I never for a
moment thought her old or linked to her lite the imagination of
death. It is a sore loss to lose one so fresh, so alive, so ardent
in all good and beautiful things, and it must leave you in a great
loneliness.... How well, how nobly she lived her life! It shames us
to think of all she did, and yet it kindles us so much that we lose
our shame in its inspiration.

[118] On October 31, 1897.

_Mr. Frederic Harrison to Lady Agatha Russell_

_February_ 16, 1898

...The news of the great sorrow which has fallen on you came upon
my wife and myself as a dreadful surprise.... Over and over again I
tried to say to the world outside all that I felt of the noble
nature and the grand life of your mother, but every time I tried my
pen fell from my hand. I was too sad to think or write; full only
of the sense of the friend whom I had lost, and of the great
example she has left to our generation. She has fulfilled her
mission on earth, and all those who have known her--and they are
very many--will all their lives be sustained by the memory of her
courage, dignity, and truth. She had so much of the character of
the Roman matron--a type we know so little nowadays--who, being
perfect in all the beauty of domestic life, yet even more
conspicuously raised the public life of her time. I shall never,
while I have life, forget the occasions this last summer and autumn
when I had been able to see more of her than ever before, and
especially that last hour I spent with her, when you were away at
Weston, the memory of which now comes back to me like a death-bed
parting. To have known her was to ride above the wretched party
politics to which our age is condemned. I cannot bear to think of
all that this bereavement means to you. It must be, and will
remain, irreparable.

_Mr. James Bryce [119] to Lady Agatha Russell_

_March_ 10, 1898

Your mother always seemed to me one of the most noble and beautiful
characters I had ever known--there was in her so much gentleness,
so much firmness, so much earnestness, so ardent a love for all
high things and all the best causes. One always came away from
seeing her struck afresh by these charms of nature, and feeling the
better for having seen how old age had in no way lessened her
interest in the progress of the world, her faith in