Partie 184 - Letter from Henry Sidgwick to F. W. H. Myers

1 doc

States that he has wanted to write to Myers since he and Nora went back to Cambridge [after his mother's funeral], but claims that he finds it difficult to write 'not from painfulness of feeling', since his mother's death 'seems really a release, but from perplexity and mingledness.' Writes that he feels as if he had 'reached the summit of the Pass of Life: behind the old memories from infancy, unrolled like a map, and before the strange world of "the majority" near though in a mist, at which [he is] forced to gaze. And more than ever the alternatives of the Great Either-Or seem to be Pessimism or Faith'.

Reports that Nora was away 'all the time at Terling'. States that, although she was not seriously ill, he had been worried about her, but she considers herself quite well now.

Part transcription in Sidgwick, Arthur, and Sidgwick, E. M, 'Henry Sidgwick'. London: Macmillan, 1906, p 340.