‘DEAR ALFRED,—I wrote to you from the Wandsworth Station yesterday on the way to Bromley. As I was folding your letter came the scream of the train, and then the yells of the porters with threats that the train would not wait for me, so that although I got as far in the direction as your name, I was obliged to run down the steps, and trust the directing and despatch of the whole to strange hands. I would rather have kept back my letter than have thus risked it, had it not been for my extreme desire to hear of your wife. Day after day I get more anxious to hear and then I write again, and thus I write, not to bore you by satisfying my own heart’s wish, but to know if I can be any help or comfort. I have been writing one of my longest letters to Sir John Herschell to-day, but won’t inflict the like upon you.’ (Then come many pages of the reasons which prevent her from writing.) After she came to live near the Tennysons, Mrs. Cameron had no sense of ever having done enough for them or more than enough. She would arrive at Farringford at all hours, convenient and inconvenient, entering by the door, by the drawing-room window, always bringing goodwill and life in her train. She would walk in at night, followed by friends, by sons carrying lanterns, by nieces, by maids bearing parcels and photographs. Hers was certainly a gift for making life and light for others, though at times I have known her spirits sink into deepest depths as do those of impressionable people. Torch-bearers sometimes consume themselves and burn some of their own life and spirit in the torches they carry. When Julia Cameron took to photography, her enthusiasm was infectious and her beautiful pictures seemed a revelation. She was an artist at heart and she had never felt satisfied till she found her own channel of expression in these new developments. Watts greatly encouraged her, and I heard him say of one of her pictures of himself, that he knew no finer portrait among the old Masters. One of her admirers, F. D. Maurice, wrote: ‘Had we such portraits of Shakespeare and Milton, we should know more of their own selves. We should have better commentaries on “Hamlet” and on “Comus” than we now possess, even as you have secured to us a better commentary on “Maud” and “In Memoriam” than all our critics ever will give us.’ Browning, Darwin, Carlyle, Lecky, Sir John Herschell, Henry Taylor with his flowing beard were all among her sitters and still reveal themselves to us through her. She photographed without ceasing, in season and out of season, and she summoned everyone round about to watch the process.