MS location unknown. Printed in Coleridge, Life 331-2
My dear Mary
Thank you so much for your long letter and history of all your doings.1 I am sure if usefulness makes a happy life this ought to be one, and you must have much of kindness and of the sense of a living Church round you to fill you with energy. I do not know whether you have ever felt a sort of sense of the absence of the whole salt of life in being with people who had not gone on to the energetic influences of the Church. I don’t quite know whether I am writing sense, but I do remember such a weary flat feeling at one place I stayed at, where the people were highly cultivated, but their energy and interest in Church matters seemed to have died out. I told F. W. that you had been saying her verses about the Tree to the Bishop, and she only hoped you remembered that some of them were a quotation from Dr. Neale. I shall be very glad if you can send me a paper on Church work, but in general I had made it a rule to leave missionary papers to the Net, because they do get so frittered and dispersed among too many magazines, but I do not think that Church work in Cape Town exactly comes under this category, and there is no harm in making an exception sometimes.2 The Illustrated News is so good as to say that but for its sectarian character the Monthly Packet would take a high rank among magazines, and I do not wish to diminish that character, though I do not wish to increase it.3 How do you get on with your Dutch? It looks as if it must be like speaking very broad Somersetshire. You will have heard how Anne and I went into Devon together; I saw your mother and all your sisters.4 What a very nice face Beatrice’s is. But they were not at home when I called with Elizabeth Colborne. Reginald and Frank Colborne are come to Winchester to be in the same house with Ernest Morshead; it must be a tremendous change for them, coming so suddenly too. I am staying away from home for a few days, and so getting time to write my letters. I fancy I shall make a good many little excursions this year, including one to Normandy, but you had better always write to me at home, as a letter there will be sure to find me. The Goslings are come to life again, and I am expecting a flight of answers in a few days, indeed the very day when I hope you will be seeing Bishop Macrorie consecrated. Archbishop Tait’s appointment pretty thoroughly settled that matter.5 I hear that the building of Keble College is getting on very nicely, and that Mr. Edwin Palmer is talked of for the head.6 Fernseed and I hope to stay at New College together in the first week in June. Will not that be most delightful? I am afraid this is a very stupid letter, but you will write to me again I hope, and tell me how you are going on, and what your work settles into.
Your affectionate cousin
C. M. Yonge