* * * * *

[Tuesday.]

I should have written to you before, if I had had one word of hope to say; but I have not.  She grows daily weaker.  The physician’s opinion was expressed too obscurely to be of use.  He sent some medicine, which she would not take.  Moments so dark as these I have never known.  I pray for God’s support to us all.  Hitherto He has granted it.

* * * * *

21 Dec. 1848.

Emily suffers no more from pain or weakness now.  She never will suffer more in this world.  She is gone, after a hard, short conflict.  She died on Tuesday, the very day I wrote to you.  I thought it very possible she might be with us still for weeks; and a few hours afterwards, she was in eternity.  Yes; there is no Emily in time or on earth now.  Yesterday we put her poor, wasted, mortal frame quietly under the church pavement.  We are very calm at present.  Why should we be otherwise?  The anguish of seeing her suffer is over; the spectacle of the pains of death is gone by; the funeral day is past.  We feel she is at peace.  No need now to tremble for the hard frost and the keen wind.  Emily does not feel them.  She died in a time of promise.  We saw her taken from life in its prime.  But it is God’s will, and the place where she is gone is better than that she has left.

God has sustained me, in a way that I marvel at, through such agony as I had not conceived.  I now look at Anne, and wish she were well and strong; but she is neither; nor is papa.  Could you now come to us for a few days?  I would not ask you to stay long.  Write and tell me if you could come next week, and by what train.  I would try to send a gig for you to Keighley.  You will, I trust, find us tranquil.  Try to come.  I never so much needed the consolation of a friend’s presence.  Pleasure, of course, there would be none for you in the visit, except what your kind heart would teach you to find in doing good to others.

To MR. G. SMITH

Thackeray and ’Esmond’

14 Feb. 1852.

MY DEAR SIR,

It has been a great delight to me to read Mr. Thackeray’s work; and I so seldom now express my sense of kindness that, for once, you must permit me, without rebuke, to thank you for a pleasure so rare and special.  Yet I am not going to praise either Mr. Thackeray or his book.  I have read, enjoyed, been interested, and after all, feel full as much ire and sorrow as gratitude and admiration.  And still one can never lay down a book of his without the two last feelings having their part, be the subject or treatment what it may.  In the first half of the book, what chiefly struck me was the wonderful manner in which the writer throws himself into the spirit and letters of the times whereof he treats; the allusions, the illustrations, the style, all seem to me so masterly in their exact