I have not been able to write to you until now. I have lived in hope
that Kate and I might be able to run down to see you and yours for a
day, before our design for enforcing the Government to make Knowles the
first custodian of the Shakespeare house should come off. But I am so
perpetually engaged in drilling the forces, that I see no hope of making
a pleasant expedition to the Isle of Wight until about the twentieth.
Then I shall hope to do so for one day. But of this I will advise you
further, in due course.
My doubts about the house you speak of are twofold, First, I could not
leave town so soon as May, having affairs to arrange for a sick sister.
And secondly, I fear Bonchurch is not sufficiently bracing for my
chickens, who thrive best in breezy and cool places. This has set me
thinking, sometimes of the Yorkshire coast, sometimes of Dover. I would
not have the house at Bonchurch reserved for me, therefore. But if it
should be empty, we will go and look at it in a body. I reserve the more
serious part of my letter until the last, my dear White, because it
comes from the bottom of my heart. None of your friends have thought and
spoken oftener of you and Mrs. White than we have these many weeks past.
I should have written to you, but was timid of intruding on your sorrow.
What you say, and the manner in which you tell me I am connected with it
in your recollection of your dear child, now among the angels of God,
gives me courage to approach your grief--to say what sympathy we have
felt with it, and how we have not been unimaginative of these deep
sources of consolation to which you have had recourse. The traveller
who journeyed in fancy from this world to the next was struck to the
heart to find the child he had lost, many years before, building him a
tower in heaven. Our blessed Christian hopes do not shut out the belief
of love and remembrance still enduring there, but irradiate it and make
it sacred. Who should know that better than you, or who more deeply feel
the touching truths and comfort of that story in the older book, where,
when the bereaved mother is asked, "Is it well with the child?" she
answers, "It _is_ well."
God be with you. Kate and her sister desire their kindest love to
yourself and Mrs. White, in which I heartily join.
Being ever, my dear White,
Your affectionate Friend.
[Sidenote: Mr. W. C. Macready.]