The ladies to whom these letters were written have been, throughout
their brightly tranquil lives, at once sources and loadstones of all
good to the village in which they had their home, and to all loving
people who cared for the village and its vale and secluded lake, and
whatever remained in them or around of the former peace, beauty, and
pride of English Shepherd Land.
Sources they have been of good, like one of its mountain springs, ever
to be found at need. They did not travel; they did not go up to London
in its season; they did not receive idle visitors to jar or waste
their leisure in the waning year. The poor and the sick could find
them always; or rather, they watched for and prevented all poverty and
pain that care or tenderness could relieve or heal. Loadstones they
were, as steadily bringing the light of gentle and wise souls about
them as the crest of their guardian mountain gives pause to the
morning clouds: in themselves, they were types of perfect womanhood in
its constant happiness, queens alike of their own hearts and of a
Paradise in which they knew the names and sympathized with the spirits
of every living creature that God had made to play therein, or to
blossom in its sunshine or shade.
They had lost their dearly-loved younger sister, Margaret, before I
knew them. Mary and Susie, alike in benevolence, serenity, and
practical judgment, were yet widely different, nay, almost contrary,
in tone and impulse of intellect. Both of them capable of
understanding whatever women should know, the elder was yet chiefly
interested in the course of immediate English business, policy, and
progressive science, while Susie lived an aerial and enchanted life,
possessing all the highest joys of imagination, while she yielded to
none of its deceits, sicknesses, or errors. She saw, and felt, and
believed all good, as it had ever been, and was to be, in the reality
and eternity of its goodness, with the acceptance and the hope of a
child; the least things were treasures to her, and her moments fuller
of joy than some people's days.
What she had been to me, in the days and years when other friendship
has been failing, and others' "loving, mere folly," the reader will
enough see from these letters, written certainly for her only, but
from which she has permitted my Master of the Rural Industries at
Loughrigg, Albert Fleming, to choose what he thinks, among the
tendrils of clinging thought, and mossy cups for dew in the Garden of
Herbs where Love is, may be trusted to the memorial sympathy of the
readers of "Frondes Agrestes."