mighty work he did for his country in the forty years preceding the Home
Rule split can only thank the Powers "that hold the broad Heaven" for
the part which the passion of his Christian faith, the eagerness of his
love for letters--for the Homer and the Dante he knew by heart--played
in refreshing and sustaining so great a soul. I remember returning,
shaken and uplifted, through the April air, to the house where my mother
lay in death; and among my old papers lies a torn fragment of a letter
thirty years old, which I began to write to Mr. Gladstone a few days
later, and was too shy to send.

This morning [says the letter, written from Fox How, on the day of
my mother's funeral] we laid my dear Mother to rest in her grave
among the mountains, and this afternoon I am free to think a little
over what has befallen me personally and separately during this past
week. It is not that I wish to continue our argument--quite the
contrary. As I walked home from Keble on Monday morning, I felt it a
hard fate that I should have been arguing, rather than listening....
Argument, perhaps, was inevitable, but none the less I felt
afterward as though there were something incongruous and unfitting
in it. In a serious discussion it seemed to me right to say plainly
what I felt and believed; but if in doing so I have given pain, or
expressed myself on any point with a too great trenchancy and
confidence, please believe that I regret it very sincerely. I shall
always remember our talks. If consciousness lasts "beyond these
voices"--my inmost hope as well as yours--we shall know of all these
things. Till then I cherish the belief that we are not so far apart
as we seem.

But there the letter abruptly ended, and was never sent. I probably
shrank from the added emotion of sending it, and I found it again the