‘My dear Friend,—I have answered very few of the many kind letters my friends have written; the expressions of sympathy have been most general; and I hear that no such event has been ever more deplored. Nor is this wonderful. There are many who love me—full as many who knew how to love and admire him who has thus suddenly, thus almost mysteriously, been taken away. But this is the second blow that has fallen on me in almost the same circumstances, and just when the memory of one had been recalled and rendered familiar to all by Tennyson’s remarkable volume, the tribute of undying friendship, we are called on to lament a calamity not less bitter, and very similar in all respects. Yet not in all, alas! for one left behind him the living image of his talents and virtues, and seemed by the mercy of providence as it were restored in another person—while there is now nothing to fill the gap, nothing to take off from the solitude of my last days, or if I have still a blessing left that prevents solitude, nothing to preserve my name and memory when I go home and am no more seen. But I will not dwell on this.
‘You, as I have said, are one of those few friends whose friendship I cannot leave unnoticed. Of you I thought often during my absence, and heard very little. It was a great gratification to see the date of Brighton on your letter.
‘I hear now favourable accounts of your progress,
| 380 | ROGERS AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES |
‘My dearest daughter has borne two lessons with resigned piety—a steady principle in her heart. She has been inspired not to think this world a home of mere pleasure.
