 
 seems, that with all this beauty there lurks a poison. All the ex- 
 perienced people tell us that the night air, especially in bright 
 moonlight, is injurious. The moon smites by night as well as the 
 sun by day. 
 
 Wednesday, $ist. To-day Mr. Eyre gave his evidence before 
 the Commission. It only lasted an hour and a half. R. says he 
 gave his evidence very fairly and clearly, and his manner was 
 dignified and collected, though when he first came in he was very 
 pale and nervous. R. says he has added very little to what they 
 knew before ; he has not employed any counsel, though Gorrie 
 and Payne on the black side are eagerly on the watch for his 
 weak points, and for the triumph of his adversaries. 
 
 I had a call from a Mrs. S., a widow, obliged, she told me, 
 to remain here with the wreck of her husband's estate, for the 
 little that remained would become nothing if they were to leave 
 it in the hands of an agent. She came here when she mar" 
 ried, a short time before the emancipation. Her mother and 
 grandmother lived here before her, " and my grandmother gave 
 my mother a favourite slave, who nursed her and her children 
 till she died, and my mother gave me that slave's daughter, who 
 was the nurse of my children the most grateful, loving creature 
 you can imagine. She died of the cholera in 1850, and my chil- 
 dren keep her grave nice with flowers still. I know emancipation 
 was perfectly necessary, but it has completely destroyed all the 
 affection that there was between the blacks and the whites. Of 
 course, many did suffer, who were working under overseers, 
 especially when the master was away from the country ; but the 
 house slaves were part of our own family, and they felt the same 
 interest, more in us than they did in their own children. They 
 never stole anything, because they felt that all things were their 
 own." " But are there no servants now who are attached to their 
 masters and mistresses ? " " Yes, up to a certain point, but they
 
 3 o8 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 are always ready to leave you, or to listen to anything that may 
 be said against you ; and then those that have been at school are 
 so fearfully rude and independent. I know it sounds a shocking 
 thing, but still I must say it has been my experience, that when 
 they learn to read they become hopelessly bad; they have a 
 notion that it turns them into ladies, and they will do nothing but 
 dress themselves. There is such a demand for servants, that if 
 you find any fault with them they go off in a huff, and your next- 
 door neighbour happens to be in such sore distress for a servant 
 that she engages her at once. I have endeavoured to train many 
 young girls, but they have all left me when they have grown to be 
 thirteen or fourteen, just when they might be useful. They are 
 very clever at dressmaking ; the moment you have a new gown 
 out from England they see how it is made, and by the next 
 Sunday they are wearing one that is a facsimile of it. We had 
 one very faithful old servant (he had been a slave and could not 
 read), and when he heard the news of the rebellion, after leaving 
 our service, he came to me and said, ' Missus must not fret, for 
 I'll take care of her and the young ladies.' He begged us to come 
 out to his cottage, and I should have been quite inclined to do 
 so, but my girls would not. They do not like the blacks as I 
 do, because they have not seen the good specimens there were 
 in the old times." 
 
 I went into the Court for a short time. A most statuesque 
 black woman was giving her evidence about her husband being 
 hanged only because a receipt was found in his cottage in Paul 
 Bogle's handwriting ; he had been a schoolmaster. (It remains 
 to be seen whether there was much more evidence against him.) 
 She rose up from her seat once, to enact what she was describing. 
 Her head, in the tightly bound yellow handkerchief, and her 
 mouth, worthy of a Juno, was quite redeemed from coarseness by 
 the splendid curves of her lips, and by the moulding of her firm 
 chin, and the setting on of her head to a perfectly round and 
 delicate throat. She excited my admiration, but not my sym- 
 pathy. I could not see any trace of feeling as she described her 
 husband's death, and a few moments afterwards, as I came out,
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 309 
 
 I found her talking in the merriest way to a group of friends. I 
 spoke to her, and she answered me rather shortly, and went on 
 talking to her friends ; in a few moments she came running after 
 me and said " I not know you come from England, or I talk 
 more." 
 
 I have never told you how it rained here. It has poured in 
 the earnest, lavish way in which Nature here works at everything 
 while man reposes. The sound of abundance of rain is so great 
 as sometimes almost to drown the sound of our voices ; but the 
 soil is so sandy and light that it dries again in a few hours. It 
 has interfered sadly with my short sketching moments. How- 
 ever, I must not complain, as it has certainly cooled the air and 
 made a great many flowers flash forth. The thermometer is often 
 only 72 or 73 at night, and has not risen above 80. 
 
 This afternoon we drove through tangled, uncleared country, 
 with long thin aloes or penguins, as they are here called, on each 
 side of the sandy road, shutting off the cedar-like acacias, their 
 light, soft, green foliage intermixed with trailing climbers, and 
 their stems and branches often tagged with cacti, showing peeps 
 of the deep-blue hills in the distance. After six miles of this 
 kind of road we came to a little port half-a-dozen houses at the 
 water's edge, and the sweetest breeze coming over the green 
 wavelets. It was not pretty ; only the water looked so bright 
 and fresh after the tangled vegetation. 
 
 Sunday, tfh. We went this exquisite morning at seven o'clock 
 to the early Communion. About forty people there ; about 
 twenty-five very smart black women. The afternoon intensely 
 hot. R. went to call on the Chief- Justice. He said Gordon 
 had come out very badly in cases before him, more than once in 
 money matters. In his affairs he thought he was not honest ; 
 the Chief-Justice is a son of Sir B. Edwards, the historian of 
 Jamaica. 
 
 Monday, 5th, was a day spent in eagerly watching for the 
 arrival of the mail, and watching in vain. In the morning I 
 went into Court and heard Levien, the editor of a newspaper, 
 who was imprisoned, give his evidence. He is a Jew ; he laid
 
 3 io LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 aside his sensational style and came out quite simply. He had 
 written very much against the Government, but since the out- 
 break had warmly advocated Mr. Eyre's cause. His imprison- 
 ment was a most foolish blunder on the part of the governor 
 or his people. The black editor of The Watchman was also 
 examined ; he expressed himself very well, but fell into acting 
 his story, as the more ignorant people do. He had been sud- 
 denly arrested and treated (by his own account) in the harshest 
 way. 
 
 Tuesday, 6th. The guns were heard at 6.30 this morning, 
 just before we went out for our delicious walk ; we did not hear 
 them. I lingered behind to sketch, and on my return found the 
 blessed letters. It is impossible to say what it is to hear a voice 
 again from across the Atlantic, that has been utterly silent for 
 five weeks ! 
 
 Have I told you what a delicious perfume comes in at the 
 drawing-room windows at night ? That, and the stars, and the 
 great fanning leaves, and the chirping and stir of insects, make 
 up a new Beethovenish Symphony for me. I have to-day seen 
 the original letter that poor Gordon wrote to his wife. Mr. Bravo 
 took it himself from General Nelson to Mrs. Gordon. On the 
 outside is written, " Luke vi. 20-26." This was thought peculiarly 
 seditious. But evidence seems coming out against him, more 
 than was given at the court-martial. 
 
 Wednesday, %th. Now comes the morning again for sending 
 off the letters. Would that I could breathe into you a tropical 
 sensation ! but words will not do it ; at least not mine : they 
 cannot get themselves wings, they go so heavily. 
 
 A fine brown old naturalist has called upon me, Mr. R. Hill, 
 a stipendiary magistrate. He is the best of all the whites, 
 browns, or blacks I have seen. You see it written on his fore- 
 head that he has lived in a large calm region. He has made 
 beautiful paintings of the birds, fishes, and flowers of Jamaica, 
 and has lent me some nice books on these subjects. He will 
 show me the leaf of life, which may be shut in a drawer, or 
 hooked on a nail, or torn in half; but it does not mind, but
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 311 
 
 will send out its fibres, and grow and live again in new rootlets 
 and leaves, do what you will to quench it. Don't we all want 
 some of this more abundant life, to triumph over all the maim- 
 ing, and dark places, and dark corners that some of us seem 
 forgotten in? 
 
 February i^th. By all means get a pamphlet called 
 " Jamaica : Who is to blame ? " reprinted from the Eclectic 
 Review. It seems the wisest and most masterly view that has 
 been taken of the state of the island. If the lovely place does 
 go to wrack and ruin, it will be the saddest pity that ever was. It 
 is such a paradise, I suppose there ought to be a race of angels 
 to make it do. For everybody says that one of its great diffi- 
 culties is the beauty and fruitfulness of the soil. Men are not 
 obliged to labour in the sweat of their brow for the bread 
 they eat ; and so for want of the curse falling on the ground, 
 men become worse and worse from the idleness in which they 
 can live and feed in peace and comfort. Then, I suppose, the 
 climate does have an enervating effect, even on black skins. 
 We are often struck with the lazy way in which they creep 
 along in the early mornings to their work : not so often the 
 women, they march erect, with great baskets on their heads. 
 They can all make an independent living, and they say this is 
 why they do not care to marry, because they like better sup- 
 porting themselves than a husband into the bargain. 
 
 Bath, February ztfh. The first part of our drive from 
 Kingston here reminded me of the Cornice road, of the parts 
 low down by the sea. There was just that kind of low under- 
 wood growing, in sandy, stony soil. Wide beds of torrents 
 across the road, with but little water now. Looking up them 
 you see a range of soft, shadowy hills, very much like those 
 you see by San Remo and Mentone. But now and then the 
 late undergrowth was interrupted by tufts of cocoa-nut trees, 
 and there were fringes of penguins, as they call them, a kind 
 of aloe, which get a beautiful pink at the tip. The sun became 
 very hot by 10.30, and our horses fagged very much. We 
 stopped when the horses could go no farther, at a little road-
 
 312 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 side tavern, where nobody was to be seen, except a funny, fat 
 old brown woman, who said she was formerly the owner of the 
 house, but now she had let it to those who took no heed, and 
 let everything go to ruin. Her husband had been a German. 
 The wretched horses were taken out and allowed to eat some 
 grass under a bamboo, and we sat under the same shade in 
 some chairs that the brown woman brought us. We went on 
 in about half-an-hour, and reached the nineteen miles' tavern, as 
 it is called. It is something like a poor Italian inn, only slighter. 
 Here we got some very poor food, but some nice orange-juice 
 and water, and some shade two very desirable things and went 
 on refreshed at two o'clock. Then the road became more and 
 more wildly beautiful, leaving the coast occasionally for valleys 
 clothed with every kind of leaf : there were many sweet streams. 
 There was a cascade that came leaping down a rock, and by the 
 side of the foaming water, sparkling in the sunshine, an abundant, 
 deep, purple convolvulus came gushing down. The little huts, 
 with sloping thatches, built of basket-work of bamboo and plaster, 
 are very, picturesque, but most wretched abodes, except in such a 
 climate as this, where they only want sleeping shelter. They 
 would burn in ten minutes or less, and there seems no attempt 
 at furniture inside, except a few calabashes ; the fire is lighted 
 on the ground, and the smoke goes up through a hole in the 
 roof. And they might be built up again in half a day with the 
 materials that are close at hand thatch being made of the dead 
 cocoa-nut leaves, and the walls of woven bamboos. This ought 
 to be borne in mind when people in England hear about burning 
 cottages and destroying property. We are now in the district of 
 St. Thomas in the East, which looks like a rich exotic garden, 
 the ground swelling in soft hills, cut through by numbers of 
 streams hastening to the sea such a garden of Eden ! We 
 always had a delicious breeze from the sea, so the heat was not 
 overpowering. We reached Morant Bay at three o'clock. The 
 coast is not bold or indented ; the beauty is the form of th 
 undulating ground, the streams, and the vegetation. 
 
 We turned inland from Port Morant, and struck deeper
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 313 
 
 amongst low hills. The after-glow a delicate mauve was 
 mingled with the moon's tints. We went along terraces cut 
 in the sides of the hill, above basins of leafy country, looking 
 like lace-work richly wrought in silver ; the cottages in clusters 
 here and there beneath the pearly columns of the cocoa-nuts, 
 their large leaves glistening in the moonlight like armour; 
 lights in some of the cottages, sending out long rays, inter- 
 rupted by leaves. And to add to the mysterious effect, 
 numbers of fireflies glinting about, some a green phosphorous 
 colour and some glowing sparks, leading our bewildered eyes 
 in and out amongst the nooks and grottoes and temples of 
 greenery that clothed the sides of the road. Every now and 
 then delicious aromatic scents fanned in our faces. We 
 stopped still in the midst of a stream for the horses to drink. 
 At about eight o'clock we were in the village of Bath. We 
 stopped, uncertain as to the house we were to go to; and a 
 tall clergyman, Mr. Douet, came to meet us and direct us on 
 a few steps to one of those roadside dilapidated villas, where 
 we were to be put up. It was very fairly decent, and I have 
 preserved a record of the nature of its outside, which you will 
 see, I trust, some day. We were very tired with our long day, 
 and glad to go to bed. 
 
 Friday, z^th. Russell went to the court-house this morn- 
 ing a white, wooden building, with a Grecian portico, on a broad 
 green by the roadside, where stood the white church and the 
 white Wesleyan chapel under breadfruit trees, cocoa-nuts, and 
 another kind of feathery palm that abounds here. The strangest 
 and most splendid trees were rampant, each with beautiful 
 flowers hanging from them. Mr. Douet joined me, and told 
 me the names and the natures of some of them. There was 
 a delicious creeping, climbing fern, that was actually shot blue 
 and green. I cannot tell you what a lovely effect it had; the 
 dead leaves were a light pink. There were splendid Brazilian 
 bananas, with immense crimson seed-vessels between each of 
 the light-green leaves. There were the nutmeg and the 
 camphor. The common parasite was the vanilla. One of the
 
 3 i4 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 palm tribe, as it grows old and spreading, puts out walking- 
 sticks as supports in all directions. Here all these things are 
 utterly unheeded. Later in the day I sat in the only nice 
 shady place to make a little sketch of the house, and to 
 attempt the effect of the feathery bamboo that covers the 
 hill behind it. 
 
 When the Court was over, we drove back on the road we had 
 come by in the dark. I was almost loth to look at it in broad 
 daylight, lest some of the recollections of its mysterious, unearthly 
 loveliness should be dispelled. But it would have been a pity 
 not to see it, for its reality is quite as beautiful in another kind of 
 way as its moonlight glory. 
 
 We passed the house, on a little knoll, where the poor Her- 
 schells lived. He was a clergyman of Bath, who was murdered 
 at Morant Bay. He was disliked chiefly because he had a good 
 deal of land, and insisted on getting his rents, and was thought 
 to interfere too much with the politics of the place. 
 
 February 2$th. Russell had a long day in the Court, the 
 people flocking in from the country, saying he was come to 
 increase the rate of wages, and also to give them compensation 
 for all they had lost during "mashallah," as they call martial 
 law. Poor things, the letting the Maroons upon them was one 
 of the worst deeds that was done, I think. It was owing to 
 Colonel Fyfe's falling ill that they were uncommanded by any 
 Englishman, and were very wild and barbarous in their devas- 
 tations. The people from Thornton, no doubt, joined Bogle on 
 the nth, and many of the people here plundered several houses 
 directly they heard of the massacre ; they believed all the 
 Buchra would be killed, and they were to have all their worldly 
 goods. It was for these plunderings that so many were flogged, 
 and no doubt some were far too severely punished. It was very 
 difficult to know how to punish them ; they could not have been 
 all put in prison, and, indeed, that would have been no punish- 
 ment at all, even if it had been possible. They are so much like 
 children or animals that it strikes one that whipping, if ever it 
 is employed, is the most suitable punishment they can have. I
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 315 
 
 am afraid you will think the air of Jamaica hardens my heart 
 against the blacks 
 
 Sunday, 2$th. We went to the little white church at eleven. 
 I thought, if you could look at us, you would think the aspect 
 of things very interesting and missionary-like. The black con- 
 gregation, all in their Sunday best, standing in groups under the 
 beautiful trees on the green, waiting to go into the church or 
 the chapel. The two are so close together that they disturb 
 each other in singing their hymns ; they are about the same size, 
 and both were filled with very decent-looking, attentive people. 
 The singing in our church was extremely bad, and very good at 
 the Wesleyan, where we went for a few minutes after our service 
 was over. In both they have catechising in the afternoon. Mr. 
 Douet, the English clergyman, seems a painstaking, sensible, 
 gentlemanly young man. He thinks the soil he has to work upon 
 most unsatisfactory; the ignorance greater than one could imagine, 
 and the superstition also. They are so apt at parrotry that it is 
 some time before you discover how little they understand. He 
 thinks there is hardly a person among them who speaks the 
 truth. The Ibeah man is greatly consulted. One said to be 
 such was hung for joining the rebels. There are others, whom 
 they consult pretty much as fortune-tellers are consulted with us, 
 only he supposes much more universally. 
 
 Monday, 2&th. Russell and Mr. Strahan (who arranges every- 
 thing for us beautifully, and takes no end of trouble for Russell 
 in sifting the witnesses, as well as paying and providing) went 
 off this morning on horseback to see Thornton, or " Torrington," 
 as they pronounce it, or rather to see all that remains of it ; about 
 eighty houses had been burnt, one or two superior ones, and a 
 schoolhouse which was used as a meeting-house, but the others 
 merely huts. They saw many of the widows of the owners who 
 had been hanged, who seemed very cheerful. Some of the huts 
 were being rebuilt. Mr. S., who has a great talent for under- 
 standing and talking to the blacks, jokes with them, and they 
 respond with great glee and shouts of laughter. One said, " They 
 have killed three pigs, my fowls, my husband, and everytink."
 
 316 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 Mr. Douet spends two hours almost every morning in the 
 school, not having an efficient master, and has cottage lectures 
 three evenings in the week. His people are so scattered that he 
 has to make long journeys to visit them. He gives frightful 
 accounts of the immorality in which they are living. He says 
 he has several in his congregation who are most exemplary in 
 never missing church, walking for miles, attending every class, 
 singing hymns with the greatest delight, while they are carrying 
 on the most flagrantly immoral lives. He says they mix up 
 religion with everything ; any quarrel or existing circumstance is 
 sure to present itself to them under some Bible aspect. He 
 thinks the reason of this is that it is the only kind of intellectual 
 life they have. They have never been talked to or taught by 
 educated people on any other subjects ; their intelligence is first 
 drawn out on religious matters, and they have no other subjects 
 of interest or amusement. Their quarrels are frightful, as I can 
 testify. While I was sitting out for more than two hours on 
 Monday morning drawing a cotton tree, the strife and war of 
 words that was carried on was such as I never heard even in 
 Italy. They never come to blows ; the consequence is it all 
 has to come out in words. Their eloquence is extraordinary ; 
 but I could not understand what they said, except, perhaps, a 
 stray word here and there. He said, " When they tell you about 
 their quarrels they usually begin at the very beginning of their 
 lives, saying, ' When I was pickaninny and he was pickaninny so 
 and so happened ; ' and they do not think it rightly heard 
 unless you hear it from these early days. Whole families join 
 in these disputes ; the children are taught to carry them on, and 
 to ' cut their eye,' as they call it, at their father's enemy. This 
 is a peculiar gesture of scorn and defiance that they have." 
 
 Monday, 26th. To-day all the people from the country round 
 came in troops and gathered outside the court-house, hearing 
 there was a messenger from Missus Queen to raise the rate of 
 wages ; so they had taken a holiday, and had come to hear 
 how much more they were to get. The general impression pro- 
 duced by this Commission is that Missus Queen thought her
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 317 
 
 black subjects were quite right in what they had done, and had 
 sent out some messengers to punish the white people for having 
 punished them. 
 
 Tuesday, 27^. By 7 A.M. I was settled in the midst of my 
 stream to sketch for nearly two hours. The black figures in the 
 foreground, who lounged or dabbled at the edge of the water, 
 were very much interested in knowing what I had drawn ; and 
 several strange creatures came in the course of the day and 
 walked straight into the room where I was sitting, to see what 
 Missus had " draw'd off." They all pronounced it " fust-rate," 
 which is their word of approval for everything. They are par- 
 ticularly pleased at recognising the cocoa-nut. Then I had a 
 visit from Mr. Douet, and went with him to his schools, and 
 saw each of his classes. The master does not seem so conceited 
 as they generally do, and said he was "of a weak nature." 
 The children a much duller set than in the Kingston schools. 
 I could not help thinking what a horrible burden it would be 
 to spend two hours each day amongst them, and that missionaries 
 must either be men of the most exalted faith and piety, or have 
 the most extraordinary tastes to choose such a vocation. 
 
 After I came back, Mr. Wilson the botanist, who lives on a 
 hill two miles above this, came to see me, and brought me some 
 fibres, and told me the names of some ferns we have collected. 
 He takes a very different view of our black brothers from the two 
 naturalists I liked so much at Spanish Town, and gave terrible 
 accounts of their lying, their ingratitude, and their stupidity. He 
 has no land, is not a magistrate, so that he does not come in 
 contact with them in any unpleasant way, having no bones of 
 contention with them, except that they will steal the plants he 
 puts aside to give them, because they will not pay a penny for 
 the basket in which they are. He has been obliged to give up 
 his own nice vegetable garden, because it was such a vexation to 
 him to have everything stolen. At the time of the rebellion it 
 was said he could have nothing to fear, because he had never 
 been brought into any unpleasant relationship with any of the 
 people. He was, however, told that a party had marched from
 
 3 i8 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 Bath to kill him and plunder his house, but they fortunately 
 turned back, the leader being so drunk that he fell into a ditch. 
 He was told afterwards that one who joined this party was a man 
 whom he had nursed through a long illness, and fed day by day 
 to keep him alive. He spoke of the mistake it was to suppose 
 that the people were driven to this rebellion by poverty. He 
 found them so independent that it was most difficult to get any 
 little job of work done even if you offered to pay very highly. 
 
 Later, I had a visit from Mr. Harvey and another Quaker, who 
 have come out to investigate the state of things, but, in fact, to 
 espouse the negro cause. It was most curious to hear their ver- 
 sion of things. The negroes flock round them, and tell them all 
 their grievances, which they believe as Gospel, and will not hear 
 a word on the other side. They believe that the planters are con- 
 stantly in the habit of keeping back the wages from the people 
 that they have fairly earned ; but the fact we hear is, they are 
 paid exactly according to the number of hours they work (the 
 book-makers are very often black themselves). The people never 
 seem to understand that if they give up work and go home in 
 two hours instead of working the proper time, that they are not 
 to expect a day's wages. 
 
 The Quakers say they wished Russell had seen a village 
 that they had been to, near Stony Gut, where the desolation was 
 fearful, even cocoa-nut trees cut down ; and that the sight of poor 
 widows and orphans haunting the sites of their former happy 
 dwellings was most pathetic. It happens that Russell has seen 
 this place, and describes an utterly different scene. These 
 men would not hear a word Mr. Wilson said, he told me, but 
 immediately changed the subject when they found he had different 
 views. I cannot wonder at the whites here being angry at the 
 philanthropists coming from England and visiting every place, 
 encouraging the discontented idle people to tell them what lies 
 they like, and listening with open mouths and glistening eyes to 
 the most improbable stories. . . . Now the Commissioners begin 
 to see daylight, and are unanimously of opinion that they will 
 have finished their witnesses by the 25th of March; then they
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 319 
 
 will want a fortnight for drawing up their report. We therefore 
 hope to start homewards on the gth of April. We shall be due 
 on the z8th of April ! Writing the dates seems to make it very 
 near at hand, and the thought that next month we expect to be 
 at home, and especially the thought that I shall write you only 
 one more letter after this one ! I can hardly believe it, for I 
 seem only just to have come to the conclusion that I really am 
 in the tropics in the flesh. Now that the day is fixed for going, 
 my thoughts seem to fly towards it, and I feel less absorbed with 
 this place, and to live more in the delight of beholding you 
 again. 
 
 On Saturday Colonel N. was examined, and gave very great 
 satisfaction to the Commissioners. He was most clear in all his 
 statements, and left upon them all a remarkably favourable im- 
 pression. I have always greatly liked the look of him. Poor 
 Colonel Hobbs is to be examined on Wednesday ; he is in the 
 most nervous state, they say. How surprised the religious public 
 in England would be, who looked upon Gordon as a murdered 
 saint and upon Hobbs as a monster of cruelty, if they heard what 
 we do about the two men. Hobbs is weak, no doubt, but most 
 amiable, teaches in Sunday schools, paints windows in churches, 
 and is considered by all as a religious man. It is difficult to 
 make out what Gordon was, but there can be little doubt that he 
 was very mischievous, discontented, and anything but honourable. 
 I am thankful to say the English officers, both military and naval, 
 are coming out much better than Russell expected. It was only 
 the black troops and the Maroons who could be accused of any- 
 thing like atrocities. It is true that there was no sufficient 
 evidence against Gordon to justify his being hanged ; but there 
 is no doubt that he had been long preparing the way for the 
 outbreak, and stirring up the people to rebellion, if not to 
 murder. The provost-marshal, it is true, acted in the wildest 
 and most off-hand manner. 
 
 I wish you could have seen two humming-birds I have been 
 watching : I could not see their colours, they looked quite black ; 
 but their movements are so strangely delicate. They have been
 
 320 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 chasing one another, and playing in the most fantastic manner 
 round the patodia tree ; darting about, and then poising for long 
 in the air against the sky : the movement of their wings seemed 
 to make a veil round them. A good, brown woman we met in 
 our walk before breakfast said, " I have found a humming-bird's 
 nest for you, Mrs. Gurney," and she sent the little thing in after 
 breakfast. It is about large enough to put two thimbles in; 
 very neatly made, encrusted with bassi-relievi of light green lichen, 
 and lined inside with the silk cotton fibre. The fibre is too 
 delicate and fragile to be made use of for anything else ; the 
 wood of that magnificent tree is so pithy that it cannot be used. 
 So I am happy to say that splendid tree is quite useless, as 
 utilitarians would define use ; but its good purpose is beauty and 
 majesty, and the supplying a silken lining for humming-birds' 
 nests. 
 
 The people who live here do look so astonished when I speak 
 of liking this place. The only idea that they have seems to be of 
 contempt for Jamaica and its people, white, brown, and black. 
 I was asked by Mrs. H. if I did not find it dreadfully dull to be 
 here ; and when I ventured in a very modified way to observe that 
 I thought the country rather pretty, she said she believed it was 
 considered so in the hills, but what could any one admire about 
 Spanish Town ? I mildly insinuated that some of the trees were 
 not ugly, and that the cocoa-nut palm pleased me ; to which she 
 responded, "Ah, well, perhaps they are foreign looking" 
 
 On Tuesday the 6th I had promised to go and spend the day 
 with Mrs. Campbell and to remain the night. She is the wife of 
 Dr. Campbell, brother of the Rector of Kingston, and daughter of 
 the Bishop of Jamaica. In the train I was in a carriage alone 
 and gazed at the visionary mountains. The trees had recovered 
 the contrast of Bath, and I said over and over to myself I cannot 
 be mistaken ; all these things are more lovely than words can 
 describe, and enough to rejoice any heart that is not frozen 
 against beauty. Mrs. C.'s carriage met me and brought me to 
 the cool house under the genapp trees. The front door, which 
 is always open, as all windows and doors are here, opens into a
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 321 
 
 corridor or vestibule which is always furnished with seats and 
 tables, and then arched doorways open into the sitting-room, 
 dining-room, and boudoir, all communicating, with stained wooden 
 floors and a few rugs, plenty of cane rocking-chairs and a few 
 tables, and that is all the furniture. A little vestibule, answering 
 to the one you enter by, at the back of the house has steps into 
 the garden yard, which is more like a covered balcony, and there 
 the breakfast was laid on the whitest tablecloth. This woman's 
 hospitality is so different from Mrs. O.'s, which seemed only to 
 come out of a kind of easy good-nature combined with riches, 
 having a good house and good servants, and being pleased to 
 make use of them for company. Mrs. C.'s hospitality comes out 
 of a tender, loving nature that needs to be providing with her 
 own hands for friends. Well, the doctor came in to breakfast 
 at about 9.30, and afterwards Mrs. C. and I sat in the garden in 
 the shade, and I began a sketch of the trunk of a tree with the 
 parasites ; but I talked too much to do any good, and the sun 
 was always finding us out and peeping through holes in the 
 foliage, and then we had to change our seats. She told me a 
 number of interesting stories. She seems to me to take a very 
 just view of things, not joining the party either against or for the 
 blacks or whites, thinking there had been too much of a panic, 
 and that there had been much ill-feeling on the part of the whites 
 as well as fright, but not believing there had been much actual 
 cruelty. At four o'clock Mrs. C. took me a most bewitching 
 drive for three hours amongst the spurs of the hills. Oh that I 
 had words to tell you what I saw ! The nature of the country 
 was rather of the kind of that about Massa and Carrara, the hills 
 all folding about each other, making valleys and denies in all 
 directions a mixture of rock and stream ; but the character of 
 the whole is completely different from anything one can see out 
 of the tropics. 
 
 We climbed turn after turn amongst these hills on a green 
 rocky bank up above the stream. Peeping out of deep foliage 
 was a little white cottage where the Campbells had lived for a 
 time, and enjoyed intensely being set down in the midst of the
 
 322 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 hills and the people, though the place was so dilapidated that 
 the first day they were there the girl who brought them in some 
 dinner fell through the floor, dinner and all. We went up to 
 Gordon Town, and then we got out and walked and saw the 
 sunset tints come out upon all that was so glorious before, adding 
 a new glory to the old one, till I was incapable of taking in any 
 more in the flesh. We came down after the sun was set, and 
 the stars soon began to come out, and the sky remained a quiver- 
 ing lemon light not colour. 
 
 At dinner we had the Rector and his wife ; they are not people 
 of many words. The tone and atmosphere was completely un- 
 worldly and so charitable and gentle. They are inclined to take 
 the most hopeful view of the blacks, and they deeply deplore the 
 tone of the white people about them, and think there have been 
 many precipitate rash acts of revenge ; but as to believing in the 
 Star account, they do not for a moment, or imagine that England 
 has disgraced herself in any way. I have often observed in my 
 experience of life that people are judged more by their spirit than 
 by their acts, though you would imagine it would be the contrary. 
 The whole spirit of the people has been disregardful of the blacks, 
 except for their own interests, and contemptuous, as if they were 
 not human beings ; and the volunteers especially were not sorry 
 to have the opportunity of killing them, and it was considered 
 the thing to talk as if they were even more pleased to kill and 
 more hard-hearted than they really felt, and so they have got the 
 credit of being much more cruel than they really were. But the 
 English officers have not been generally brutal ; and as to Mr. 
 Eyre and others having pretended that the rebellion was more 
 widely spread than they really believed it to be, for the sake of 
 popularity, it is the vilest of calumnies. Do not believe for a 
 moment that we have disgraced ourselves as a nation in the 
 punishment of these poor creatures. I believe that any other 
 nation would have been far more reckless, and their conduct 
 would never have been called in question afterwards. I see 
 more and more that people only understand your painting either 
 black or white. If you put the faintest shade into your white-
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 323 
 
 wash of a person, you are accused of making him all black ; and 
 if you put any white into your description of a person whom 
 those you speak to consider black, they say you think him all 
 white. No one has time or eyes for gradations. Bear in mind 
 that the counsel sent out by the Jamaica Committee are hanging 
 out a flag and attracting as much as they can all the stories of 
 cruelty and over-severity ; and, on the other side, Russell says 
 they have the most inefficient man imaginable. The case of the 
 governor has not been got up in the least, as it might have been. 
 
 Sunday, March \oth. Oh the days do go too quickly ! Only 
 one month more in the land of sunshine and beauty and abund- 
 ance. It is delightful to see that the people cannot be in any- 
 thing like what we call poverty here. The smallest amount of 
 work brings abundance and luxury. Clothes are luxuries here, 
 not necessaries. Fire is not wanted even to cook, for the people 
 can live on fruits, and they do not want beds. They will not 
 sleep in them, even when they are servants and provided with 
 them ; they prefer lying on the ground with their arm for a pillow. 
 And knives and forks are a weariness to their flesh ; they say 
 everything is so much sweeter eaten with the fingers. 
 
 On Monday I went early to the pretty river, and drew a few 
 strokes there, the bathers and the washers all congregating round 
 me and talking and laughing very engagingly. They told me 
 about the flowers that come out in summer, saying those would 
 be pretty to draw. There was a great yellow one, they said, so 
 big they could only just put their arms round it. They all seem 
 to know about trees and herbs, and what is good for medicine, 
 and what for food, and what for poultices. I wished I could have 
 photographed some of them with their calabashes, but I cannot 
 draw them, say what you will. One ought to catch them quickly 
 in their attitudes out of doors. Directly they are brought in, even 
 if one can succeed in keeping them out of their Sunday finery, 
 they lose their spirit and their beauty, and look stiff and ugly. 
 
 Tuesday itf/i, from Gordon Town. This afternoon Mrs. B. 
 and I again mounted on ponies, and rode nearly all the way to 
 Woodford ; I had so set my heart on trying to sketch a bit of the
 
 3 2 4 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 path, where bananas meet overhead and where daturas hang their 
 long white bells. We went in a very independent fashion, accom- 
 panied only by a little girl of ten, who carried a cloak and camp- 
 stool, and paddled with her bare feet nimbly through the stream, 
 and then leant against a tree-trunk watching us with her large 
 dreamy eyes. She was just like a fawn or dryad belonging to the 
 animal and vegetable world around her, only not joyous as those 
 things ought to be, but bewildered and half-waking, as if it was 
 going to dawn upon her that other creatures made like herself had 
 souls, and that she ought not to be without one. So she stared 
 and stared at us with a kind of unconscious wistfulness that 
 touched me. Poor, poor child ! I gave her two small books 
 with pictures in them to encourage her to learn to read a doubt- 
 ful good to lure her on to, but still a necessary one in this age. 
 
 After tea there was a hurdy-gurdy of a piano, so out of tune 
 that the notes did not bear the smallest relationship to each other. 
 The words sounded in my ears, " Where every prospect pleases, 
 and only man is vile." I do not wonder that a lizard stood in the 
 doorway and hissed us loudly. They say lizards are fond of 
 music, and that is why they come ; but it was easy to see what 
 their feelings were, by their expressive and indignant hiss. 
 
 The Bishop spoke of the Revival as I have not heard any 
 other clergyman speak of it. He said he hailed it as producing 
 what he so felt the want of amongst these people, some sense of 
 sin ; but it has degenerated into such frenzy, and is accompanied 
 by such immorality, that all are obliged to do what they can to 
 put a stop to it. Mr. I. had also hailed it with the greatest thank- 
 fulness, but, he says, since the beginning it has seemed like the 
 work of a destroying angel. 
 
 Tuesday, zoth. How good you have been to write so much 
 day by day! You cannot imagine the interest and delight of 
 reading it all in this dreamland. I shall feel just as if I had been 
 stolen away by the fairies when I go home. When the house- 
 keeping books come in, I shall be crossing a stream by moonlight, 
 and hearing the loud cicadas chirping, and feeling the scent of the 
 daturas, and trying to disentangle the stars and fireflies through
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 325 
 
 the thickly woven branches. I fear I shall never be " all there " 
 again. The great thing that lies like a load is the not having 
 made something of one sketch that would in the smallest degree 
 convey anything I feel or mean about the bewitching nature of 
 the scenery. There is some witchcraft or ibeahism in it, I believe. 
 The treasure is guarded by some key which has not been found 
 by me. Sometimes, also, I feel a pang at not having improved 
 more my opportunities with the blacks I do not mean in the way 
 of doing them good, that is not my vocation, and I believe the 
 less they talk and are talked to the better, by those who do not 
 understand them, but in not getting more acquainted with their 
 ways, in not having heard a black Baptist preach, &c. But I 
 know I have been hedged in with difficulties, and I freely own 
 that having only a certain amount of energy and feeling, that has 
 been more called out by the scenery than anything else ; yet so 
 am I made, and I cannot help it. The black brothers have been 
 put out, or rather I have left them aside, as too tangled and in- 
 tricate a web for me to meddle with, and I have thought that I 
 might drink in this natural beauty as a blessed cup given me to 
 drink of, rather than strain after nobler and deeper interests 
 that I have not yet grown up into. 
 
 St. Thomas's again! April \^th 1866. I could moralise at 
 this place during this day of transference from one vessel to 
 another, so like the one spent here more than two months ago, 
 when the unknown future was as a blank before us, which now 
 we look back upon all filled up with details. Some things are 
 wanting that I thought lay concealed in the mist, and the petty 
 circumstances of everyday life do in a slight degree interfere 
 with the vision I looked^ forward to. But how much better on 
 the whole has been the reality than the prevision. So I have 
 found it through life. 
 
 I hardly knew how to believe, as the boxes were being re- 
 packed, that the time of our exile was over, without one accident 
 or fear of any kind. 
 
 The poor Commissioners some days worked from six in the 
 morning till twelve at night, with only the intermission of their
 
 326 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 meals. Oh the hurry-scurry of the A.D.C.'s and the horror ex- 
 cited by the proposal of fresh paragraphs to be inserted ! Once 
 or twice we have thought it impossible the Report could be 
 finished in time. On Sunday night a fair copy of the Commis- 
 sioners' Report was brought to Russell for final reading. 
 
 On Monday morning, the Qth, at eight o'clock, the Report 
 was signed. We had one more breakfast together in that great, 
 long dining-room. We had a very cordial parting. When we 
 reached the station there was a crowd of blackies to see us off. 
 Some grand old women in their Sunday best, kissing their hands 
 and waving their handkerchiefs, and wishing us a safe passage. 
 We arrived at St. Thomas's harbour about four or five on Friday 
 the 1 3th. 
 
 I have now plenty of time to consider my impressions of 
 Jamaica, and of the black and white question ; and as you will 
 read the Judicial Commissioners' Report, I shall also record, and 
 expect you to read, my laywoman's views on the matter, and give 
 them their due weight accordingly. I feel very much as if I had 
 heard of a tyrannical husband ill-treating and beating his wife 
 cruelly, and had flown indignantly to take part with the poor 
 weak woman ; but having arrived on the spot, and having looked 
 in her face, and heard her story and his, I had found my warm 
 sympathy gradually ebbing away, and the thought arising in my 
 mind, " Well, but you were very aggravating, and unspeakably, 
 inconceivably puzzling to manage ; he was, no doubt, wrong to 
 be so hasty and revengeful, but there were extenuating circum- 
 stances." 
 
 The days on the Shannon have passed more slowly than any 
 days in the course of my existence. I cannot take an interest in 
 anything except in the question how many miles we make each 
 day, and the answer is generally disappointing. Our ship has 
 been absurdly " taken with a heavy swell " all the time. The 
 wind has been changing about, but always resolves itself into a 
 head-wind ; the sun has scarcely peeped out on us since we saw 
 him set for the last time between the tropics on the isth. There 
 has been no sitting on deck for twelve days, it has been so cold.
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 327 
 
 The great topic of conversation more and more becomes what 
 time shall we arrive at Southampton. The captain looks impene- 
 trable, but gives hope of Saturday afternoon. 
 
 But now we are coming to our last day, Friday ; we are 
 approaching the entrance of the Channel. Two days ago Eng- 
 lish gulls came out to meet us ; to-day a land bird fluttered over 
 our deck as if it would love to land, but thought better of it and 
 withdrew. Many ships have been seen lingering about in the 
 east wind. A genuine English fog has reached out to us ; for an 
 hour last night it was so thick we had almost to stop and then to 
 go gingerly afterwards, ringing a bell to keep vessels from being 
 run down by us. The sea has become very smooth ; 8.30, I 
 have been on deck to see the blessed sight, the first sight of land 
 a lighthouse on the Stilly Islands; 12 at night, we pass the 
 Lizard. 
 
 Saturday Morning. It is misty, but a perfectly calm day. 
 We are going fast, and shall reach our goal in three or four hours, 
 thank God ! When the curtain, which has been dropped for six 
 weeks between us and any tidings, is raised what will be our 
 prospect ? 
 
 JOURNAL LETTERS WRITTEN DURING 
 A JOURNEY TO SICILY, 1889. 
 
 To ELLEN MARY GURNEY. 
 
 MARSEILLES, March 27. 
 
 No, I hope no pity was wasted on us. When we left our 
 moving " tent," we agreed we could have gone on two more days 
 and nights. It is always the unexpected, for our English journey 
 was warm and sunny, and our dawn, so counted on this morning, 
 was only grey visible ; and the howling storm, by degrees, after 
 eight, becoming sunny, with a sweeping mistral shaking the few 
 blossoms to be seen to the blast, and turning the men's blouses 
 over their heads. I forgot what a time it took to cincture Paris,
 
 328 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 and how forlorn all the stations and great deserted places looked 
 just as it was dusking at 6.30. At the last station electric lights 
 burst out, and delighted E., who said, " This makes me believe in 
 Paris." Electric light is pure wisdom, I think, and now it does not 
 strike me as cold and loveless, only as separated intellect, ready 
 to be married to its complementary love. Then we plunged with 
 screams into darkness. I gladly fled from my couch at four, to 
 sit in a nice little opposite seat, and awaited the sun in vain. 
 And then there was great Lyons, and that broad, mysterious, 
 light-reflecting Rhone to cross. At worst, the south begins to 
 show itself by degrees, though the trees are as bare as ours, ex- 
 cept here and there an exceptional and rash little pioneer. It is 
 interesting to see the first signs of the olive tribe, putting in the 
 thin end of the wedge, when we know how grandly and hoarily 
 they root themselves in the soil about Ariccia and the more 
 southern parts. Then the proportions of the cottages have such 
 a rhythm of their own. Those long perpendicular lines, and 
 the but slightly sloping and richly corrugated tile roofs, and the 
 stray little windows at unexpected spots, and the often outside 
 stairs. 
 
 They make everyday life look so much more idyllic, even 
 without the pergolas and dancing shadows. I had forgotten such 
 arrays of cypresses were here. How their feathery plumes did 
 sway and bow in the baffling wind ! 
 
 March 28. 
 
 We have had such a comfortable night, and bise has much 
 subdued ; and we have had croissons and coffee, and stood on 
 the balcony and compared notes about the charm of everything 
 " furrin," and already I find myself less lumpishly a " winter's 
 slave." I would give anything to steal the dear little femme-de- 
 chambre, with her soft, sensible black eyes and spotless cap, for 
 Orme Square. We look out at whitish sky, towards the hill 
 crowned with the Madonna Church. The great lime trees have 
 not yet put forth a leaf. A crowd of men vociferate and shake 
 hands with a lad, evidently going to push his fortunes in a distant
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 329 
 
 land. E. has made herself into a parcel, and abides immovably 
 till we are summoned. 
 
 I thought the lessons to-day perfect. That Deut. xxx., " The 
 Lord thy God is thy Life, and the length of thy days," for the 
 old and the young ; and the verses about the nighness or the 
 Word, so blessed when one has not wings to ascend, or diving 
 power for descent. This, with St. Luke iii., still more precious. 
 Now we are in the train. I should like always to leave off on 
 the verge of some denouement, like the lady of the Arabian 
 Nights. 
 
 CASA CORAGGIO, BORDIGHERA, March 29. 
 
 To continue. Only two or three miles from Marseilles we 
 perceived the strides the spring had made towards advancing 
 summer. The willow trees, of which there are many, quite, quite 
 green, of the ''pur mo nati" brightness ; the alder trees also, and 
 several others and the sun smote us with power as we emerged 
 from the first tunnel. Our window towards the sea, wide open ; 
 the summer look and feeling everywhere. The olives larger, the 
 cypresses taller, the poppies glowing like flames among the tender 
 green springing corn, under the over-smoking olives, reminding 
 us so much of Palestine. Every reminder from the long experi- 
 ence of age gives a deeper value to each beautiful thing that we 
 see, and often to an unbeautiful thing too. It does not occur to 
 us in youth that this will be one of the compensations of age. 
 And we look on from this, and fancy " the larger other eyes " than 
 ours, to which our blessed invisible ones have attained, and how 
 much they can read which we have not grown up to. 
 
 Oh the pretty grey and yellow rock, tufted and fringed, and 
 here and there mantled with the evergreens we love, the glossy 
 myrtle, the tall white heath, and the yellow spurge in profusion, 
 under twisting rich pinaster stems ! Our first palm greeted us 
 at 12.30, just before Toulon. This is the station for Hyeres, 
 where I always wish to stop, but will just falls short of accom- 
 plishing power. Now come the grey-green aloe spears, hedging 
 along sienna-coloured banks, against the bluest blue sea. The
 
 330 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 billowy-crested Esterelles are in sight. Clumps of wall-flowers 
 whiff their scent to us as we pass ; we see lavender-grey star 
 anemones, and beans in flower in stripes, across the olive groves. 
 I watch a fat priest, in a loose dressing-gowny vestment, walking 
 up and down in the sun, with his breviary in his hands crossed 
 behind him. Now I hail the caroba trees. We approach 
 Cannes at 3.30 ; and here it seems that Flora holds her court. 
 What crowding mimosas, sulphur daisies, eucalyptus with its 
 pretty blossoms, climbing roses just breaking from bud to flower, 
 tall heliotropes covered with blossoms. Gardens cultivated and 
 adorned only too lavishly, up to the very windows of the carriages. 
 Sweets too concentrated; and white and pink parasols sway 
 about amongst them, and hints of Vanity Fair that seem a little 
 to affect and hinder the glory of the flower raiments. There is 
 Antibes and its fortress and the avenue road. 
 
 By degrees, and or ever we were aware, the evening mystery 
 submerged the gorgeous day tints. Silvery hues gathered on 
 sky and water, with long opal interweavings across the sea. It 
 was after Monaco that the evening ravished us, and that less 
 cultivated parts and lonely little coves spread snares for our en- 
 raptured souls. And lo, we were at Ventimiglia before we took 
 note of the time, and its old town, climbing the hill, looked dark 
 and strange. And up above, with a few attendant cloud mant- 
 lings on the clear sky, beamed out the one great lustrous planet. 
 It seemed to have gathered into itself the very soul of all the 
 day's beauty, and so it did, for it was the love star, Venus. 
 
 A carriage with two white steeds bore us swiftly to Bordighera. 
 In half-an-hour we were at the door, and Mrs. MacDonald stood 
 bidding us heartiest welcomes. Do you remember the room 
 hung round with Genoese scarves, and a semi-grand piano, and 
 a frieze of photographs of Turner's landscape ? a delightful fire 
 burning on the hearth. A small table spread for our evening 
 meal. And soon the dear patriarch, now looking so venerable, 
 came in with outstretched arms and added his welcome to hers ; 
 and heaped on olive clumps, and knelt and blew up the flames, 
 and soon let himself out to us, after his own beautiful fashion,
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 331 
 
 making inquiry after you and others. And then he went on to 
 Lazarus, and to the over-troubling of the Lord's heart, when He 
 found that even Mary could not trust His Father and hers about 
 calling Lazarus home, but that she, as well as the rest, made ado, 
 as though an evil thing had happened. We had about an hour 
 and a half of his unchecked talk. And at 10.30 we were led to 
 our lovely chambers. A fire burning bright, quaint things and 
 pretty about, with the certain roughness needed to belong to a 
 certain natural growth, in a fairy olive wood. 
 
 A heliotrope, eleven or twelve feet high in full bloom, is 
 thrusting itself into my window, and after our morning psalms we 
 walked up and down, and sunned and gazed, and scented and 
 wondered, and gave thanks, and I began my writing. This 
 afternoon there is to be a children's party. We shall go into it 
 at four. Oh if I could but scatter some of these giant violets 
 on you ! All bids fair to be an abundant feast for the two old 
 pilgrims. 
 
 April 6. 
 
 It is even interesting to hear of your weather, and to compare 
 it. Your account of the way April came dressed was so pretty 
 and poetical, " swaying between promise and uncertainty." True, 
 I have no longing for an English April, as the poets have ; but I 
 own, perhaps, these hues may be too positive and unchanging, 
 and the coyness and mysteries of light and of hiding and seeking 
 may be missed in this kind of midday blaze. Well, every scene 
 and clime should have its song, and you absorb that of our sea- 
 girt island ; and I love to think of you bareheaded " in the bath 
 of scented freshness." 
 
 This morning E. and I have had our first dispute, and it was 
 all along of those two "Costanzas" one a grandmother and the 
 other a daughter of Manfredi. I stuck to the note in my Dante ; 
 she to her history of the Normans in Sicily. I had to knock 
 under as usual ; for out of that note's own lips does it stultify 
 itself. There is no satisfaction in history ; its facts and people 
 are so slippery. Whereas the principles in " Moral Ideals " one
 
 332 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 can clench as one's immovable antenatal affinities or repudiate 
 as eternal foes. 
 
 Do you know, the flies are very trying, bobbing about and 
 returning to the charge. Only think of the beauty of an old 
 workhouse woman's mind, of whom I have just been reading, 
 who had only one hand to keep them off with, and saying, " Yes, 
 they keeps coming back, the forgiving little things ! " 
 
 HOTEL VITTORIA, PISA, April 9. 
 
 11.30 A.M. by the opposite clock-tower that strikes twice all 
 night pertinaciously. The muddier than ever, but full and swift 
 Arno, passing on. How unchanged dear staid old Pisa remains, 
 even since the days of my youth. The flattish corrugated red- 
 tiled roofs ; the time-worn houses, though with some new painted 
 persiennes to their windows ; the many peasants with long carts 
 filled with sacks ; the sleepy air of pedestrians, and paucity of 
 foreigners, make it like one who " gangs his ain gait," let time 
 and the hour run on as they may. E. feels as I do, that Pisa 
 is a place just fitted for the attempati, and that, as at present 
 advised, we would (ideally) end our days here. 
 
 April 10. 
 
 It is the most strangely inconsistent thing of these dolcefar 
 niente people to stand about, loudly talking in groups at 1.30 in 
 the dead of the night, as these Pisans do. They were only quiet 
 between 2 and 5. It became a lovely evening yesterday; the 
 clouds whirling off and thinning, and the transparent blue green 
 emerging ; the troubled muddy river quieting and reflecting lights 
 and shades ; the clumsy and picturesque red-grey kind of fortress 
 church to the west, in mass against the light amber horizon. 
 And to the east, the tallest of rainbows sprang up into the dome 
 of heaven, and opaline tints everywhere came out under its magic 
 sway. The people came out and strolled, with great green and 
 red furled umbrellas under their arms, their rich brown cloaks or 
 coats, fur collared and cuffed, hung loose on their shoulders ; and 
 women also stood in groups, and all seems coming to life again,
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 333 
 
 after the storm. Dear old Pisa, how much I like you and your 
 muddy stream. It will soon be in the sea and lose its mud, it 
 is nice for old people to think. Well, we finished our day with 
 beautiful readings, and rounded it with a very good night ; and 
 this morning, after a breakfast in the sunned window and our 
 usual morning readings, I felt quite like an uncaged bird, and 
 that I might hie me to the green sward, where grow those wonder 
 flowers ! The wind was so gusty, my pride was quelled, and we 
 had to subside into a coupe, which whisked us to the precincts. 
 More lovely than ever was that first entering into the transept 
 confusion of arches, and the delicate violet hue of the colouring 
 of Duomo. 
 
 The same kind of strong, serious-faced peasant men, as 
 when here with you, were gathering and taking up the seats 
 in the nave for La Prediga. We furtively outskirted, and then 
 sat opposite the pulpit, having watched the archbishop, with a 
 flunky on one side holding a green silk umbrella, and on the 
 other another holding a long wand with the tiniest cross finish- 
 ing it off, and many canoni following with vacantest faces. He 
 made the sign of blessing, with very fine finished courtesy : then 
 came the preacher. Oh such a contrast to our Franciscan, 
 Agostino di Montefeltro a very caricature of a priest ! He 
 stood surveying his audience in silence. . . . Then came the 
 torrent of words and action that these southerners seem to 
 have so usually at command. But oh it was very dreadful ! 
 all about Satana and Protestantism. The triumph of evil over 
 good might have been his text, finishing up each division 
 quite conclusively with the neatest iron bars and locks. Those 
 poor, dear peasants, attentive and grave, as under Agostino, 
 but where was the sacred fire or one helping word for their 
 needs? The stones grew colder under my feet. We did not 
 wait for the third division, but came away unblest. And then 
 the cold wind chased me from even looking into the Campo 
 Santo. And we " couped " to our dear tent on the Arno, to which 
 we are saying adieu. And traps are being gathered and tethered, 
 and we give thanks for our happy sojourn here ; and after a late
 
 334 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 luncheon we turn our faces south again, and hope by midnight 
 to be installed in the Eternal City. The privilege of stepping on 
 from holy place to holy place seems to me greater, deeper, fuller 
 than ever. 
 
 HOTEL ROYALE, ROMA, April n. 
 
 ... We crossed the Tiber twice, I think, and saw the 
 hundred lights of the city beyond, and or ever we were aware, 
 though after long expectation we were in the sparkle of the 
 station electric lights. 
 
 Oh how different from my entrances of yore ! When our 
 carriage was left waiting outside a huge gateway, and a few 
 sleepy carabinieri came forward to poke into provisions we 
 might be smuggling into the city; yet amiably willing they 
 were to receive a little friendly bribe not to keep us waiting 
 too long. And how dim and strange and silent that great 
 Piazza del Popolo used to look, with scarce a sound but that 
 of the dripping fountains. Now we seemed at once in the 
 very heart of the city. Only one little touch gave a distinc- 
 tive sensation to our entree. No porter or official opened the 
 carriage door; but an old facchino, who might have been 
 Tito's father, flung open the door and said, with a voice and 
 air utterly beyond description, so full was it of meaning, of 
 totality, of finality, as though nothing more of joy or sorrow 
 could in this attainment ever be looked for, " ROMA ! " E. 
 read it as I did, and found it a full volume. Turning out of 
 the station, we are at once amongst the grandiose buildings 
 and public gardens, looking like fairyland, with such a tall, 
 Undine-sprite of a silver veil fountain upspringing, illumined 
 by concealed electric light This hotel is not far off an enor- 
 mous Parisian kind of place. E. has been to see a friend, 
 whose brother has become a Roman Catholic and a Pope's 
 chamberlain, and whose mother is very ill ; whom an old Irishman 
 of ninety, called promiscuously "the Archbishop of Ephesus," 
 visits tenderly every day, un vero santo, it seems. He has 
 never been to Ephesus, or is ever, I suppose, going; that is 
 why I say "promiscuously."
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 335 
 
 And now a coupe* is beckoned, and we go to St. dementi 
 St. Peter's, and the Colosseum. 
 
 IN THE TRAIN, April 12. 
 
 I don't think even the Greek sculptured hills can be lovelier 
 in outline than the Sabines, from about two miles from Rome. 
 Now the more distant line is covered with snow. A perfectly 
 adorable young Italian lady is opposite to me. Her lover or 
 her husband put her into the carriage, and they had an absorb- 
 ing whispered conversation ; it is in some crisis of their lives. 
 I never saw such language-filled eyes as hers deep, dark, 
 shaded with heaviest lids and exquisite brows. He was plead- 
 ing with her, and arguing and persuading, and she looked at 
 him with a limitless passion of tenderness ; it was a mother's 
 pitying ruth, but with her lips she said, " Mai, mai, mai, 
 impossible." The next words I heard were, " Pensi solo com' 
 io era felice iera, ed ora ! " with such infinite sadness. When 
 the carriage was shut, and he took her hands, she said, 
 "Speriamo," with a sigh of despair. He was not interesting 
 looking, but earnest; not a "Tito," but not noble. I wish I 
 could read the romance. I feel sure it is one where the woman 
 is on the divine side. What shall I call her? She is pale 
 olive, a straight nose, and a perfect mouth and chin, about 
 twenty-six. She has taken off her hat, and bewitches me more, 
 with a coil of dead black hair high on her Juno-like head. 
 I have offered her eau-de-Cologne, and in other ways intimated 
 that I was at her feet, ma si tiene chiusa, chiusa, enveloped in 
 her melancholy smile. 
 
 NAPLES, April 12. 
 
 " La Pate"tica " (that was the name I decided on) left us at 
 a quaint little town about an hour before we reached Naples. 
 Two rather ordinary-looking young girls came to meet her, 
 and they packed into a little calhhe and drove away. So 
 there is the last of my story without an end. 
 
 Suddenly to look out and see Vesuvius seemed quite a 
 wonder. The mountain rises very impressively from the plain,
 
 336 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 as we see him from this side. No clear sky; all grey gloom, 
 with clouds and advancing night. 
 
 On arriving, we were not torn to pieces by facchini, which 
 I missed very much. Saddened and respectably inclined was 
 the first aspect of the wild and joyous people. Anzoleto ! 
 Anzoleto ! is your type improved away ? 
 
 A great omnibus carried us for miles and miles, it seemed to 
 us, and through strange enough narrow old streets ; the little 
 ornamented nooks of open shops, so like the Eastern Bazaar. 
 And here we were landed, after the poor horses had climbed 
 over the tops of many a terrace of houses, in an enormous bar- 
 rack of a place. We have a good view, it is true, over the roofs 
 of houses, and look upon that indescribably poetic outline of 
 Capri, and can see to our left the shoulders and head of 
 Vesuvius, and last night we were fascinated by watching its 
 flames glow up and then dwindle and die out in a moment. 
 This morning it is thickly veiled with clouds. After morning 
 reading we sallied forth alone and enjoyed splendid sunshine, 
 but a great touch of March wind accompanies it. As yet we 
 have seen no point of view to make us exclaim, " Vedi Napoli 
 e poi morir." 
 
 Oh such a beauty of two years old toddled before us ! Her 
 father had crossed the road, and she dared not follow, but in- 
 sisted on " Babbo's " return ; he lingered to tantalise ; she pre- 
 tended to cry, with outstretched imploring arms. I begged her 
 not to piangere, and would you believe it, she put her little hand 
 in mine, let me lead her across, and then kissed my hand and 
 crowed with laughter ! Fancy how elated and set up I feel. 
 
 MESSINA, April 16. 
 
 We are really here, at the farthest point of our pilgrimage ; 
 and it does seem a long way from our start this day three weeks 
 We have been on the chase of summer ever since, and fancied 
 we had hold of the hem of her garment between Cannes and 
 Bordighera; but she broke away and let us only have a peep 
 again when we reached Naples. Then she departed in a thunder-
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 337 
 
 storm, and on Monday morning we were too glad to get warm 
 over a fine wood blaze, and I to heap on all the wraps in which 
 I left England. Every outline was blotted out from our view, so 
 that we left Naples without regret, hoping to get into another 
 clime. What an unspeakably lovely journey it must be without 
 hiding clouds ! And I must tell you that we agreed it was the 
 most delightful train we had ever been in. It hardly made a bit 
 of haste, and never screeched or shook, or showed the diabolic 
 character you so hate. We might have been ambling along on a 
 quiet donkey, among vineyards and olive woods and cornfields 
 and sweet by-paths. The carriages seemed much lower than 
 usual, and as we sat in the windows we seemed in the very midst 
 of the country, lingering and strolling to see as much as we 
 wanted. Towards sunset the rain subsided, and we wound up 
 the bleak Apennines into such wild, desolate uplands, with a 
 few flocks of goats and shaggy-looking Calabrian peasants, who 
 might have been brigands a few years ago. At Posenza we were 
 just in the midst of Italy, between its east and west coasts, I 
 mean, in the Basilicata, and then ran down to the sole of its boot 
 at eleven at night, and saw again the tremolar della marina in the 
 moonlight, and many weird and bewitching scenes intermingling 
 with more or less of dreamland. At five we were well awake, 
 and able to enjoy warmer air and smiling, awakening villages, 
 and little troops of wild flowers, gleaming and glistening. At 
 last we turned the very tip of the dear land's toe, and saw the 
 Sicilian mountains faintly through the clouds, and the snows of 
 Etna shining out above them. 
 
 The sea looked so very gambolful at Reggio we half feared 
 we should have to get to the little steamer in a boat. The waves 
 were Atlantic colour; they did frascarsi in brilliant white foam. 
 The steamer so reminded us of our Greek steamer experiences : 
 so dirty, and filled with such odds and ends of self-neglectful 
 humanity. It was very beautiful, but not a colour anywhere but 
 in the water. " Nebbia, nebbia," everywhere, as all remarked. 
 Etna quite hidden ; only Aspromonte (where the Italian ball was 
 put into dear Garibaldi's foot) behind us, showing its snows.
 
 338 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 There lay Messina before us. As we approached, the line of 
 grandiose houses looked in the sea, they were so little above the 
 quay ; perhaps a little like Genoa from the sea, only, of course, 
 much smaller ; something a little Eastern and uncommon about 
 its air. We rounded the point of its harbour, and then saw why 
 it had been called " Sickle" (Zankle) ; that was just the outline of 
 a bit of its coast. On landing the old facchini were at their old 
 work, seeking to tear us to pieces for prey. At such moments 
 one is glad of one's stern " nurse " (courier). This hotel is more 
 like an Alexandrian one than an Italian. We look over the har- 
 bour to the Aspromonte hills. Such a busy scene, steamers and 
 shipping, and in the foreground a market with magnificent oxen, 
 larger than the grey, of a rich, lustrous, mahogany colour. Along 
 the edge of the quay hundreds and thousands of barrels ever 
 shipping off; and guess what they contain? Lemons cut in 
 pieces, and preserved in salt water so very odd ; I cannot think 
 who or what wants them. 
 
 At three our nurse took us out in a handsome carriage. 
 First, we stopped at the cathedral, at a side entrance in black and 
 white layers, with ornamented Gothic windows something like 
 little Pisan Spina, grown bigger and more careless and unpro- 
 portionable. Blind men on the steps asking alms, as Dante 
 remarked them in Purgatorio. Inside all very elaborate ; 
 thorough congruity of bad-ish style, but picturesqueness, and 
 all so busy. Priests at so many altars, and groups and strollers. 
 Old men in great cloaks, sitting or kneeling about, and wreaths 
 of little children running about, some hand in hand, curiously 
 peeping ; sweet bursts of organ. I never saw anything quite like 
 it. Some seemed settling themselves to sleep for the day ; all 
 perfectly at home there : no concentration of worship round one 
 altar. Ballroom little glass chandeliers with candles unlighted, 
 I suppose waiting for Easter Dawn, from almost top to bottom of 
 one of the transepts. And this reminds me of the enormously 
 high catafalque made for Conrad, half-brother of our Manfred, 
 with its naming candles or torches so high that the very lofty 
 wooden roof caught fire, and the cathedral of those days was
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 339 
 
 much injured, but Manfred restored it. Then the earthquake 
 almost entirely destroyed it in 1700; so no need to wonder at 
 all the bad flying-garmented ornaments. But the facade you 
 would like, of about 1450, by Mazollo a new name to me. 
 The carvings so very naif. Vines with children like monkeys 
 climbing them, and twisting about them, seizing the bunches of 
 grapes or basketing them ; others engaged in all the little busi- 
 nesses of common life rather Giottesque. This west entrance 
 makes one side of an attractive piazza, with a large, elaborate 
 marble fountain in the midst. What I most admire, I think, 
 about the place are the great tall arches that open from time to 
 time from the main street (Garibaldi) to the sea, and from it 
 and its craft, with aerial Calabrian mountains, across the straits. 
 Then we drove on and up little steep streets to the Cappucini, 
 then the Villa Guelfonia. It reminded me of the battlemented 
 entrance and gateway of San Miniato. Within we found our- 
 selves in the quaintest, ruggedest old garden, all terraces and 
 mounds made out of ruins and bastions, crowded with neglected 
 rampant flowers and shrubs, rampaging at their own wild will. 
 It was Costanza's castle, the good daughter of Manfred, whose 
 prayers he wished for ; see what he says about " la speranza ha 
 fior del verde" (Purg. iii.). She held a court here for a time. 
 She was married to the Arragon prince, " 1'onor di Cicilia e 
 d'Arragona," and began the Arragonese rule of Sicily. It is 
 quite unique, the great tower of very old masonry ; and when 
 we climbed the little terraced paths, bordered with lavender and 
 roses and geraniums, and great star bunches of hyacinths and 
 myrtles and flame flowers, what a view we had of the town below, 
 and strait and mountains opposite, and wide encircling sea ; and 
 then, turning our back on the sea, rugged height after height of 
 Sicilian mountains, and narrow ravines and rocks, crowned with 
 perching village or castle. 
 
 And withal it gave one a kind of grasp of the people in 
 Dante's mind ; and of that beautiful passage he puts into poor 
 Manfred's lips about the width of the embrace of the Infinite 
 Goodness ; and the defiant little censure of the Pastor di
 
 340 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 Cosenza, who could not rightly read that page in God. Well, it 
 all mixed up into a strange joy and admiration and worshipful 
 sacrament to me, and it seemed necessary that we should be 
 quenched by a tray of dust and rubbish from a balcony above 
 our heads, when descending the narrow street ; then our barouche 
 bore us away from attendant little gamins who brushed us with 
 their fingers, like curry-combs. 
 
 The next morning we escaped alone to the cathedral, to 
 receive its full and unalloyed impression. Again half the town 
 was there, and most bewitchingly interesting and picturesque it 
 looked ; all so happy and at their ease was the prevalent impres- 
 sion the people made ; almost all peasants or little shopkeepers. 
 Two beautiful priests, mournful and ascetic looking amongst very 
 ordinary ones. The little children were again enchanting ; a 
 whole string of them came in with slates and books on their way 
 to school, scampering through, and pulling up now and then for a 
 little reverence. 
 
 We sat about, and knelt a bit here and there; the organ 
 pealed forth just for a word now and then. It seemed to our 
 ignorance broken up services promiscuously ; but such a vision 
 of a peculiar kind of conversazione, in a most striking setting. 
 
 PALERMO, April 18. 
 
 Now I must tell you that the journey here was just indescrib- 
 able. Do you know the mesembryanthemums ? They carpet all 
 the ground about the railway ; large cockades of primrose colour, 
 white, pink, and, I must own, magenta also ; miles of orange and 
 lemon groves ; rocky heights beyond like the Greek islands. 
 Pilgrims hooded on their mules with green provender. Then 
 soon, the astonishment of Etna. Its gradual, gradual long slopes, 
 up to its tippeted-with-snow shoulders and head. First one side, 
 then another, we could never look away till it grew dusk ; and 
 then the stars and our Venus ; then the sparkling lights in the 
 Sea of Palermo. Then, ah ! how shall I say it ? we, as in 
 dreamland, ascended some creeper-decked stairs, and found and
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 341 
 
 knew ourselves enchanted princesses coming into an inheritance 
 of prepared wonders. Three little fairy bowers, opening on to 
 a broad terrace balcony over a glassy sea, moon-illumined ; 
 mysterious hills, absolute silence, tiny boats with lights gliding 
 across with messages as from another world. Warm like June. 
 
 PALERMO Good-Friday, April 19. 
 
 I have no expectation of taking up my abode in Sicily. Two 
 things are against it. I find the people so utterly different from 
 the Italians. Rude, rough, and fiery to the last degree. Why, 
 at Messina one of the quite respectable-looking officials at the 
 railway station, because we lingered in the waiting-room after 
 other passengers, raved and stormed at us, and literally flashed 
 murder from his eye at our poor little harmless selves ; and the 
 way they treat one another and their beasts would suit the 
 avenging Furies. Reason two : It is a most windy island, 
 always they tell us ; both cold and hot winds disport themselves, 
 and have their innings without any interval. The people all say 
 it is "variabile, variabilissimo." 
 
 After that lovely June moonlight on arriving, that night for 
 Jessica or Juliet, when the breath was all love, it changed to cold 
 after sunrise, and we have had only an hour or two of real, 
 sunshiny, quiet warmth since ! Yesterday we walked along this 
 straight long street which traverses the length of the town, and is 
 cut in the centre by another at right angles, dividing the town 
 into four portions. The strange half citadel, half mosque, 
 partly Norman church, cathedral is at the other end ; not quite 
 quaint enough for all this mixture; not the least enrapturing, 
 only from its novelty attractive in general effect. I dare say most 
 interesting to wise architects in many of its details. Inside it is 
 vast and bare looking, and wanting in any picture element ; and 
 the people, not like the Messina ones, enjoying it, but much more 
 conventional and fashionably dressed. We were immensely in- 
 terested in the tombs (would you believe it ?) of those very two 
 Constances ! One, the empress-wife of Henry VL, grandmother
 
 342 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 of Manfred, a fine porphyry sarcophagus with mosaic canopy 
 and pillars ; the other, Constance, wife of Aragon of Villa Rocca, 
 in an old Roman sarcophagus, with a lion hunt sculptured on it. 
 Also tombs of the] nice Rogers, the count, and the king. They 
 are interesting characters, and they came, I am credibly informed, 
 from that illustrious house of Hauteville, of which Tancred of the 
 Crusade was one ; and Robert Guiscard, who is turning up every- 
 where, was, I venture to think, father to Count Roger. 
 
 We are most comfortable in our snug balcony rooms. Since 
 the Constances are at rest, we have no other cause of quarrel. 
 We are up early, and it is very exquisite ; but, as you would have 
 the wit to perceive, that first enchanting experience could never 
 be repeated. It was magic, or a spiritual wave. 
 
 PALERMO, Easter Monday, April 22. 
 
 It is, I fear, very unbecoming to the dignity and propriety 
 of evening pilgrim days to be subject to such fits of in- 
 ebriation ! 
 
 To-day we have had a gorgeous waking dream of mys- 
 terious splendour, to which that first moonlight enchantment 
 might well have been the vestibule. I should like to have 
 been led blindfold from one to the other. The gem of all 
 shrines this Capella Palatina seems to me. It makes " il mio 
 bel San Giovanni" Baptistery at Florence pale into some- 
 thing thin and rather poor. It is a combination of St. Mark's, 
 Venice, with the chastened beauty of San Miniato. Roger, 
 the first King of Sicily, began to build it, 1132. It combines 
 the ideals of the Saracenic, the Greek Byzantine, and the 
 Norman. I believe these heretical combinations are the ro- 
 mances that my soul loves. How to paint it I know not. 
 When will telepathy be brought to practical perfection, that 
 so I may breathe its vision into thy brain ? First, I must have 
 Rembrandt's eyes lent to me to see its gloom and glory 
 worthily. My breath was literally taken away when I stood 
 within its portal. The arches, supported by columns o rich,
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 343 
 
 dark granite and marble, are lengthened Romanesque, with 
 the slight point in the centre and the slight inclination in- 
 wards towards the base. All above them flat, covered with 
 glimmering, glooming, mysterious mosaic, and the roof of 
 high, barn-like, dingy rafters. It is a nave with aisles, the 
 choir and apse raised five steps above the nave. Small and 
 yet unlimited ; measuring by common rule, it is only thirty- 
 six yards long and fourteen wide. Its pulpit, a sort of am- 
 bone, all inlaid marbles, and its pavement, of course, in the 
 St. Mark's style. Rays of light come straggling through its 
 small and rather scarce clerestory windows, across the gloom 
 of deep recess and rounded transept. It seems built of gems 
 by a magic wand, from a magic dream that saw it all as a 
 unity at once, and gave it its soul like none other. I would 
 fain describe some of its quaint imaginative decorations, its 
 bands of peculiar interlacing devices, dividing the partly 
 picturesque, partly conventional, symbolic representations of 
 biblical subjects. 
 
 We spent more than an hour and a half sitting there, but 
 I must go again awake, and see what it looks like then. 
 So strange to have lived in the world with this extraordinary 
 poem, and not to have heard it thrilling through the air ! 
 And then we wended close by a garden and dream cloisters, 
 and Arab well, and torrents of roses, and nespoli, and iris, 
 crimson-purple, and branches of literally weeping lemon trees, 
 so down did their clusters of fruit drag them. And these 
 clothed the ruins of a mosque converted into a church also 
 by Roger, and the catacombs of his Court. The church in- 
 tended by him, carried out probably by an Arabian architect, 
 now quite bare and deserted. And one end of it opened 
 upon a rocky ledge, which 800 years ago was lapped by the 
 waves. The tower above held the bells, so the custode as- 
 sured us, that tolled and clamoured, and roused the angry, 
 cruel Sicilians when the overbearing French filled the measure 
 of their iniquities, and provoked the ferocious, retaliating mas- 
 sacre that followed in 1280, the Sicilian Vespers.
 
 344 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 This little wild and most abundant garden, with its de- 
 serted delicate cloisters, all aromatic under the sunbeams, 
 reminded me of dreams of Seville, or of the Alhambra. You 
 see, this Sicily has been touched by so many sceptres, Greek, 
 Saracenic, Norman, Anjou, Spanish, and each has left its own 
 mark, and the sky, and sea, and sun have mantled all to- 
 gether into harmony. One thing Sicily lacks forest, even 
 wood; for it has been inhabited for such centuries, that all 
 the trees have been cut down for fuel. 
 
 Last night we said we must watch the sunrise from the sea, 
 opposite our windows. This came about at 5.10, after long 
 gorgeous preparation, that seemed to flame crimson and then 
 dusk and pale before the first spark came up ; so that we 
 might have said, " Where is the promise of His coming ? " 
 
 PALERMO, April 24. 
 
 Yesterday we set out early on our expedition to Monreale. 
 Along a dusty, white , ascending road, the sun terribly powerful. 
 One side of the road is flanked with bosky heights, and 
 gathering beneath them are small olives and abundant lemon 
 trees. On the other, we look on the plain that runs in be- 
 tween craggy mountains behind Palermo. Probably the sea 
 ran up this valley. Formerly, also, there was a forest on these 
 heights, where William II., a nice young man, brought up by 
 an Englishman, while, in about 1180, hunting wild beasts, saw 
 an apparition of the Virgin, who commanded him to build 
 her a church on that very spot. We ascended gradually to 
 this same height, and found ourselves, after a bit of straggling 
 village, in the midst of a gay and very modern-looking piazza, 
 laid out in neatest, brightest beds of cineraria, with a centre 
 fountain, and, I must confess, gas lamps ! But the cathedral 
 arched peristyle along one side, and the crags precipitously 
 rising on the other, and the Eastern - looking houses were 
 special enough, and when we gladly flew into the shade under 
 that open portico, and noted its beautifully sculptured door-
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 345 
 
 ways, and old bronze doors, by Bonino di Pisa, we were 
 charmed. Many blind were there, but we were not invited to 
 buy ugly baskets, as at Fiesole. We lingered on the threshold, 
 and I hardly ventured to look within, lest my Capella Pala- 
 tina should be blurred ; but lo ! it was yet a fresh vision of 
 beauty, though in the same Byzantine and Norman strain ; and 
 the sweetest organ was rolling out tenderest strains. Palatina 
 was a gloom glory ; this was a dove glory. Larger, more 
 aerial, the pillars all light marble; the marble panels of the 
 walls, grey-white, with their mosaic borders ; the walls above 
 entirely of mosaics on gold ground, like the Palatina, but 
 more illumined. The large arch that separated, or rather out- 
 lined the choir from the nave, had only a very low white 
 lace-like marble screen across it. The space between that 
 and the rich apse was large, and filled with choristers, on one 
 side in blue, on the other in scarlet under white lace. The 
 altar in front of the gorgeous apse was raised very high, and 
 the spectacle of ascending and descending ministrants, and 
 little acolytes with swinging censers, especially from the end 
 of the nave where we stood, made a most beautiful picture. 
 
 The mosaics, many of them, interested us immensely. I 
 cannot quite tell you how they followed each other, but the nave 
 was, on the whole, from Old Testament subjects, and much what 
 a child might have drawn the conventional, struggling into the 
 realistic, nearly a century before Cimabue's time. There was the 
 funniest little Noah's Ark, at which hammering was going on 
 most energetically ; there was a plank up to its door, along which 
 a man struggled to push an antelope, while Noah's wife and sons and 
 daughters from within were looking, their great faces filling up all 
 the little windows. Further, the dove was returning, with the olive 
 branch, while a monster below opened his cruel jaws in the hopes 
 of snapping up the hope and peace it carried. Amongst the New 
 Testament series we were much struck with the Transfiguration : 
 the idea of the blending of the dead with the living through 
 Christ; a cross-ray going from Moses to Peter on one side, 
 through the body of Christ, and another from Elias to James,
 
 346 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 and another to John, who crouches in the middle, under the 
 Lord's feet. There were two of the disciples at Emmaus. The 
 second represents the moment after the vanishing of the Lord ; 
 the broken bread ; the two at the table and the empty space ; a 
 gold window, against which the Divine Head had been. The 
 action of their hands seems to say, " Did not our hearts burn 
 within us ? " They are very fond of St. Paul here ; as you know, 
 he came to Syracuse ; and all his life is represented very gro- 
 tesquely, especially his being let down in a little basket from 
 the wall, where there is no room for anything but his head. He 
 is also baptized by Ananias, in a vessel like a basket, of about 
 the same size. There is a very touching naivete in all these 
 pictures, and certainly they tell their tale distinctly enough. 
 There is a mosaic of William II. being crowned by Christ him- 
 self. The custode kept clanking his keys, and intimating that 
 the church ought to be shut. We had to leave it at last, and 
 were invited to examine the cortile of the Benedictine monastery 
 that was, and there was another dream that could only be sung 
 by a Persian poet. Such a quadrangle of sculptured columns 
 supporting Moorish arches of the most delicate workmanship and 
 phantasy you can fancy. Two hundred and sixteen columns in 
 pairs, and not one capital like another. At one angle there was 
 an enclosing row of columns, making a little square, in which 
 rose and dripped a dreamy fountain. The central ground was 
 covered with aloes and mesembryanthemums. The massive 
 yellow stone tower of the cathedral was seen rising over one 
 side, with a background of rocky mountain. On one little capital, 
 as if moulded in wax, was the king, partly holding up his church 
 to the Virgin, who stretched a hand to receive it, and an angel's 
 wing kept it from falling a most bewitching little com- 
 position. 
 
 Returning, we drove into an avenue of just greening mulberry 
 trees, wide-spreading lemon groves on each side. An opening 
 in the hedge of roses tempted us to turn into this grove, and 
 there under nespoli and lemon-laden boughs we sat and had 
 out our basket, and counted the wild flowers around us, and
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 347 
 
 wondered we could dream such dreams in our old age, till we 
 remembered the prophecy. 
 
 To the Lady MOUNT-TEMPLE. 
 
 PALERMO, April 27. 
 
 Yesterday was a day of revelation. To-day it seems opening 
 in interpretation. We were called at 3.15. The sky still un- 
 touched by dawn, but the small crescent moon stood just above 
 the hills to the east, and mirrored a narrow path across the bay 
 to our feet. We had to go along our prosaic way by omnibus 
 and railroad as the sun rose, and at eight were at the little 
 isolated station of Calatanmi. Here a strange little car awaited 
 us with a merry young driver. Our road climbed and climbed a 
 little mountain pass. The cold wind blew, and scuds of fleeting 
 showers. The scant people we saw were mostly shepherds in 
 sheepskins. In two hours we were at the village crowning a 
 height, much like some in Palestine, piled up the face of the 
 hill in flat lines, rock-colour, windowless, apparently doorless, 
 of the fortress nature. In the little inn, beggar-thronged even 
 upstairs, neither bread nor milk was to be had ; but we had 
 our basket, refreshed ourselves, and went on again for about 
 a mile, and once over the hill-tops was pointed out our goal, 
 the temple of Segestae. Then we had again to descend into the 
 valley and there leave the carriage, for the rest of the way must 
 be done on foot. In a few minutes a stream eight or ten yards 
 wide crept across our way ; no going farther without crossing 
 that stream. Our bold, bright young vetturino came forward, 
 and with some boys placed some stepping-stones, by dint of 
 perseverance, across the little river ; there were already large 
 rocky ones, but we could not have sprung from one to the other. 
 Then he took my hand, and said, " Andiamo ! " with a virtu 
 that inspired even me so much, that if he had thus bid me follow 
 down the crater of Etna, I should have obeyed. He did the 
 same for E. ; and after this we had two miles' climb and stumble 
 through dried clay ruts and stony places, till we were among the 
 flowery downs.
 
 348 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 Could I but tell you of those delectable mountains ! Turning 
 the shoulder of one, we beheld the wonderful vision. On a 
 swelling height stood the Doric temple, its plain massive columns 
 and entablature facing us, like a work of nature, so simple and 
 majestic, " come se avesse (i secoli) in dispetto." Behind, it was 
 protected by another ridge of rocky mountains. The approach 
 to this temple never, never can you conceive. The path along 
 and between shallow swelling downs, as thickly covered as pos- 
 sibly Flora in her most wildly lavish moods can cover, with tall 
 waving flowers and grass, soft, fluffy, rejoicing, thousand-tinted. 
 But crowding most to the edge of the little ascending path, gor- 
 geous flame-coloured marigolds, the via sacra's glory ; purple 
 gladioli with them ; pink exquisite selaginella ; the large, tall 
 yellow asphodel, the more delicate coral-lined one ; pink mallows ; 
 tassel hyacinth, and countless nameless ones. Is it not, indeed, 
 the land where Proserpine might forget her soul away among the 
 flowers ? On amongst them we went, and mounted regal steps, 
 and entered the sacred enclosure of those thirty-six magnificent 
 unfluted columns ; no remains of inner walls, indeed they were 
 never built ; the wind sweeping ever through and through the 
 columns, no rubbish, no fallen stone, no pavement ; but an even, 
 smooth surface of greenest turf, with a literal Eastern prayer- 
 carpet spread at one of the entrance corners, of richest gold and 
 purple diminutive flowers ! And through the columns as we 
 paced, the near hill downs and valleys rolling, and beyond and 
 beyond even to faintest aerial tints, mountains and sky ; all light, 
 all width, all gladness of beauty ; no dwindling barriers ; all 
 liberty for the most widely embracing human soul. 
 
 Never in all my travels before, never at Athens, or Baalbec, 
 or Thebes, did I see one fair perfect temple stand on one sepa- 
 rated lonely mount And we had to cross a stream to behold it, 
 and we were pilgrims ; and the temple had no sign of sect, no 
 walls to shut in or out from the breathing of the Spirit as He 
 listeth ; and the gay innocent flowers waved around it, and it was 
 carpeted for adoration; no roof hindering the doming heavens. 
 It was the mingling of the inward and the outward, that you
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 349 
 
 taught me in the streamlet at Broadlands. Is not the outward, 
 indeed, the ever-united sacrament, the sign only existing by the 
 inward spiritual grace ? 
 
 To ELLEN MARY GURNEY. 
 
 PALERMO, April 28. 
 
 And now our last Sunday, our last day here has slowly come. 
 Eleven days gone, that have deposited in our hearts treasures and 
 charms unspeakable, and no striving after the treasures ; nice 
 grey fallow days between the blossoming wonders that had to be 
 gathered. To-day we turned into the gardens of the splendid 
 Hotel des Palmes, where all subtropical trees and plants and 
 flowers have been crowded in a kind of lavish cornucopia. The 
 hotel all polished and exquisite ; the seats under palms fit for 
 Sybarites ; the fashionables reclining about the place. We did 
 feel thankful for being advised to choose this quieter, rougher, 
 more primitive one with the terrace over the sea ; from the other 
 there is no view, but along a fine, broad, clean street. This 
 morning we realised our dream of the first moonlight evening, 
 when we said, " We will breakfast on this terrace." An attached 
 waiter, a true sympathetic Italian (not a Sicilian), carried our 
 tray out for us, and put it on a little tin table inside a slight 
 basket-work arbour, with its back to the sun, which position 
 enabled us to sit in comfort to our boiled goat's milk and rolls 
 and butter, and watch the slippery water, scarcely moving itself, 
 curving along the wide expanse of bay ; the distant little townlets 
 to our right like a string of pearls between pinky blue of moun- 
 tains and opal blue of sea ; and the opposite horn terminating 
 in the much nearer precipitous cliff of Monte Pellegrino, so 
 sculptured and defined, with masts and shipping, and moving 
 boats beneath it. 
 
 One thing I have greatly neglected in my letters : to initiate 
 you into the interesting episode of the Normans overcoming the 
 Saracens here. I don't believe you are half acquainted with 
 pleasant young Count Roger, youngest brother of wily Guiscard, 
 and the count's son, King Roger, whose daughter Constance
 
 350 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 married a son of F. Barbarossa, Henry VI. of Germany, and be- 
 came grandmother of Manfred. Theirs were the palmy days of 
 romantic architecture here, and the Palazzo Reale here, and 
 Monreale, five miles in the hills, are full of memories of them. 
 The dash back into pure classical temple building will be a strain. 
 
 PALERMO, April 29. 
 
 Once more I date my letter from Hotel Trinacria, Palermo. 
 The ideal harbour for weary voyagers ! Never can we sojourn in 
 such a spot again, unless the dell in Ante-Purgatorio, where the 
 mixture of colours and scents made the incognito indistinto, is per- 
 mitted us. We found ourselves regretting too much our last 
 breakfast overlooking the sea, with its smooth glassiness in parts, 
 and more sparkling sapphires where the morning breeze took it ; 
 but as we gazed and sorrowed, a large English three-masted vessel, 
 which has been lying in harbour for days, moved pressing on- 
 wards, crowded with sail a sight one never sees in these steam- 
 ing days, looking so stately and full of meaning as it glided 
 eastwards, and it repeated again after its own fashion the watch- 
 word given us at Segestee " Andiamo." 
 
 GIRGENTI, SICILY, April 30. 
 
 Another broad terrace balcony, prepared for the princesses ! 
 On to which they stepped forth at ten o'clock last night, under 
 their spangled wide canopy of deep distances : no fairy scene 
 like the Palermo enchantment of moonlight ; but utter darkness 
 and profound silence, and the sense of being high above the sea ; 
 mountain air stealing about ; the distant baying of a dog ; the 
 conviction of being utterly in the country, far from the haunts of 
 living men, and very near the haunts and traces of generations 
 that lived and strove here two or three thousand years ago. 
 
 Some early settlers came to Rhodes ; the city grew in grandeur 
 and luxury, and walls were ten miles round. And here tyran- 
 nised that horrible Phalaris of the burning bull, whose artificer 
 was first tried in it as a hasty joke of the tyrant, whom, I am 
 happy to say, Dante saw in Inferno, Canto xxvii. Here attack-
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 351 
 
 ing Carthaginians were defeated and captured by hundreds, and 
 were probably employed in the great architectural works here ; but 
 after the war between Athens and Syracuse, the Carthaginians 
 overran the island, and Hannibal captured this rich city. From 
 this time Carthaginians and Romans were constantly squabbling 
 over the unhappy island till it became finally the prey of Rome, 
 was called Agrigentum, and sank into comparative insignificance. 
 In 828 the Saracens grabbed it, till Count Roger, of happy 
 memory, rescued it from their grasp. We conned this as we 
 came along our lonely way from Palermo, between tall geranium 
 hedges and waving scented acacia and millions of lemons. 
 
 This morning we rushed to the view, looking towards the 
 African sea three or four miles off, the intervening descent and 
 plain wild and solitary looking. Three temples about a mile off, 
 looking like cork models. To the right, almost out of sight, the 
 present town of Girgenti, piled up the face of a hill. 
 
 We went an earlyish walk to a height where stands a little 
 church, St. Biagio, made out of a temple to Ceres and Proserpine ; 
 the path leading up and down and round about rocks and valleys 
 and fig trees with browning figs and brilliantly green almond 
 trees and tangles of greenery. The air intensely hot. In the 
 afternoon we had a carriage and went the round of the temples. 
 We saw six of them, I think, in splendid situations, with back- 
 grounds of mountain or sea ; these things are quite indescribable. 
 You know what they were at Athens. These remind me of the 
 Temple of Theseus there, only their material is not that mellow 
 marble, but very rough and disintegrated. But the miracle of all 
 is the decking with the profusion of flowers, the purple and gold, 
 the rose-pink tall snapdragons, the little wild sweet-peas every- 
 where. I cannot enumerate a thousandth part, and they say 
 February was the time to see them. We filled our baskets, and 
 made our way through thick carobas growing in bright green 
 barley-fields, and came upon a sketching party and offered to 
 carry their bundles back in the carriage ; whereupon an elderly 
 artist became on the spot as intimate as if we had known each 
 other for years. We have been prolonging dinner, comparing
 
 352 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 notes. He is an ardent believer in Christ as the Head and in- 
 spirer and finisher of every man. 
 
 CATANIA, May 3. 
 
 " Every place would have its song, 
 If the heart were right." 
 
 And so even Catania, in its dirty pretending inn, with dark grey 
 sky, wind blowing and howling and carrying whole dust-bins on 
 its wings for scattering at every moment. It began the day before 
 yesterday, while we were having tea in the Temple of Juno. Per- 
 haps it was an offence and a profanity to attempt it in the 
 Pro-naos. 
 
 The day before was the most perfect summer day, when 
 everything lay sleeping and glowing in the sunshine, and we 
 determined to come again, with fuller time, to absorb all the 
 impressiveness of the scene. On Wednesday morning it was 
 still hot and fair, notwithstanding an ominous sunset with a 
 grey bat's wing across it. We drove early into the old town 
 that climbs a steep hill, very curious to behold, and its in- 
 habitants awfully savage looking and dirty ; yet many new fine 
 palatial residences abutted on the squalor, and a splendidly 
 engineered road wound up a certain height, from whence we 
 climbed the narrow streets to the cathedral and other little 
 antiquities a pillar here, an arch there, very unsatisfactory. 
 But I won't Baedeker you about. In the Temple of Concord 
 we read the opening canto of Inferno ; not to be appropriate, 
 but to absorb us a little, and kindle imagination for the second 
 and third outlooks. This has its cella complete, for it was 
 turned into a Christian church for two or three centuries, and 
 has arched perforations in this inner wall which sheltered us 
 nicely ; but it was not carpeted with flowers like Segestae. 
 That will ever stand alone with its own most special aureole 
 of majesty. 
 
 Then we moved on and farther up for Juno's more ruined 
 shrine: the peristyle complete only along one side; no cella;
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 353 
 
 more wildness and beauty-decked fragments. There I opened 
 on " Abt Vogler," and we read it there, and fancy how it solaced 
 us in the thought of the passed-away temples and generations of 
 worshippers. " Not one lost good," &c. 
 
 At night the wind arose mightily : every persienne had been 
 closed in expectation of it ; it swept round every point of the 
 compass. Some called it Scirocco, some Levante, some 
 Libaccio ! chi sa ? No terrace balcony, no stars. No morning 
 joy of it at our eight-o'clock breakfast. 
 
 This place on arrival looked grand and civilised for us 
 Girgenti pilgrims. But we were soon disenchanted within the 
 hotel. . . . 
 
 Have you seen how we have traversed Sicily, and looked out 
 upon Tirreno, loio, and Africano seas? The railway leads us 
 about a good deal too, through its interior. Etna looked 
 beautifully at us again last evening. The long, extraordinarily 
 long and gradual slope to its summit is, I think, very majestical. 
 Fancy seeing an omnibus with "Porto d'Empedocle" in large 
 letters on it. Perhaps you don't know that he was a Girgenti 
 man, and improved the conditions of his town. 
 
 CATANIA, May 5. 
 
 We are at this unsympathetic place again, you see, with all 
 our Syracusan scenes intervening between my last letter from 
 here and this. But I have the sensation of having heaps to tell 
 you of surpassing interest. This is a pure delusion, I know, for 
 these things cannot be told, or Murray would be the most 
 interesting book in the world. The facts there recorded, when 
 they are made to live by the scenes and signs of them that strike 
 our living eyes, are intensely interesting ; but this actual contact 
 is everything, to raise dead history from dry dust, at least to such 
 of us as are not historians. I always thought Syracuse had a 
 wonderful sound and prestige in it ; did not you ? And we did 
 just know of its struggle with Athens, and that she was defeated 
 there, and never recovered her defeat. But we only knew it as a 
 kind of hazy school-booky chapter that had better not be alluded 
 
 z
 
 354 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 to, lest it should prove our crass ignorance. Well, after this, do 
 not imagine I am going to tell you that this chapter of ancient 
 history lives and glows before me. Oh no ! Only, on looking 
 round at the fifteen miles that its five cities in one covered, and 
 sitting on the time-worn steps of its oval rock-hewn theatre, and 
 walking along its street of tombs, one does seem to get a touch 
 from the past-away age of the twenty-fourth century ago, that 
 stirs one with all kinds of questionings and wonderings. We 
 felt it at Athens, and its thrill again ran through me at Syracuse. 
 Our journey there was not as lovely as most of the other parts of 
 Sicily have been, but the grey windy sky improved, and it was fair 
 when the officials called out " Syracousa." We saw it jutting out 
 into the sea, all but a long thin island. Ortigia was the ancient 
 name of that part of the city, the earliest settlement, and the new 
 town just covers that part no trees, no hills, flat and sandy and 
 yellow. A primitive little bathing machine the omnibus of Casa 
 Politi was. The boys and men clustered round our descent like 
 savages. In the little omnibus a very pretentious smiling man, 
 with tight gloves, spotted us for his prey ; said the Signer Politi 
 was already engaged with a party, and that he was the very 
 providential substitute. Such a funny little back entrance to the 
 inn, then a widish Eastern-looking courtyard, two pepper trees, 
 and two rugged outside stairs, over cavernous arches. At the 
 top of one was Mme. Politi, who tried us in German, went on in 
 French and Italian, and finally launched into very fair English. 
 She pioneered us down the steps again, and through one of the 
 cavernous descending arches into the old thick-walled founda- 
 tions of the house, but newly whitewashed and painted, and, 
 moreover, giving on to a little balcony just above the sea and a 
 narrow intervening terrace. There was something very ravishing 
 and unexpected about it ; brilliantly clean beds and brick tiles, 
 with a few rugs about, and the large windows in the arch letting 
 in sea-rippled reflections of light on walls and roof. She con- 
 fided us to " Mr. Brisk," the guide, and a carriage with a strong 
 pair of horses, and off we whisked along the white dusty road for 
 about two miles : first, to the Roman amphitheatre ; its long grey
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 355 
 
 ellipse lying embedded, or rather set, in green turf, with the sea 
 and promontory beyond, made a good picture. But here we 
 despise anything so modern as 212 B.C., when the Romans got 
 possession of the place, and we drove on to the Greek theatre, 
 where more beautiful games were played and poems recited. I 
 will just inform you that it was in 734 B.C. that a colony of 
 Corinthians planted the infant that became the mighty Syracuse, 
 and that it flourished independently for more than five hundred 
 years, when Rome swallowed it up. The wild flowers do not 
 wave about these ruins as about the Girgenti ones, and I will 
 spare you further lately gathered information and remarks on 
 classical times, and only tell you a little about the very extra- 
 ordinary quarries here, which are quite unique, more like the 
 American canons than anything else deep clefts and ravines, 
 the sides absolutely as precipitous as walls, sometimes more than 
 100 or 150 feet high, and scooping over. In the space between 
 these, tumbled rocks and banks diversify the ground, and 
 almonds and lemons and loveliest plants deck them. These 
 places are called Latomie, and were used as prisons, and the 
 cities were built from the stones of these quarries. In one of 
 them it is believed the 7000 unhappy Athenian captives were 
 incarcerated. The one we explored the evening of our arrival, 
 and just as lights and shades of evening added mystery to the 
 scene, is called " II Paradise." It belongs to a gentleman who 
 has turned it into the most luscious garden Persian poet ever 
 conceived ; its tall enclosed precipices keep all cruel winds 
 away; it is a lap wherein each plant may grow unchecked to 
 its ideal beauty. Roses climb everywhere. Syringas were giving 
 out their over-sweetness, and tall lemon and almond and fig 
 trees. Large green sub-tropical leaves soften the outlines of 
 fallen boulders of rock ; the winding, tangled paths and little 
 terraces amongst these are bordered with spicy carnations, and 
 long trails of ivy clothe some of the walls, hanging from the top 
 and meeting the yellow and white climbing Banksia roses. The 
 overpowering scents and the wild incessant songs of nightingales 
 nearly took away our sober senses, and made us fancy we were in
 
 356 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 a haschish or opium dream. Never have I heard nightingales 
 sing like those ! Fancy the contrast to the groans and misery of 
 enslaved prisoners before the mercifulness of Christ was known. 
 This very Paradise one was, I think, close to the huge cavern 
 with a strangely shaped entrance, that they call "the ear of 
 Dionysius" a most uncanny cave, with an extraordinary echo. 
 The custode who opens it, and speaks or whispers, is answered 
 by a distinct, yet somewhat different voice, that seems to come 
 from the dark recesses of the huge and winding cavern that 
 dimly recedes from one's gaze. Of course, he bangs a great 
 gate, and prolonged thunder reverberates answeringly. 
 
 Mr. Brisk was most amusing, pointing with his gloved hand, 
 and saying with fervour, " Regardez, regardez, mesdames ; quel 
 point de vue ! mais c'est magnifique," and then, after a deep 
 sigh, again, " magnifique ! " E. said she would give worlds to 
 taste for five minutes his self-satisfaction, it was so utterly with- 
 out misgiving. He had us back to the inn exactly as it struck 
 seven ; as he had said, " C'est mon affaire cela, qu'on ne s'en 
 inquiete pas." 
 
 Saturday morning was fine and hot, but with the ever-buffeting 
 wind, sand-laden. We had a long drive to see the heights of 
 Epipoloe. The Athenians took this by storm, and hoped by a 
 wonderful wall to circumvent the Syracusans. They, however, 
 ran up a counter-wall and baffled them. We saw the fragments 
 of these walls, and we saw wonderful corridors, rock-hewn, said 
 to be barracks in the remote ages ; and we climbed about and 
 became " summer's tannlings " and wind-tossed atoms ; and it 
 was Mr. Brisk's affaire again, and a difficult one, to have us driven 
 and jolted back again in time for dejeuner. A little rest and 
 then another jolt, to see the tomb of Archimedes and Timoleon, 
 and the much more modern, but far more interesting, first church 
 of Sicily San Marziano. A well-lighted crypt it now is, in the 
 form of a Greek cross. He is said to have been contemporary 
 with the apostles, and to have received St. Paul when he spent 
 his three days here. There is a rude altar, at which St. Paul 
 is said to have ministered, and a pillar at which St. Marcian was
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 357 
 
 martyred. Are these things really true ? At any rate, it was the 
 Mother Church of Sicily, and most venerable and quaint and 
 interesting to behold. We had to rush away from it. All these 
 places are so widely scattered. We did up our bundle, had 
 some tea in the window, where we had seen the little crescent 
 of the young May moon pencil itself in the sea the night before. 
 Mr. Brisk would see us off, rushing frantically to thrust us into 
 a wrong train, and then to extricate us. How it jolted and jarred 
 us, and then went to sleep for half-an-hour at a time, but finally 
 consigned us to the station of Catania. And here we rest till 
 9.30 to-morrow. 
 
 TAORMINA, May 7. 
 
 It was well that we left this crime de la crime to the last ! We 
 thought the view over the amphitheatre and the coast, with the 
 mighty sweep of Etna in the background, was not only the most 
 magnificent view in Sicily, but the most magnificent in the 
 world ! The enchanted princesses found the prepared vision 
 almost more than they could attain to. It was beyond the moon- 
 shine magic of the Palermo arrival, and the Armida witchery of 
 the Latomia Paradise garden of Syracuse. Shall I say it was 
 beyond the shrine for heaven-ascending incense of the Palatina, 
 or the delicate intricacies of the cloisters of Monreale ? Beyond, 
 because it contained more of heaven and earth and sea, so 
 fashioned and combined by the Divine Artist as to be an ever- 
 changing, all-embracing revelation of manifold beauty. It par- 
 takes so much of infinity that one might come back and back 
 to it for years and find it always inexhaustible. We had no rich 
 tints, and hardly any breaking gleam of sun through the dove's- 
 wing feathers of clouds ; one long ray over the shoulder of Etna 
 as sunset approached. The head of Etna astonished us by 
 appearing far above in the sky, with layers and banks of cloud 
 below, and the outline curving in and out, far beneath, of the edge 
 of the sea, a peacock-green with tiny white edge seen through 
 the arches and between the chasms of the amphitheatre through 
 which we wandered. How well I can fancy'the despair of the
 
 358 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 artist of whom the custode told us. He had been for years in 
 consumption, and came here too late. Each day when he took 
 up his easel he said, " I see it was all wrong yesterday ; to-day I 
 shall do something better." And so he began again and again 
 each day, destroying the work of the day before, till one morning 
 he was too ill to come out, and died. What an epitome of life : 
 seeing the fair, unattainable ideal, and proving each day one's 
 failure, till death comes to remove us from our unfinished 
 picture ! 
 
 What a wonderful thing it was to have built a city in this 
 eagle's nest of a place in the cleft of a rock hundreds of feet 
 above the sea, at whose edge the fishermen look to us like little 
 flies, and their boats like floating olive leaves ! Our little inn is 
 on a shelf, sheer above the sea, on the precipice edge. I never 
 looked on such an expanse of sea, reaching half-way up the sky. 
 If we had been able to get into the Timeo, we should have been 
 turned partly towards Etna, and seen more than its shoulder, 
 which we strain to catch behind the large grey convent that 
 crowns another height to our right. But we said when we came 
 into our rooms, " Oh, to spend a week over this sea, and in the 
 midst of such a dome of sky ! " Since that moment almost, 
 layer upon layer of cloud has come, now above, now below, 
 curtaining away almost everything from the field of vision. And 
 the first evening in the theatre, when the custode said, " II 
 tempo fa dimoztrazione di scirocco, ma non e proprio scirocco," 
 gave me a little cold again, so that I have not been'out since. 
 
 If it may but lift for one more view it will be a boon, but if 
 not, that first evening in and on the amphitheatre was well worth 
 the expense and trouble and little drawbacks of the travel from 
 Dover to this spot ; and it has been the sixth supreme picture 
 prepared for us in Sicily. I don't the least wonder at the ladies 
 we heard of settling here, especially if the Timeo is able to 
 feed them properly, which the Bella Veduta, where we have 
 had to locate ourselves, cannot do. There are in this long 
 village street two or three very fine old houses ; whether to call 
 them Venetian or Gothic, I don't know. One, rather of the
 
 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 359 
 
 Tower construction, has a courtyard like the Bargello at Flor- 
 ence, only much smaller. An outside, time-worn staircase like 
 that ; then an archway entrance to the second storey; the 
 windows, two arches, separated by a tall, slender, marble 
 column. Some peasants are living in it, and invited us in. Work- 
 men were restoring one large room, with frescoed roof, but 
 fresco evidently much later than the fourteenth-century palazzo 
 itself. They said, " le due signore " had taken it, for either a 
 church or a hospital. Should I not have loved to have bought 
 it, and had it reverently restored? To-morrow we wend our 
 way to Messina, and next day close our Sicilian chapter. I 
 dare say, on leaving Proserpine's mystic isle, I shall not be 
 tempted to write you such long descriptions, and it will be a little 
 holiday for you. 
 
 LA CAVA, Sunday, May 12. 
 
 How delightful, at the end of a long journey, to find just 
 such a resting-place as one longs for cool, quiet, with views of 
 green hills from the windows, and, still more sweet, a letter in a 
 dear handwriting, seeming to give a smile of welcome; at any 
 rate, betokening that the place has been prepared for one by the 
 thought of the one who has sent forth a messenger before one's 
 face. It was quite a relief to hear of your truly summer days, 
 and to trust that lilacs, and even laburnums, now are bursting 
 forth around you. It seemed so wrong that we should 
 have all summer beauties while you were kept in winter's 
 clutch. 
 
 I cannot bear to feel that Sicily and its enchantments are 
 over ! Only fancy its witcheries when I tell you that we seem 
 dropped into ordinary life, though in May, in the loveliest parts 
 of Southern Italy. It had such a distinctive character of its 
 own, and that took hold of us. Yet this is greener, and the 
 people are sympathetic, much more so than the Trinacrians ; 
 and the airs are softer. But we know even a more beautiful face 
 does not drive that of the more beloved one away. Yet I will 
 not say Sicily is more beloved than Italy. But in some sense it
 
 360 LETTERS OF EMELIA RUSSELL GURNEY 
 
 has a more engrossing and marked individuality, and one less 
 entangled with memories. As George Herbert says 
 
 " We say amiss this or that is, 
 Thy Word is all if we could spell." 
 
 Our journey from Taormina to Messina was all too short. 
 And finally, at 3.30, we were once more in a Sicilian omnibus, 
 and then had to step from the quay on to the little steamer with 
 its prow towards Italy, and felt that magic was undoing by every 
 paddle movement across those waters, and that the enchanted 
 princesses were shimmering away, and the two old ladies in 
 black were coming to life again. 
 
 THE END 
 
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