“I leave Arthur Balfour—­Alfred’s and my dear, deeply loved friend, who has given me so many happy hours since I married, and whose sympathy, understanding, and companionship in the deep sense of the word has never been withheld from me when I have sought it, which has not been seldom this year of my blessed Vita Nuova—­I leave him my Johnson.  He taught me to love that wisest of men—­and I have much to be grateful for in this.  I leave him, too, my little ugly Shelley—­much read, but not in any way beautiful; if he marries I should like him to give his wife my little red enamel harp—­I shall never see her if I die now, but I have so often created her in the Islands of my imagination—­and as a Queen has she reigned there, so that I feel in the spirit we are in some measure related by some mystic tie.”

Out of the many letters Alfred received, this is the one I liked best: 

Hawarden Castle,

April 27th, 1886.  My dear Alfred,

It is a daring and perhaps a selfish thing to speak to you at a moment when your mind and heart are a sanctuary in which God is speaking to you in tones even more than usually penetrating and solemn.  Certainly it pertains to few to be chosen to receive such lessons as are being taught you.  If the wonderful trials of Apostles, Saints and Martyrs have all meant a love in like proportion wonderful, then, at this early period of your life, your lot has something in common with theirs, and you will bear upon you life-long marks of a great and peculiar dispensation which may and should lift you very high.  Certainly you two who are still one were the persons whom in all the vast circuit of London life those near you would have pointed to as exhibiting more than any others the promise and the profit of both worlds.  The call upon you for thanksgiving seemed greater than on any one—­you will not deem it lessened now.  How eminently true it is of her that in living a short she fulfilled a long time.  If Life is measured by intensity, hers was a very long life—­and yet with that rich development of mental gifts, purity and singleness made her one of the little children of whom and of whose like is the Kingdom of Heaven.  Bold would it indeed be to say such a being died prematurely.  All through your life, however it be prolonged, what a precious possession to you she will be.  But in giving her to your bodily eye and in taking her away the Almighty has specially set His seal upon you.  To Peace and to God’s gracious mercy let us heartily, yes, cheerfully, commend her.  Will you let Sir Charles and Lady Tennant and all her people know how we feel with and for them?

Ever your affec.

W. E. Gladstone.

Matthew Arnold sent me this poem because Jowett told him I said it might have been written for Laura: 

REQUIESCAT

    Strew on her roses, roses,
    And never a spray of yew! 
    In quiet she reposes;
    Ah, would that I did too!