To me your mother has become more and more an inspiration—­a kind of tower of cheerful courage and strength.  By her steadfast mental and moral bravery, by the sunshine she has been beneath the heavy clouds that have been sweeping over her, she has made one ashamed of the small things that troubled him and rebuked his petty discontent and repining.  No one can ever be told how much I both have honoured and loved her for the very greatness of her noble spirit.

    Rev. Stopford A. Brooke to Lady Agatha Russell

    January 18, 1898

How little I thought when I saw Lady Russell last [118] that I should see her no more!  She looked so full of life, and her interest in all things was so keen and eager that I never for a moment thought her old or linked to her lite the imagination of death.  It is a sore loss to lose one so fresh, so alive, so ardent in all good and beautiful things, and it must leave you in a great loneliness....  How well, how nobly she lived her life!  It shames us to think of all she did, and yet it kindles us so much that we lose our shame in its inspiration.

[118] On October 31, 1897.

    Mr. Frederic Harrison to Lady Agatha Russell

    February 16, 1898

...The news of the great sorrow which has fallen on you came upon my wife and myself as a dreadful surprise....  Over and over again I tried to say to the world outside all that I felt of the noble nature and the grand life of your mother, but every time I tried my pen fell from my hand.  I was too sad to think or write; full only of the sense of the friend whom I had lost, and of the great example she has left to our generation.  She has fulfilled her mission on earth, and all those who have known her—­and they are very many—­will all their lives be sustained by the memory of her courage, dignity, and truth.  She had so much of the character of the Roman matron—­a type we know so little nowadays—­who, being perfect in all the beauty of domestic life, yet even more conspicuously raised the public life of her time.  I shall never, while I have life, forget the occasions this last summer and autumn when I had been able to see more of her than ever before, and especially that last hour I spent with her, when you were away at Weston, the memory of which now comes back to me like a death-bed parting.  To have known her was to ride above the wretched party politics to which our age is condemned.  I cannot bear to think of all that this bereavement means to you.  It must be, and will remain, irreparable.

    Mr. James Bryce [119] to Lady Agatha Russell

    March 10, 1898

Your mother always seemed to me one of the most noble and beautiful characters I had ever known—­there was in her so much gentleness, so much firmness, so much earnestness, so ardent a love for all high things and all the best causes.  One always came away from seeing her struck afresh by these charms of nature, and feeling the better for having seen how old age had in no way lessened her interest in the progress of the world, her faith in the triumph of good.

[119] The Right Hon. James Bryce, British Ambassador at Washington.