_Lady Russell to Mr. Rollo Russell_

PEMBROKE LODGE, _January_ 14, 1892

... Most truly do you say that, while we can shelter ourselves from
the demands that assail our physical being, no defence has been
found against the bitter blasts which batter against our mental and
spiritual structure--no _defence_, only endurance, in hope and
faith and endeavour after Marcus Aurelius's "Equanimitas," and the
knowledge that the higher man's mental and moral capacity the
greater is his capacity for suffering.... And nobody has shown more
than you do in "Psalms of the West" that sorrow is not
_all_ sorrow, but has a heavenly sacredness that gives
strength to bear its burden "in quietness and confidence" to the
end. How entirely I feel with you that this has been a glorious
century. Not all the evil and the misery and the vice and the
meanness and pettinesses which abound on every side, as we look
around, can blind me to the blessed truth that the eyes of mankind
have been opening to see and to deplore these things, and to give
their lives to the study of their causes, and the discovery and
practice of means to put an end to them. The wonderful intellectual
strides, which my long life enables me not only to be aware of, but
to remember as they have one by one been made, are in close
connection with this moral and religious development; and all these
together will, I believe, raise the education of the people
(already so far above the standard of fifty, much more of a hundred
years ago) to something of the kind to which you look
forward--"more high, more wide, more various, more poetic, more
inspiring, more full of principles and less full of facts "--a
consummation devoutly to be wished.

PEMBROKE LODGE, _June_ 22, 1892

Day of much weakness. The sense of failing increases rapidly. May
the short time that remains to me make me less unfit to meet my
God. Oh, that I could begin life again! How different it would be
from what has been. I have had everything to help me upward; joys
and sorrows, encouragement and disappointment, the love and example
of my dearest husband and children in our daily companionship and
communion, the never-failing and precious affection and help of
brothers, sisters, and friends--and yet my life seems all a failure
when I think what it might have been.