Reference
X955/1/112
Title
To Mrs Sarah Colenutt
Date free text
16 July 1899
Production date
From: 1899 To: 1899
Scope and Content
5 High Wickham, Hastings
My dear friend
I was just about to write to you when your note came, for I wanted to know how you and your husband were. I am very glad to hear that you are both well. I am also glad to learn that the great-grandchild and the
mother are prospering. As to myself, I lead the idlest of lives. There is a woman here who lets out a shabby old chaise and an equally shabby old pony who goes at the rate of five miles an hour, the charge being
about 7s 6d a day. In this vehicle, which would be a scandal in Union Street, Molly and I have been visiting some of the exquisite Sussex villages which lie remote from excursionists in this corner of England. Last week we drove over to Northiam, through hopfields and most umbrageous lanes. Under the old oak on Northiam Green Queen Elizabeth is reported to have sat before dinner and to have taken off her shoe, for what purpose history does not inform us. The drawback to these jaunts lately has been the drought. It is pitiable to see how parched the earth is, and the failure of the water this year will be most serious. If all the springs and wells do not run dry we are going to place called Windmill Hill next Friday for a few weeks, in order to escape the worst of the tripper season. Windmill Hill is about 14 miles from Hastings, between Herstmonceux and Ashburnham. I have amused myself lately with writing a short preface and some notes to a curious little volume which my friend Mr. Dykes Campbell left behind him unpublished. It is a facsimile of some Coleridge MSS. Of no interest whatever to the ordinary reader, by Mrs. Campbell wished it to be issued and I undertook the necessary explanations. (1) I do not suppose a dozen copies will be sold. If it had possessed any value other than that it possesses other than for a biographer or editor I would have sent you one. As it is, I am sure you would not think it worth the postage.
My Willie, I hope, is better. He has certainly increased in weight and his cough is less. I do sometimes think that he would recover if he had less work, but he is busier and busier every day and he has to travel so much. It is in his favour that the disease was caught and not inherited and that he lives in the light of the great discovery that the remedies for consumption are open air and food. His windows are never shut and
most certainly he does not increase his colds thereby. What a change from the old days! I remember a whole family in Bedford dying unnecessarily from consumption. Every door and crevice was sealed, as far as it could be; and the air in the bedrooms was sickening and the children all herded with one another.
I have been reading the Bible through again – an hour daily before breakfast. I read it through once in every two or three years and always find it profitable beyond almost any other book. I have also been reading
Wesley's Journal , a most extraordinary compound of superstitious folly, wisdom, extravagance, and shrewdest common-sense. What a man he was; what a ruler of men! Whole pages of it are almost unintelligible Methodist rant, but it is redeemed continually by such passages as these-
'The Devil once infused into my mind a temptation that perhaps I did not believe what I was preaching. “Well then,” said I, “I will preach till I do'.
Again- I feel and grieve; but, by the grace of God, I fret at nothing.
Wesley was, so I have always thought, a really great man. He had true religious insight, he was self-denying as any apostle or medieval saint, giving all his goods to feed the poor, and he had a genius, almost Napoleonic, for command; but he was born in a bad time when the proper development of such gifts as his was impossible. Caught up in into the strange eighteenth-century element of ecclesiastical lying, and
struggling against it, he emerged imperfect as we behold him.
Farewell for the present. Molly and I send our best love to both of you.
Ever affectionately
W. Hale White
(1) Coleridge, Facsimile Reproductions of the Proofs and MSS of some of the poems. Edited by J. Dykes Campbell, with Preface and Notes by W. Hale White 1899.
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