Scope and Content
9 High Wickham, Hastings
My dear friend
It was very pleasant to see your handwriting again. I wish there were chance of some more this dark miserable Sabbath morning. We have had the strangest weather here this month, little sun, wet, and driving
grey cloud which has shut out the blessed celestial light altogether. Sunday is a day on which I cannot endure gloom: if fact I never care much for Sundays and am glad when they depart. We do not observe
them in any particular way, but the behaviour of the world outside is contagious.
As for stars, I don’t know, but they may have gone out altogether. I have been waiting to catch one particular star for three weeks, but in vain. One day, however, we had some pure sunshine, and as I had a spectroscope lent me, I managed to see for the first time in my life what are called the prominences, that is to say, the solar eruptions, enormous masses of ruddy hydrogen flame shooting some seventy or eighty thousand miles above the sun.s edge. I shall never forget that spectacle.
I have heard once or twice from my cousin William lately. He has been in London and wanted me to stay with him at his friend, Mr. Jones’s house. It was very kind of both of them to ask me, but I could not go.
Mr. Jones’s ways are so different to my own (bed about 2 a.m., breakfast at 10.30 a.m. or 11, and endless distraction) that I dared not venture.
Molly and I start on our travels about the middle of next month. We go northwards, of course, and perhaps may extend our journey to see my cousins and my friends in Edinburgh. One our way we may accept an
invitation to – where do you think? – to One Ash, Rochdale, John Bright.s (1) old house!. We have learnt to know his eldest son, J.A. Bright, the present member for Birmingham. I should very much like, as Molly will probably be in London a short time, to call at Ryde, were it only for a few hours. I suppose I should find you at home?
I have now nearly finished a re-reading of Carlyle’s (2) Frederick (3) Every time I take up Carlyle, a new Carlyle is revealed to me, and I may say a greater. There are some men who stand for that which is definite;
for a particular set of truths, or for a particular aspect of human life; and however interesting or important these truths or that aspect may be, we feel that their representatives are limited and we soon exhaust them.
Carlyle, however, belongs to a different order and is infinite. The Frederick is to me the great modern epic, the Iliad of a man who was driven into the most desperate extremities; so desperate that destruction seemed absolutely certain, but who did not yield and was finally victorious. That unquenchableness is what has drawn Carlyle to him; and what more precious doctrine is there, even for us poor work-a-day creatures? My enthusiasm for Carlyle grows as I grow older, taking into account the incapacity for enthusiasm which accompanies old age.
Oh, how I wish you and Richard would come here, and that I could show you Winchelsea and some of the wonderful old houses in Sussex! I never saw a county so rich in lovely architecture. Why won’t you.
Love from Molly and myself to both of you and the children.
Ever faithfully and affectionately
W. Hale White
1) Bright, John (1811–1889), politician,
2) Carlyle, Thomas (1795–1881), author, biographer, and historian,
3) Frederick – biography of Frederick the Great of Prussian Vol 1 & 2 1858