# - Hudson, William Henry.

discussing his work, poetry and literature, Russian writers ("...I'm sorry Dostoevsky has turned you inside out - it cant be very pleasant..."), philosophy and Hudson's agnosticism ("...We die, we pass away, we are back in Nature's melting-pot, but the moral or spiritual effect of our lives & actions remains ... That's all, and it is no consolation..."), animals and birds, the English landscape especially that of Cornwall, and writer friends of Hudson including Rupert Brooke, Edward Thomas, Wilfrid Scawan Blunt, Norman Douglas, Hilaire Belloc, Galsworthy, Conrad, and Robert Frost ("a new American poet"), 4to and 8vo, in excess of 400 pages, including 3 sketches by Hudson, various locations mostly in London, Cornwall, and Worthing, mostly undated but 1904-1922

"...But what association can any town-born wretch have with a violet? From my heart I pity these poor soul-starved sons & daughters of cities, since all they know about the inner mysterious loveliness of such things as flowers is learnt from books from hearsay, not from the things themselves. For the chief elements in such things is the expression which is infinitely more than the intrinsic beauty, & the expession is wholly due to association. The violet takes me back to my boyish period, with tall rows of Lombardy poplars, to a grassy bank beside them when violets grew in abundance & we children joyfully gathered them..."

the record of an intimate friendship, and an important unpublished series of letters. Margaret Brooke (1849-1936) was the estranged wife of Sir Charles Brooke, 2nd Raja of Sarawak; the nadir of the marital relationship is said to have been when the raja served his wife's pet doves in a pie. Hudson and the Ranee first met when she engineered a meeting after falling in love with Green Mansions (see M. Brooke, Good Morning and Good Night (1934), pp. 275-9). She kept a cottage in Cornwall, where Hudson also spent considerable time, and the county figures strongly in the correspondence. Hudson speaks with rare bitterness and anger on Cornish cruelty to birds ("...the great snow & frost at Christmas drove the bird population of Southern England to this end of all the land, & how the poor hungry fugitives were slaughtered wholesale..."), which he connects to their attitude to art ("...If any of the 40 or 50 artists who live here [St Ives] ventured to set up his easel today out of doors he would be stoned and driven out of the town...")

In these wide-ranging letters Hudson talks freely of his explorations of the English countryside, his love of its ancient churches as well as its natural beauties. The growing intimacy of their relationship is well recorded ("...Oh, I wish I could go and see you as the dearest friend in the world!..."), and much is revealed about the personal lives of both Hudson and the Ranee, but the focus of the letters is mostly on literary and to a lesser extent naturalist subjects.

A dark note running through many of the letters is the slaughter of World War I. He writes of zepellin raids, the billeting of troops in Worthing, and of the death of many friends. Rupert Brooke figures heavily in the correspondence in the opening year of the war. In one letter, for example, he relates Edward Thomas's opinion on 'The Soldier' and other war poems ("...it is not perfectly sincere: That if it were so he would not at the end have dragged in anything about the "Emptiness of love" & so on..."). In another letter he tells the Ranee that a shell has destroyed "the MS. of a volume of poems he was writing in his knapsack", but Brooke was not harmed and "got back to his ship & is now in the Dardanelles. Happy man!" Brooke must in fact have been dead by the time Hudson wrote this letter. Hudson's hopes for peace are poignantly expressed in his account of a walk through London on 13 August 1915:

"...Yesterday was our best day this long time past ...  a magnificent rainbow appeared and lived in the black eastern sky from 5 to 6.30 - I never saw one last so long or show such brilliant colour. I went down to Hyde Park ... & in Edgware Rd. this crowd of people were all gazing at it as if it was an unknown thing, something unimagined, a message of peace perhaps. But there will be no peace..."