Reference
X955/1/142
Title
To Mrs Sarah Colenutt
Scope and Content
The Cottage,Groombridge,Kent
My dear friend
Will you send me a word to say how you and the children are, especially Charley? We are all well, but the absence of sunlight during the last six months has been depressing.
I have nearly finished my Dorothy Wordsworth letters in the Athenaeum (1) . Next Saturday will perhaps conclude them. You see most of the weekly papers, I think. I remember that they were brought home on
Saturday always from an Institute or Reading Room. In to-days Speaker you will find a paper of mine on Galileo (2) which may interest you. I was pressed to write something, and the new Life of Galileo (3) has
been quite a discovery to me. I don’t make, though many discoveries now, and find it more profitable to occupy myself with those already made. A Roman Catholic friend, (4) however who has been here to see me has been an attractive study to me. She is cousin to Rose La Touche, whom Ruskin wanted to marry. She is an able woman, and her Biblical criticism is much more liberal that that of most of the English clergy, although she is very devout. The power which we possess of combining apparent opposites in our minds is singular, but I am quite sure that this lady is quite sincere and sees no contradiction in what she believes. I have been introduced at Groombridge to more Church of England parsons than I knew before in all my life, and a sillier set of creatures I cannot conceive. The world in which they live is the merest nutshell. It would have amused you to hear one of them talk about his sect as he did to me. It was of course the sole Catholic Communion. Everybody outside it, all the Roman Catholics, Dissenters, to say nothing of Mohammedans etc. etc. Were mere contemptible schismatics – the pride, the patronage of the wretched little mortal would have been unendurable were they not so comical.
I have just been round the garden. Once more the snowdrops and crocuses, once more another spring is bursting. I trust it will bring you another message of hope and peace.
My beloved grandson Bobbie, one of the brightest boys that ever gladdened a grandfather, has this minute come to spend Sunday with me. His mother put him on the train and here he is.
Ever affectionately
W. Hale White
(1) WHW prepared a selection of Dorothy Wordsworth letters for publication but it was rejected on the ground that the passages relating to Coleridge’s degeneration might be offensive to the poet’s descendants.
Selections from the letters were published in The Athenaeum, January – February 1904 ( p. 239, MacLean.)
(2) How can we tell? Reprinted in Last Pages from a Journal
(3) by J.J. Fahie – John Joseph Fahie : Galileo, his life and works. 1903.John Murray.
(4) A note refers to LTF page 236 where the name is Miss Florence Mary E Bishop, afterwards Mrs. Hubert Burke. 20 Feb 1904
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