mber_ 10, 1874

We have been going on in a happy humdrum way since I last
wrote--humdrum as regards events, and all the happier that it
should be so--but with no lack of delightful occupation and
delightful conversation, and that intimate interchange of thought
which makes home life so much fuller than society life. However, it
would not do to go on long cut off from the world and its ways and
from the blessing of the society of real friends, which unluckily
can't be had without intermixture of wearisome acquaintances.

Rollo's reader is reading Molesworth's "History of England for the
last Forty Years," and Agatha takes advantage and listens, and I
read it by myself, and as your father knows it all without reading
it and likes to be talked to about it, we have been living a good
deal in the great events of that period, and we find it a relief to
turn from the mazy though deeply interesting flood of metaphysics
which this age pours upon the world, to facts and events which also
have their philosophy, and a deep one too.

PEMBROKE LODGE, December 28, 1874

Finished "Life of Prince Albert." It is seldom that a revelation of
the inner life of Princes would raise the mind to a higher region
than before--although we all know that they _have_ an inner
and a real life through the tinsels and the trappings in which we
see them. But this book can hardly fail to raise any mind, warm any
heart, brace any soul. Would that we all, in all conditions of
life, kept truth and duty ever before us, as he did even amid the
pettinesses of a Court--the solemn trifles of etiquette which would
have stifled the nobleness of a less noble nature. Would that all
Princes had a Stockmar, [88] but there are not many Stockmars in
the world; if there were, there would soon not be many Princes of
the kind which now abounds, beings cut off from equality,
friendship, freedom, by what in our supreme folly we call the
"necessary" pomp and fetters of a Court. Noble as Prince Albert
was, those things did him harm, and as Lady Lyttelton says, nobody
but the organ knew what was in him.... The Queen appears in a
charming light--truthfulness, humility, unbounded love for him.

[88] "One of the best friends of the Queen and the Prince Consort
was Baron Stockmar. This old nobleman, who had known the English
Court since the d