’I must go on writing to you, my own dearest Father, even as I go on praying for you.  It is a great comfort to me, though I feel that in all human probability you are to be thought of now as one of the blessed drawn wholly within the veil.  Oh! that we may all dwell together hereafter for His blessed sake who died for us.  Now more than ever your loving and dutiful Son,’ &c.

Such another letter was written to his sister Fanny; but it is dated four days later, when he was better in health, and was somewhat recovered from the first shock; besides which, he felt his office of comforter when writing to her.  So the letter is more cheerful, and is a good deal taken up with the endeavour to assure the sisters of his acquiescence in whatever scheme of life they might adopt, and willingness that, if it were thought advisable, Feniton Court should be sold.  ‘This is all cold and heartless,’ he says, ’but I must try and make my view pretty clear.’  Towards the end occurs the following:—­

’Last night, my slight feverish attack over, my ears comfortable, with the feeling of health and ease returning, I lay awake, thought of dear Uncle Frank, and then for a long time of dear Mamma.  How plainly I saw her face, and dear dear Uncle James, and I wondered whether dear dear Father was already among them in Paradise.  It is not often that I can fasten down my mind to think continuously upon those blessed ones; I am too tired, or too busy; and this climate, you know, is enervating.  But last night I was very happy, and seemed to be very near them.  The Evening Lesson set me off, 1 John iii.  How wonderful it is!  But all the evening I had been reading my book of Prayers and Meditations.  Do you know, Fan, at times the thought comes upon me with a force almost overpowering, that I am a Bishop; and that I must not shrink from believing that I am called to a special work.  I don’t think that I dwell morbidly on this, but it is an awful thought.  And then I feel just the same as of old, and don’t reach out more, or aim more earnestly at amendment of life and strive after fresh degrees of enlightenment and holiness.  But probably I have to learn the lesson, which it may be only sickness will teach me, of patient waiting, that God will accomplish His own work in His own time.’

Some of this is almost too sacred for publication, and yet it is well that it should be seen how realising the Communion of Saints blessed the solitary man who had given up home.  The next letter is to Sir J. T. Coleridge:—­

’H.M.S.  “Cordelia,” September 11, 1861.

’My dearest Uncle,—­It is now nearly five weeks since I learnt from my letters of March and April, brought to me by this ship, the very precarious state of my dear Father.