try to picture their meeting in the Fox How drawing-room: Matthew
Arnold, tall, handsome, in the rich opening of his life, his first
poetic honors thick upon him, looking with a half-critical,
half-humorous eye at the famous little lady whom Miss Martineau had
brought to call upon his mother; and beside him that small, intrepid
figure, on which the worst storms of life had already beaten, which was
but five short years from its own last rest. I doubt whether, face to
face, they would ever have made much of each other. But the sister who
could write of a sister's death as Charlotte wrote, in the letter that
every lover of great prose ought to have by heart--

Emily suffers no more from pain or weakness now, she never will
suffer more in this world. She is gone, after a hard, short
conflict.... We are very calm at present, why should we be
otherwise? The anguish of seeing her suffer is over; the
spectacle of the pains of death is gone; the funeral day is
past. We feel she is at peace. No need now to tremble for the
hard frost and the keen wind. _Emily does not feel them_.--

must have stretched out spiritual hands to Matthew Arnold, had she lived
to read "A Southern Night"--that loveliest, surely, of all laments of
brother for brother.




CHAPTER III


THE FAMILY OF FOX HOW