Peace, and the knowledge of God it gave me. For, by the way, observe in that sacredest of benedictions, which my Dean gave me in my own cathedral last Sunday, (I being an honorary student of Christ Church;—and there are only eight, if you please to look in the Oxford Calendar,) “The peace of God, which passeth all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in the knowledge and love of God;”—observe, I say, for we do not always think of this, it is not the knowledge that is to give peace; but the peace which is to give knowledge; so that as long as we fast for strife and debate, and to smite with the fist of wickedness, and bite and devour one another, and are consumed one of another—every traveller paying an eight per cent. tax in his fare, for dividend to a consuming railroad company—we can’t know anything about God at all. And compare again ‘Eagle’s Nest,’ p. 194. There, then, at Rose Terrace, I lived in peace in the fair Scotch summer days, with my widowed aunt, and my little cousin Jessie, then traversing a bright space between her sixth and ninth year; dark-eyed deeply, like her mother, and similarly pious; and she and I used to compete in the Sunday evening Scriptural examinations; and be as proud as two little peacocks because Jessie’s elder brothers, and sister Mary, used to get ‘put down,’ and either Jessie or I was always ‘Dux.’ We agreed upon this that we would be married, when we were a little older; not considering it preparatorily necessary to be in any degree wiser. 9th February.