An article on the Cretan insurrection, printed while I was still in the island, had led the way to an acquaintance with Froude, in whose magazine it appeared, and I had been put on the staff of the “Daily News,” which had printed a contribution on the Greek question as a leading article; so that, on the whole, the venture did not seem too rash for a man who never looked far ahead for good fortune.  My friendship with Froude lasted as long as he lived.  He was a warm and sincere friend, always ready with word or deed to help one who needed it, and one of the men for whom I retain the warmest feeling of all I knew at this epoch of my life.  In New York I had made an arrangement with Dr. Holland to hold the literary agency for “The Century” (then “Scribner’s”) for England, and on returning to London we took a small furnished house at Notting Hill Way, where our daughter Effie was born.  In the following spring we moved out to Clapham Common, to be near the parents of my wife, and in the comparative quiet of that then delightful neighborhood we gave our experiment full scope.  The life as a literary life was ideal, but as a practical thing it failed.  Here I had the pleasure of extending hospitality to Emerson on his way to Egypt, and Lowell on the way to Madrid.  To make the acquaintance of Lowell we had Professor and Mrs. Max Müller to meet him at dinner, and Tom Taylor was of the company, he living as a near neighbor.

But Russie’s condition was a shadow over my life, growing deeper every day.  Though he had been discharged from Boston as incurable, we put him under the care of one of the best of English surgeons, and one of the kindest-hearted men I have ever known, the late Mr. John Marshall, one of the warm and constant friends I had made through my relations with Rossetti, of whom Marshall was a strong admirer.  Though his charges were modified to fit our estate, they aggregated, with all his moderation, to a sum which I could ill support; but to save, or even prolong Russie’s life, I would have made any sacrifice.  He was then not far from nine, and, though crippled by his disease, with his once beautiful face haggard with pain and no longer recognizable by those who had known him in his infancy, he was to me still the same,—­a dear and loving child, the companion of my fortunes at their worst; and his devotion to me was the chief thing of his life.  I had carried him in my arms at every change of vehicle in all the journeys from Athens to Boston and from Boston to London again, and to him I was all the world; to me he was like a nursling to its mother, the first thought of every day, an ever-present care, and his long struggle with death was an inseparable sadness in my existence.  I remarked to Lowell one day that I feared he would die, and Lowell replied, “I should be afraid he would not die.”  The seeming cruelty of the expression struck me like a sentence of death, and momentarily chilled my feeling towards Lowell; but the incident made me understand some things in life as I could not have otherwise understood them, enabling me to take a larger view of our individual sorrows.  There is no doubt that to Russie’s sufferings and death I owe a large part of my experience of the spiritual life, and especially a comprehension of the secret of the mother’s heart, so rarely understood by one of the other sex.