Queen Victoria to Lady Russell

    WINDSOR CASTLE, July 3, 1874

DEAREST LADY RUSSELL,—­Your two sad and touching letters have affected me deeply, and I thank you much for writing to me.  It is too dreadful that the dear little girl whose bright eyes and look of health I so well remember at Pembroke Lodge should also be taken.  May God support your poor unhappy son, for whom your heart must bleed, and whose agony of grief and bereavement seems almost too much to bear.  But if he will but trust our Father in Heaven, and feel all is sent in love, though he may have to go through months and years of the bitterest sufferings, and of anguish indescribable, he will find peace and resignation and comfort come at last—­when it seems farthest. I know this myself.  For you, dear Lady Russell and dear Lord Russell, I do feel so deeply.  Your trials have been so great lately....  I shall be really grateful if you would write to me again to say how Lord Russell bears this new blow, and how your poor son Amberley is.  Agatha, who is so devoted a daughter, will, I am sure, do all she can now to help and comfort you, but she will be deeply distressed herself.  And poor dear Lady Clarendon is dying I fear, and poor Emily Russell only just confined, and unable to go and see her.  It is dreadful.

    With fervent prayers that your health may not suffer, and that you
    may be mercifully supported.

    Ever yours affectionately,

    V.R.

    Lord Russell to Lady Minto

    PEMBROKE LODGE, July 3, 1874

MY DEAR NINA,—­We are struck down by the death of my dear pet, Rachel, who was taken from us to stay with her parents at Ravenscroft.  It was but too natural that Kate should wish to have her child with her, but the event is heart-breaking—­such a darling, so bright, so pretty.

      “Elle a dure ce que durent les roses,
       L’espace d’un matin.”

    I am always touched by those French verses, and now I apply them
    tearfully.

    Ever yours affectionately,

    RUSSELL

In the summer of 1874 Lord Russell took Aldworth, Tennyson’s beautiful home near Haslemere, where they remained for some months.

    Lady Russell to Lord Amberley

    ALDWORTH, HASLEMERE, November 10, 1874

We have been going on in a happy humdrum way since I last wrote—­humdrum as regards events, and all the happier that it should be so—­but with no lack of delightful occupation and delightful conversation, and that intimate interchange of thought which makes home life so much fuller than society life.  However, it would not do to go on long cut off from the world and its ways and from the blessing of the society of real friends, which unluckily can’t be had without intermixture of wearisome acquaintances.