Letter from Emelia Gurney, London, to Mrs John W. Field, 1886 December 29 : autograph manuscript signed with initials.

Saying she has been thinking of her "...as these hours of 86 are ebbing away! What a year! yet you can sing of 'living kindness as well as Judgment...Dear ones - I have been so enjoying reading Longfellows Life - tho' at first there seems so much printed not worth printing & there seems no literary workmanship whatever in suppressing & grouping so as to make an artistic portrait - Yet for one who has time as I have had to bury oneself Evg after Evg in it, there gatherers a rich result of knowledge of a tender refined courageous & most patient man - & how modest, self suppressed & persevering he was - What a firm quiet faith in God! I was so thankful to have seen him - & to have known a little some of the groupe around him - What a groupe in the earlyish palmy days - Hawthorne - Felton (he must have been a very remarkable man) Agassiz - G.W. Curtis - was he Howadji - & yours, of course - the Autocrat - & the most loved apparently of any Charles Sumner - we saw so much of him at Washington & J. Appleton we also knew pretty well - Lives are most interesting & get in some ways so melancholy - the palmy days of hope, so brilliant - & than the dropping away of so much & so many leaving a lopped stem as to the outward & the growth of the root in God not to be fully discerned or seen as a glorious compensation by our weak eyes! CES has just sent me y'r last of the 16th - I had y'rs of the 14th the crisis day & did write to you. This is an extra word of loving."