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  My dear friend

Thank you—thank you! for several kind remembrences of you in periodicals and for your letter & postal, all of which bridge over the great separating waters of the Atlantic. Our Alys will have before this seen you, I trust, and given us a picture of how you fare in these days. Having got through the murderous heats of the Camden summer, I greatly   hope that you will have a cheerful winter. I would that I could look in on you now & then in your wilderness of books & papers! With much to bring pleasure to you from far & near—the hearty tribute of reverence and affection from those whose lives you have helped to illuminate & cheer, yet I know that there must be mixed with it physical & mental heart sinkings when the unsolved, unsolveable problems of sin, pain, sorrow & the unrevealed future   must press upon spirits more or less controlled by physical depression. As Keeble​ Keble​ tells us—"the nearest heart & next our own, knows not one half the reasons why we smile or sigh"—and down in the depths of unrevealable consciousness, the problems are fought out—alas! with what small results of certitude. Not a few of us have met great audiences with bold words while the depths of purgatory were being stirred up within us!

 

Well, dear Comrade, we are helpless—we must go on with the deepest problems unsolved, & face pain, grief, loneliness, death bravely as we can. From the condition of my heart death is a daily probability to my conciousness​ consciousness​ & I face all my responsibilities in the sense that it may be for me the last time. And yet I find that I can do it cheerfully & can plan & work as though I had a century before me.

You have many, many friends among the young & earnest in whose unsoiled vigorous natures your bracing, tonic words  find a quick lively response.

In our country home at Haslemere—close, by the way, to Tennysons home—are many highly cultivated people who love you. Alys will tell you how like paradise our home there is—and how often we have wished that we might have you there to drive around the beautiful hills, two thirds in woods & undergrowth for miles. I had hoped to guide you across the ocean, but I fear that we may not now hope for that.

 

Logan is bravely & industriously doing his work at Oxford. He shows clear signs of talent but is not in haste to use his pen for the public. Alys has the courage to go alone across the sea to finish her college course & get B. A. added to her name. Mary is under a nervous break-down—not suffering much but compelled to great quiet. Her two years old "Ray" is all sunshine to us. Her husband is pushed forward on the top wave of the new Radical politics—and I am a foundered horse at grass quietly waiting—while always

Yours affectionately R. Pearsall Smith