Mrs GH Sumner to Emily [Ford]

Photocopy. Written from Geneva. She has seen JB and thanks her friend for having sent her out; it has been a wonderful experience for her. JB 'is very tired but full of peace'. They had a long heart to heart talk. They talked of the Lady and Lord Mount Temple ('she feels their real great humility to be so beautiful'); and of how she valued Emily's 'loving kindness'; of how the journey from Berne was got through almost miraculously. At lunch she saw the Canon who looked as if he had been very ill but as if it was past. Her final summing up of JB 'How delightful her originality and all absence of conventionality is, I felt 'the spirit of the world' miles off near her.

'... I felt above all that she [JB] had something so few have; such an understanding of God. George MacDonald, Hannah Smith, and one or two others have it, but so few that I know, and it sets people apart ...' George MacDonald, Scottish poet and novelist. Hannah Smith was the wife of Robert Pearsall Smith (American Revivalist preacher). Their eldest daughter Maud married the famous art critic, Bernard Berenson and the 2nd daughter, Alys, married Bertrand Russell. She was a religious writer and preacher and joined with her husband in the evangelistic mass meetings so popular in the 1870s and 1880s in England and America of which the Keswick convention was the best known. (A sketch of Hannah Smith is given in: 'Essay on Hannah Pearsall Smith (1823-1911) in 'Victorian wives' by Katharine Moore. Lady and Lord Mount Temple 'Broadlands': The home of the Mount Temples (Cowper Temple) often lent for Conferences to religious bodies.

Biog: Emily Ford; Mrs GH Summer (1829-1921) (m. George Sumner, later Bishop of Guildford 1887 she founded Mothers' Union); George MacDonald; Hannah Smith; Cowper Temple (Baron Mount Temple and Lady Mount Temple); Rebecca Jarrett; Charlie; George; (sons).