George Edmund Street: Unpublished Notes and Reprinted PapersStreet, George Edmund
History
George Edmund Street: Unpublished Notes and Reprinted Papers
Street, George Edmund
Architecture, Gothic; Church architecture -- Europe; Europe -- Description and travel; Street, George Edmund, 1824-1881
The affections are close and sweet, those of the hearth. His mother was
a good Christian but even more a Stoic, and Street held her the better
for it. Theirs was a love undemonstrative but recognized, of the most
exacting sort, neither of them accepting from the other anything short
of the very best. After he went to Winchester, being then seventeen,
she treated him like a man, and rarely praised him for doing what he
should. If a pleasure was renounced, she said, “I knew that under
the circumstances you would be Philosopher enough to give it up.” Her
grandson wrote: “It is enough to read the mother’s letters to see
the source of the son’s strength and steadfastness of character. She
was one of those women who, in some indefinable way, have a powerful
influence for good on all those into whose company they are thrown;
who, themselves rather sparing in outward signs of affection, create
in others a warm love and a perfect confidence. Her pride in her son
was unbounded, but was left to be inferred rather than expressed; while
her love was shown more in the demand for sacrifices, in the confidence
with which she appealed to her son’s sense of duty and obedience,
however severe the test.”
Besides a wide and wakeful kindness and untiring interest in others of
his own profession, he had full, warm friendships, but where he could
he took his pleasure with his nearest of kin. The early journeys were
made in his brother’s company, the continental with his wife, and later
with his son. The brothers, George and Thomas, were married to cousins,
and up to the very last the longest and most frequent visits abroad
were made to his son’s grandfather. After his wife’s death he took
for a second wife her close friend, an intimate of the household and
frequent companion.
The relations not of choice, the intimacies sweetened and consecrated
by tender use and wont and all the sanctities of the hearth, the
blind impulses of the blood and yearnings of the flesh toward kindred
flesh and blood, were for him alike inevitable and dear. Here also he
expresses the genius of the English stock. The northern race stood out
long for the righteousness of the married life even in the priesthood,
and the English church has at all times tended toward the family life
as distinguished from the cloistered, and elaborated and adorned those
services and sacraments which celebrate marriage and the birth of
children and their coming to maturity.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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