Doctor Arnold's eldest daughter, Jane Arnold, afterward Mrs. W.E.
Forster, my godmother, stands out for me on the tapestry of the past, as
one of the noblest personalities I have ever known. She was twenty-one
when her father died, and she had been his chief companion among his
children for years before death took him from her. He taught her Latin
and Greek, he imbued her with his own political and historical
interests, and her ardent Christian faith answered to his own. After his
death she was her mother's right hand at Fox How; and her letters to her
brothers--to my father, especially, since he was longest and farthest
away--show her quick and cultivated mind, and all the sweetness of her
nature. We hear of her teaching a younger brother Latin and Greek; she
goes over to Miss Martineau on the other side of the valley to translate
some German for that busy woman; she reads Dante beside her mother, when
the rest of the family have gone to bed; she sympathizes passionately
with Mazzini and Garibaldi; and every week she walks over Loughrigg
through fair weather and foul, summer and winter, to teach in a night
school at Skelwith. Then the young Quaker manufacturer, William Forster,
appears on the scene, and she falls happily and completely in love. Her
letters to the brother in New Zealand become, in a moment, all joy and
ardor, and nothing could be prettier than the account, given by one of
the sisters, of the quiet wedding in Rydal Chapel, the family breakfast,
the bride's simple dress and radiant look, Matthew Arnold giving his
sister away--with the great fells standing sentinel. And there exists a
delightful unpublished letter by Harriet Martineau which gives some idea
of the excitement roused in the quiet Ambleside valley by Jane Arnold's
engagement to the tall Yorkshireman who came from surroundings so
different from the academic and scholarly world in which the Arnolds had
been brought up.