A Writer's Recollections — Volume 2 by Ward, Humphry, Mrs., 1851-1920

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I find it extremely difficult, as I look back, to put any order into the crowding memories of those early years in London. They were extraordinarily stimulating to us both, and years of great happiness. At home our children were growing up; our own lives were branching out into new activities and bringing us always new friends, and a more interesting share in that "great mundane movement" which Mr. Bottles believed would perish without him. Our connection with the _Times_ and with the Forsters, and the many new acquaintances and friends we made at this time in that happy meeting-ground of men and causes--Mrs. Jeune's drawing-room--opened to us the world of politicians; while my husband's four volumes on _The English Poets_, published just as we left Oxford, volumes to which all the most prominent writers of the day had contributed, together with the ever-delightful fact that Matthew Arnold was my uncle, brought us the welcome of those of our own _metier_ and way of life; and when in 1884 my husband became art critic of the paper, a function which he filled for more than five and twenty years, fresh doors opened on the already crowded scene, and fresh figures stepped in.

The setting of it all was twofold--in the first place, our dear old house in Russell Square, and, in the next, the farm on Rodborough Common, four miles from Godalming, where, amid a beauty of gorse and heather that filled every sense on a summer day with the mere joy of breathing and looking, our children and we spent the holiday hours of seven goodly years. The Russell Square house has been, so to speak, twice demolished and twice buried, since we lived in it. Some of its stones must still lie deep under the big hotel which now towers on its site. That it does not still exist somewhere, I can hardly believe. The westerly sun seems to me still to be pouring into the beautiful little hall, built and decorated about 1750, with its panels of free scrollwork in blue and white, and to be still glancing through the drawing-rooms to the little powder-closet at the end, my tiny workroom, where I first sketched the plan of _Robert Elsmere_ for my sister Julia Huxley, and where, after three years, I wrote the last words. If I open the door of the back drawing-room, there, to the right, is the children's school-room. I see them at their lessons, and the fine plane-trees that look in at the window. And up-stairs there are the pleasant bedrooms and the nurseries. It was born, the old house, in the year of the Young Pretender, and, after serving six generations, perhaps as faithfully as it served us, it "fell on sleep." There should be a special Elysium, surely, for the houses where the fates have been kind and where people have been happy; and a special Tartarus for those--of Oedipus or Atreus--in which "old, unhappy, far-off things" seem to be always poisoning the present.