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[227] and by the hearty affection of your letter. It would do me more harm to be silent towards you than it possibly can to write these few lines. Few strangers would recognize the face before me as the same that hangs over my study chimney-piece,—the portrait I brought with me from America in 1836; but I see the identity, and am rejoiced to know your later aspect,—the face that looked in upon me at Tynemouth being between the two.1 I believe your decision about our not meeting is the right one, much as we should have wished otherwise. We must take it as one of the trials of the illness, to be accepted cheerfully.

If you should come this way, after all, it would be a true kindness in you to call at Fox How, where the Arnolds will be at home for some time to come. The eldest son once told me2 that he remembered the impression made on him in childhood, one winter evening early in 1839, by his father's voice in reading to Mrs. A. ‘The Martyr Age,’ then just out in the Westminster Review. The boy was too young to enter into the story, but the deep emotion of his father's voice thrilled him, and that has been the association with your name in his mind ever since. Then, again, you know W. E. Forster is the husband of Dr. Arnold's eldest daughter; and you can be in no doubt how he feels towards you. I do hope you are seeing him in London, in spite of his anxious business in Parliament. . . .

My dear friend, there is one word more that I must say. I value unspeakably your sympathy, and your sense of my sympathy, in the great interest which has occupied so much of our lives; but it leads you to overrate very much any sacrifices I have made or risked. I will not pretend to deny that what I have done has been of some use; but what I have suffered is so little that I am ashamed to hear of it from a confessor like you.

It was only repute and comfort for one single year in the United States that I risked, and so much evil-speaking since as angry people chose to utter,—quite harmlessly to me, as long as the sea rolled between them and me. You, of all men, least need to be told how harmless the slanders and scoldings of strangers are; and I don't know that they have done me any harm. I certainly never cared for them, at home or abroad. . . .

I do not suffer very much, as long as we can preserve perfect quiet; and we have no cares or troubles in this house. All about me is love and peace.

I am your affectionate old friend,


1 Ante, 2.395.

2 Matthew Arnold.

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