George Eliot's Life, as Related in Her Letters and Journals. Vol. 3 (of 3)

by George Eliot

CHAPTER XVI.

Journal, 1869.

Jan. 1.—I have set myself many tasks for the year—I wonder how many will be accomplished?—a novel called "Middlemarch," a long poem on Timoleon, and several minor poems.

Jan. 23.—Since I wrote last I have finished a little poem on old Agatha. But the last week or two I have been so disturbed in health that no work prospers. I have made a little way in constructing my new tale; have been reading a little on philology; have finished the 24th Book of the "Iliad," the 1st Book of the "Faery Queene," Clough's poems, and a little about Etruscan things, in Mrs. Grey and Dennis. Aloud to G. I have been reading some Italian, Ben Jonson's "Alchemist" and "Volpone," and Bright's speeches, which I am still reading, besides the first four cantos of "Don Juan." But the last two or three days I have seemed to live under a leaden pressure—all movement, mental or bodily, is grievous to me. In the evening read aloud Bright's fourth speech on India, and a story in Italian. In the Spectator some interesting facts about loss of memory and "double life." In the Revue des Cours, a lecture by Sir W. Thomson, of Edinburgh, on the retardation of the earth's motion round its axis.

Jan. 27.—The last two days I have been writing a rhymed poem on Boccaccio's story of "Lisa." Aloud I have read Bright's speeches, and "I Promessi Sposi." To myself I have read Mommsen's "Rome."

Feb. 6.—We went to the third concert. Madame Schumann played finely in Mendelssohn's quintet, and a trio of Beethoven's. As a solo she played the sonata in D minor. In the evening I read aloud a short speech of Bright's on Ireland, delivered twenty years ago, in which he insists that nothing will be a remedy for the woes of that country unless the Church Establishment be annulled: after the lapse of twenty years the measure is going to be adopted. Then I read aloud a bit of the "Promessi Sposi," and afterwards the Spectator, in which there is a deservedly high appreciation of Lowell's poems.

Feb. 14.—Finished the poem from Boccaccio. We had rather a numerous gathering of friends to-day, and among the rest came Browning, who talked and quoted admirably à propos of versification. The Rector of Lincoln thinks the French have the most perfect system of versification in these modern times!

Feb. 15.—I prepared and sent off "How Lisa Loved the King" to Edinburgh.

Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 15th Feb. 1869.

I have looked back to the verses in Browning's poem about Elisha, and I find no mystery in them. The foregoing context for three pages describes that function of genius which revivifies the past. Man, says Browning (I am writing from recollection of his general meaning), cannot create, but he can restore: the poet gives forth of his own spirit, and reanimates the forms that lie breathless. His use of Elisha's story is manifestly symbolical, as his mention of Faust is—the illustration which he abandons the moment before to take up that of the Hebrew seer. I presume you did not read the context yourself, but only had the two concluding verses pointed out or quoted to you by your friends. It is one of the afflictions of authorship to know that the brains which should be used in understanding a book are wasted in discussing the hastiest misconceptions about it; and I am sure you will sympathize enough in this affliction to set any one right, when you can, about this quotation from Browning.

Journal, 1869.

Feb. 20.—A glorious concert: Hallé, Joachim, and Piatti winding up with Schubert's trio.

Feb. 21.—Mr. Deutsch and Mrs. Pattison lunched with us—he in farewell before going to the East. A rather pleasant gathering of friends afterwards.

Feb. 24.—I am reading about plants, and Helmholtz on music. A new idea of a poem came to me yesterday.

March 3.—We started on our fourth visit to Italy, viâ France and the Cornice.

Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 4th May, 1869, from Paris.

I found your letter at Florence on our arrival there (on the 23d); but until now bodily ease and leisure enough to write to you have never happened to me in the same moments. Our long journey since we left home on the 3d March, seen from a point of view which, happily, no one shares with me, has been a history of ailments. In shunning the English March, we found one quite as disagreeable, without the mitigation of home comforts; and though we went even as far as Naples in search of warmth, we never found it until we settled in Rome, at the beginning of April. Here we had many days of unbroken sunshine, and enjoyed what we were never able to enjoy during our month's stay in 1860—the many glorious views of the city and the mountains. The chief novelty to us in our long route has been the sight of Assisi and Ravenna; the rest has been a revisiting of scenes already in our memories; and to most of them we have probably said our last good-bye. Enough of us and our travels. The only remarkable thing people can tell of their doings in these days is that they have stayed at home.

The Fortnightly lay uncut at Mr. Trollope's, and Mr. Lewes had nothing more pressing to do than to cut it open at the reply to Professor Huxley.[6] He presently came to me, and said it was excellent. It delighted him the more because he had just before, at Rome, alighted on the Pall Mall account of the article, which falsely represented it as entirely apologetic. At the first spare moment I plunged into an easy-chair, and read, with thorough satisfaction in the admirable temper and the force of the reply. We intend to start for Calais this evening; and as the rain prevents us from doing anything agreeable out of doors, I have nothing to hinder me from sitting, with my knees up to my chin, and scribbling, now that I am become a little sounder in head and in body generally than beautiful Italy allowed me to be. As beautiful as ever—more beautiful—it has looked to me on this last visit; and it is the fault of my physique if it did not agree with me. Pray offer my warmest sympathy to Dr. Congreve in the anxieties of his difficult task. What hard work it seems to go on living sometimes! Blessed are the dead.

Journal, 1869.

May 5.—We reached home after our nine weeks' absence. In that time we have been through France to Marseilles, along the Cornice to Spezia, then to Pisa, Florence, Naples, Rome, Assisi, Perugia, Florence again, Ravenna, Bologna, Verona; across the Brenner Pass to Munich; then to Paris viâ Strasburg. In such a journey there was necessarily much interest both in renewing old memories and recording new; but I never had such continuous bad health in travelling as I have had during these nine weeks. On our arrival at home I found a delightful letter from Mrs. H. B. Stowe, whom I have never seen, addressing me as her "dear friend."

It was during this journey that I, for the first time, saw my future wife, at Rome. My eldest sister had married Mr. W. H. Bullock (now Mr. W. H. Hall), of Six-Mile-Bottom, Cambridgeshire, and they were on their wedding journey at Rome when they happened to meet Mr. and Mrs. Lewes by chance in the Pamfili Doria Gardens. They saw a good deal of one another, and when I arrived, with my mother and another sister, we went by invitation to call at the Hôtel Minerva, where Mr. Lewes had found rooms on their first arrival in Rome. I have a very vivid recollection of George Eliot sitting on a sofa with my mother by her side, entirely engrossed with her. Mr. Lewes entertained my sister and me on the other side of the room. But I was very anxious to hear also the conversation on the sofa, as I was better acquainted with George Eliot's books than with any other literature. And through the dimness of these fifteen years, and all that has happened in them, I still seem to hear, as I first heard them, the low, earnest, deep, musical tones of her voice; I still seem to see the fine brows, with the abundant auburn-brown hair framing them, the long head, broadening at the back, the gray-blue eyes, constantly changing in expression, but always with a very loving, almost deprecating, look at my mother, the finely-formed, thin, transparent hands, and a whole Wesen that seemed in complete harmony with everything one expected to find in the author of "Romola." The next day Mr. and Mrs. Lewes went on to Assisi and we to Naples, and we did not meet again till the following August at Weybridge.

Letter to Mrs. H. B. Stowe, 8th May, 1869.

I value very highly the warrant to call you friend which your letter has given me. It lay awaiting me on our return, the other night, from a nine weeks' absence in Italy, and it made me almost wish that you could have a momentary vision of the discouragement—nay, paralyzing despondency—in which many days of my writing life have been passed, in order that you might fully understand the good I find in such sympathy as yours—in such an assurance as you give me that my work has been worth doing. But I will not dwell on any mental sickness of mine. The best joy your words give me is the sense of that sweet, generous feeling in you which dictated them, and I shall always be the richer because you have in this way made me know you better. I must tell you that my first glimpse of you as a woman came through a letter of yours, and charmed me very much. The letter was addressed to Mrs. Follen; and one morning when I called on her in London (how many years ago![7]) she was kind enough to read it to me because it contained a little history of your life, and a sketch of your domestic circumstances. I remember thinking that it was very kind of you to write that long letter in reply to the inquiries of one who was personally unknown to you; and looking back with my present experience I think it was still kinder than it then appeared. For at that time you must have been much oppressed with the immediate results of your fame. I remember, too, that you wrote of your husband as one who was richer in Hebrew and Greek than in pounds or shillings; and as the ardent scholar has always been a character of peculiar interest to me, I have rarely had your image in my mind without the accompanying image (more or less erroneous) of such a scholar by your side. I shall welcome the fruit of his Goethe studies, whenever it comes. In the meantime let me assure you that whoever else gave you that description of my husband's "History of Philosophy"—namely, "that it was to solve and settle all things"—he himself never saw it in that light. The work has been greatly altered, as well as enlarged, in three successive editions; and his mind is so far from being a captive to his own written words that he is now engaged in physiological and psychological researches which are leading him to issues at variance in some important respects with the views expressed in some of his published works. He is one of the few human beings I have known who will often, in the heat of an argument, see, and straightway confess, that he is in the wrong, instead of trying to shift his ground or use any other device of vanity.

I have good hopes that your fears are groundless as to the obstacles your new book may find here from its thorough American character. Most readers who are likely to be really influenced by writing above the common order will find that special aspect an added reason for interest and study, and I dare say you have long seen, as I am beginning to see with new clearness, that if a book which has any sort of exquisiteness happens also to be a popular, widely circulated book, its power over the social mind for any good is, after all, due to its reception by a few appreciative natures, and is the slow result of radiation from that narrow circle. I mean, that you can affect a few souls, and that each of these in turn may affect a few more, but that no exquisite book tells properly and directly on a multitude, however largely it may be spread by type and paper. Witness the things the multitude will say about it, if one is so unhappy as to be obliged to hear their sayings. I do not write this cynically, but in pure sadness and pity. Both travelling abroad, and staying at home among our English sights and sports, one must continually feel how slowly the centuries work towards the moral good of men. And that thought lies very close to what you say as to your wonder or conjecture concerning my religious point of view. I believe that religion, too, has to be modified—"developed," according to the dominant phrase—and that a religion more perfect than any yet prevalent must express less care for personal consolation, and a more deeply-awing sense of responsibility to man, springing from sympathy with that which of all things is most certainly known to us, the difficulty of the human lot. I do not find my temple in Pantheism, which, whatever might be its value speculatively, could not yield a practical religion, since it is an attempt to look at the universe from the outside of our relations to it (that universe) as human beings. As healthy, sane human beings, we must love and hate—love what is good for mankind, hate what is evil for mankind. For years of my youth I dwelt in dreams of a pantheistic sort, falsely supposing that I was enlarging my sympathy. But I have travelled far away from that time. Letters are necessarily narrow and fragmentary, and, when one writes on wide subjects, are liable to create more misunderstanding than illumination. But I have little anxiety of that kind in writing to you, dear friend and fellow-laborer, for you have had longer experience than I as a writer, and fuller experience as a woman, since you have borne children and known the mother's history from the beginning. I trust your quick and long-taught mind as an interpreter little liable to mistake me.

When you say, "We live in an orange grove and are planting many more," and when I think that you must have abundant family love to cheer you, it seems to me that you must have a paradise about you. But no list of circumstances will make a paradise. Nevertheless, I must believe that the joyous, tender humor of your books clings about your more immediate life, and makes some of that sunshine for yourself which you have given to us.

I see the advertisement of "Old Town Folk," and shall eagerly expect it.

That and every other new link between us will be reverentially valued.

Journal, 1869.

May 8 (Saturday).—Poor Thornie arrived from Natal, sadly wasted by suffering.

May 24.—Sold "Agatha" to Fields & Osgood, for the Atlantic Monthly, for £300.

Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 26th May, 1869.

That "disturbance" in my favorite work, with which you and Dr. Congreve are good enough to sympathize, is unhappily greater now than it has been for years before. Our poor Thornie came back to us about seventeen days ago. We can never rejoice enough that we were already at home, seeing that we held it impossible for him to set out on his voyage until at least six weeks later than he did. Since he arrived our lives have been chiefly absorbed by cares for him; and though we now have a nurse to attend on him constantly, we spend several hours of the day by his side. There is joy in the midst of our trouble, from the tenderness towards the sufferer being altogether unchecked by anything unlovable in him. Thornie's disposition seems to have become sweeter than ever with the added six years; and there is nothing that we discern in his character or habits to cause us grief. Enough of our troubles. I gather from your welcome letter, received this morning, that there is a good deal of enjoyment for you in your temporary home, in spite of bad weather and faceache, which I hope will have passed away when you read this.

Mr. Beesley[8] wrote to me to tell me of his engagement, and on Sunday we had the pleasure of shaking him by the hand and seeing him look very happy. His is one of a group of prospective marriages which we have had announced to us since we came home. Besides Mr. Harrison's, there is Dr. Allbut's, our charming friend at Leeds. I told Mr. Beesley that I thought myself magnanimous in really rejoicing at the engagements of men friends, because, of course, they will be comparatively indifferent to their old intimates.

Dear Madame Bodichon is a precious help to us. She comes twice a week to sit with Thornie, and she is wonderfully clever in talking to young people. One finds out those who have real practical sympathy in times of trouble.

Letter to Frederic Harrison, 9th June, 1869.

Your letter has fulfilled two wishes of mine. It shows me that you keep me in your kind thoughts, and that you are very happy. I had been told by our friends, the Nortons, of your engagement, but I knew nothing more than that bare fact, and your letter gives me more of a picture. A very pretty picture—for I like to think of your love having grown imperceptibly along with sweet family affections. I do heartily share in your happiness, for however space and time may keep us asunder, you will never to my mind be lost in the distance, but will hold a place of marked and valued interest quite apart from those more public hopes about you which I shall not cease to cherish.

Both Mr. Lewes and I shall be delighted to see you any evening. I imagine that when you are obliged to stay in town the evening will be the easiest time for you to get out to us. Any time after eight you will find us thoroughly glad to shake hands with you. Do come when you can.

Journal, 1869.

July 3.—Finished my reading in Lucretius. Reading Victor Hugo's "L'homme qui rit;" also the Frau von Hillern's novel, "Ein Arzt der Seele." This week G. and I have been to Sevenoaks, but were driven home again by the cold winds and cloudy skies. "Sonnets on Childhood"—five—finished.

July 10.—I wrote to Mrs. Stowe, in answer to a second letter of hers, accompanied by one from her husband.

Letter to Mrs. H. B. Stowe, 11th July, 1869.

I hoped before this to have seen our friend, Mrs. Fields, on her return from Scotland, and to have begged her to send you word of a domestic affliction which has prevented me from writing to you since I received your and your husband's valued letters. Immediately on our return from Italy, Mr. Lewes's second son, a fine young man of five-and-twenty, returned to us from Natal, wasted by suffering from a long-standing spinal injury. This was on the 8th of May, and since then we have both been absorbed in our duties to this poor child, and have felt our own health and nervous energy insufficient for our needful activity of body and mind. He is at present no better, and we look forward to a long trial. Nothing but a trouble so great as this would have prevented me from writing again to you, not only to thank you and Professor Stowe for your letters, but also to tell you that I have received and read "Old Town Folks." I think few of your many readers can have felt more interest than I have felt in that picture of an elder generation; for my interest in it has a double root—one, in my own love for our old-fashioned provincial life, which had its affinities with a contemporary life, even all across the Atlantic, and of which I have gathered glimpses in different phases, from my father and mother, with their relations; the other is, my experimental acquaintance with some shades of Calvinistic orthodoxy. I think your way of presenting the religious convictions which are not your own, except by indirect fellowship, is a triumph of insight and true tolerance. A thorough comprehension of the mixed moral influence shed on society by dogmatic systems is rare even among writers, and one misses it altogether in English drawing-room talk. I thank you sincerely for the gift (in every sense) of this book, which, I can see, has been a labor of love.

Both Mr. Lewes and I are deeply interested in the indications which the Professor gives of his peculiar psychological experience, and we should feel it a great privilege to learn much more of it from his lips. It is a rare thing to have such an opportunity of studying exceptional experience in the testimony of a truthful and in every way distinguished mind. He will, I am sure, accept the brief thanks which I can give in this letter, for all that he has generously written to me. He says, "I have had no connection with any of the modern movements, except as father confessor;" and I can well believe that he must be peculiarly sensitive to the repulsive aspects which those movements present. Your view as to the cause of that "great wave of spiritualism" which is rushing over America—namely, that it is a sort of Rachel-cry of bereavement towards the invisible existence of the loved ones, is deeply affecting. But so far as "spiritualism" (by which I mean, of course, spirit-communication, by rapping, guidance of the pencil, etc.) has come within reach of my judgment on our side of the water, it has appeared to me either as degrading folly, imbecile in the estimate of evidence, or else as impudent imposture. So far as my observation and experience have hitherto gone, it has even seemed to me an impiety to withdraw from the more assured methods of studying the open secret of the universe any large amount of attention to alleged manifestations which are so defiled by low adventurers and their palpable trickeries, so hopelessly involved in all the doubtfulness of individual testimonies as to phenomena witnessed, which testimonies are no more true objectively because they are honest subjectively, than the Ptolemaic system is true because it seemed to Tycho Brahé a better explanation of the heavenly movements than the Copernican. This is a brief statement of my position on the subject, which your letter shows me to have an aspect much more compulsory on serious attention in America than I can perceive it to have in England. I should not be as simply truthful as my deep respect for you demands, if I did not tell you exactly what is my mental attitude in relation to the phenomena in question. But whatever you print on the subject and will send me I shall read with attention, and the idea you give me of the hold which spiritualism has gained on the public mind in the United States is already a fact of historic importance.

Forgive me, dear friend, if I write in the scantiest manner, unworthily responding to letters which have touched me profoundly. You have known so much of life, both in its more external trials and in the peculiar struggles of a nature which is made twofold in its demands by the yearnings of the author as well as of the woman, that I can count on your indulgence and power of understanding my present inability to correspond by letter.

May I add my kind remembrances to your daughter to the high regard which I offer to your husband?

Journal, 1869.

July 14.—Returned from Hatfield, after two days' stay.

July 15.—Began Nisard's "History of French Literature"—Villehardouin, Joinville, Froissart, Christine de Pisan, Philippe de Comines, Villers.

July 16.—Read the articles Phœnicia and Carthage in "Ancient Geography." Looked into Jewitt's "Universal History" again for Carthaginian religion. Looked into Sismondi's "Littérature du Midi" for Roman de la Rose; and ran through the first chapter about the formation of the Romance languages. Read about Thallogens and Acrogens in the "Vegetable World." Read Drayton's "Nymphidia"—a charming poem—a few pages of his "Polyolbion." Re-read Grote, v.-vii., on Sicilian affairs, down to rise of Dionysius.

July 18.—Miss Nannie Smith came, after a long absence from England; Professor Masson and Dr. Bastian, Madame Bodichon, and Dr. Payne. Some conversation about Saint-Simonism, à propos of the meeting on Woman's Suffrage the day before, M. Arles Dufour being uneasy because Mill did not in his speech recognize what women owed to Saint-Simonism.

July 19.—Writing an introduction to "Middlemarch." I have just re-read the 15th Idyll of Theocritus, and have written three more sonnets. My head uneasy. We went in the afternoon to the old water-colors, finding that the exhibition was to close at the end of the week. Burne-Jones's Circe and St. George affected me, by their colors, more than any of the other pictures—they are poems. In the evening read Nisard on Rabelais and Marot.

July 22.—Read Reybaud's book on "Les Réformateurs Modernes." In the afternoon Mrs. P. Taylor came and saw Thornie, who has been more uneasy this week, and unwilling to move or come out on the lawn.

July 23.—Read Theocritus, Id. 16. Meditated characters for "Middlemarch." Mrs. F. Malleson came.

July 24.—Still not quite well and clear-headed, so that little progress is made. I read aloud Fourier and Owen, and thought of writing something about Utopists.

July 25.—Read Plato's "Republic" in various parts. After lunch Miss Nannie Smith, Miss Blythe, Mr. Burton, and Mr. Deutsch. In the evening I read Nisard, and Littré on Comte.

Aug. 1.—Since last Sunday I have had an uncomfortable week from mental and bodily disturbance. I have finished eleven sonnets on "Brother and Sister," read Littré, Nisard, part of 22d Idyll of Theocritus, Sainte-Beuve, aloud to G. two evenings. Monday evening looked through Dickson's "Fallacies of the Faculty." On Tuesday afternoon we went to the British Museum to see a new bronze, and I was enchanted with some fragments of glass in the Slade collection, with dyes of sunset in them. Yesterday, sitting in Thornie's room, I read through all Shakespeare's "Sonnets." Poor Thornie has had a miserably unsatisfactory week, making no progress. After lunch came Miss N. Smith and Miss Blythe, Mr. Burton, Mr. and Mrs. Burne-Jones, and Mr. Sanderson.

Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 1st Aug. 1869.

My last words to you might appear to imply something laughably opposed to my real meaning. "Think of me only as an example" meant—an example to be avoided. It was an allusion in my mind to the servant-girl who, being arrested for theft, said to her fellow-servant, "Take example by me, Sally." With the usual caprice of language, we say. "Make an example of her," in that sense of holding up for a warning, which the poor girl and I intended.

Journal, 1869.

Aug. 2.—Began "Middlemarch" (the Vincy and Featherstone parts).

Aug. 5.—Thornie during the last two or three days gives much more hopeful signs: has been much more lively, with more regular appetite and quieter nights. This morning I finished the first chapter of "Middlemarch." I am reading Renouard's "History of Medicine."

Aug. 31.—We went to Weybridge, walked on St. George's Hill, and lunched with Mrs. Cross and her family.

This visit to Weybridge is a very memorable one to me, because there my own first intimacy with George Eliot began, and the bonds with my family were knitted very much closer. Mr. and Mrs. Bullock were staying with us; and my sister, who had some gift for music, had set one or two of the songs from the "Spanish Gypsy." She sang one of them—"On through the woods, the pillared pines"—and it affected George Eliot deeply. She moved quickly to the piano, and kissed Mrs. Bullock very warmly, in her tears. Mr. and Mrs. Lewes were in deep trouble owing to the illness of Thornton Lewes; we were also in much anxiety as to the approaching confinement of my sister with her first child; and I was on the eve of departure for America. Sympathetic feelings were strong enough to overleap the barrier (often hard to pass) which separates acquaintanceship from friendship. A day did the work of years. Our visitors had come to the house as acquaintances, they left it as lifelong friends. And the sequel of that day greatly intensified the intimacy. For within a month my sister had died in childbirth, and her death called forth one of the most beautiful of George Eliot's letters. A month later Thornton Lewes died.

Journal, 1869.

Sept. 1.—I meditated characters and conditions for "Middlemarch," which stands still in the beginning of chapter iii.

Sept. 2.—We spent the morning in Hatfield Park, arriving at home again at half-past three.

Sept. 10.—I have achieved little during the last week, except reading on medical subjects—Encyclopædia about the "Medical Colleges," "Cullen's Life," Russell's "Heroes of Medicine," etc. I have also read Aristophanes' "Ecclesiazusœ," and "Macbeth."

Sept. 11.—I do not feel very confident that I can make anything satisfactory of "Middlemarch." I have need to remember that other things which have been accomplished by me were begun under the same cloud. G. has been reading "Romola" again, and expresses profound admiration. This is encouraging.

Sept. 15.—George and I went to Sevenoaks for a couple of nights, and had some delicious walks.

Sept. 21.—Finished studying again Bekker's "Charikles." I am reading Mandeville's Travels. As to my work, im Stiche gerathen. Mrs. Congreve and Miss Bury came; and I asked Mrs. Congreve to get me some information about provincial hospitals, which is necessary to my imagining the conditions of my hero.

Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 21st Sept. 1869.

As to the Byron subject, nothing can outweigh to my mind the heavy social injury of familiarizing young minds with the desecration of family ties. The discussion of the subject in newspapers, periodicals, and pamphlets is simply odious to me, and I think it a pestilence likely to leave very ugly marks. One trembles to think how easily that moral wealth may be lost which it has been the work of ages to produce in the refinement and differencing of the affectionate relations. As to the high-flown stuff which is being reproduced about Byron and his poetry, I am utterly out of sympathy with it. He seems to me the most vulgar-minded genius that ever produced a great effect in literature.

Journal, 1869.

Sept. 22.—We went down to Watford for a change.

Sept. 24.—Returned home this morning because of the unpromising weather. It is worth while to record my great depression of spirits, that I may remember one more resurrection from the pit of melancholy. And yet what love is given to me! What abundance of good I possess! All my circumstances are blessed; and the defect is only in my own organism. Courage and effort!

Oct. 5.—Ever since the 28th I have been good for little, ailing in body and disabled in mind. On Sunday an interesting Russian pair came to see us—M. and Mme. Kovilevsky: she, a pretty creature, with charming modest voice and speech, who is studying mathematics (by allowance, through the aid of Kirchhoff) at Heidelberg; he, amiable and intelligent, studying the concrete sciences apparently—especially geology; and about to go to Vienna for six months for this purpose, leaving his wife at Heidelberg!

I have begun a long-meditated poem, "The Legend of Jubal," but have not written more than twenty or thirty verses.

Oct. 13.—Yesterday Mr. W. G. Clark of Cambridge came to see us, and told of his intention to give up his oratorship and renounce his connection with the Church.

I have read rapidly through Max Müller's "History of Sanskrit Literature," and am now reading Lecky's "History of Morals." I have also finished Herbert Spencer's last number of his "Psychology." My head has been sadly feeble, and my whole body ailing of late. I have written about one hundred verses of my poem. Poor Thornie seems to us in a state of growing weakness.

Oct. 19.—This evening at half-past six our dear Thornie died. He went quite peacefully. For three days he was not more than fitfully and imperfectly conscious of the things around him. He went to Natal on the 17th October, 1863, and came back to us ill on the 8th May, 1869. Through the six months of his illness his frank, impulsive mind disclosed no trace of evil feeling. He was a sweet-natured boy—still a boy, though he had lived for twenty-five years and a half. On the 9th of August he had an attack of paraplegia, and although he partially recovered from it, it made a marked change in him. After that he lost a great deal of his vivacity, but he suffered less pain. This death seems to me the beginning of our own.

Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 15th Dec. 1869.

The day after our dear boy's funeral we went into the quietest and most beautiful part of Surrey, four miles and a half from any railway station. I was very much shaken in mind and body, and nothing but the deep calm of fields and woods would have had a beneficent effect on me. We both of us felt, more than ever before, the blessedness of being in the country, and we are come back much restored. It will interest you, I think, to know that a friend of ours, Mr. W. G. Clark, the public orator at Cambridge, laid down his oratorship as a preparatory step to writing a letter to his bishop renouncing, or, rather, claiming to be free from, his clerical status, because he no longer believes what it presupposes him to believe. Two other men whom we know are about to renounce Cambridge fellowships on the same ground.

Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 31st Dec. 1869.

We shall be delighted to have you on Monday. I hope you will get your business done early enough to be by a good fire in our drawing-room before lunch. Mr. Doyle is coming to dine with us, but you will not mind that. He is a dear man, a good Catholic, full of varied sympathies and picturesque knowledge.

Letter to Frederic Harrison, 15th Jan. 1870.

I am moved to write to you rather by the inclination to remind you of me than by the sense of having anything to say. On reading "The Positivist Problem"[9] a second time, I gained a stronger impression of its general value, and I also felt less jarred by the more personal part at the close. Mr. Lewes would tell you that I have an unreasonable aversion to personal statements, and when I come to like them it is usually by a hard process of con-version. But my second reading gave me a new and very strong sense that the last two or three pages have the air of an appendix, added at some distance of time from the original writing of the article. Some more thoroughly explanatory account of your non-adhesion seems requisite as a nexus—since the statement of your non-adhesion had to be mentioned after an argument for the system against the outer Gentile world. However, it is more important for me to say that I felt the thorough justice of your words, when, in conversation with me, you said, "I don't see why there should be any mystification; having come to a resolution after much inward debate, it is better to state the resolution." Something like that you said, and I give a hearty "Amen," praying that I may not be too apt myself to prefer the haze to the clearness. But the fact is, I shrink from decided "deliverances" on momentous subjects from the dread of coming to swear by my own "deliverances," and sinking into an insistent echo of myself. That is a horrible destiny—and one cannot help seeing that many of the most powerful men fall into it.

Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 16th Mch. 1870.

Cara has told me about your republication of the "Inquiry," and I have a longing to write—not intrusively, I hope—just to say "thank you" for the good it does me to know of your being engaged in that act of piety to your brother's memory. I delight in the act itself, and in the satisfaction which I know you have in performing it. When I remember my own obligation to the book, I must believe that among the many new readers a cheap edition will reach there must be minds to whom it will bring welcome light in studying the New Testament—sober, serious help towards a conception of the past, instead of stage-lights and make-ups. And this value is, I think, independent of the opinions that might be held as to the different degrees of success in the construction of probabilities or in particular interpretations. Throughout there is the presence of grave sincerity. I would gladly have a word or two directly from yourself when you can scribble a note without feeling me a bore for wanting it. People who write many letters without being forced to do so are fathomless wonders to me, but you have a special faculty for writing such letters as one cares to read, so it is a pity that the accomplishment should lie quite unused. I wonder if you have read Emerson's new essays. I like them very much.

Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 3d April, 1870.

We shall leave Berlin on Tuesday, so that I must ask you to send me the much-desired news of you to Vienna, addressed to the Hon. Robert Lytton, British Embassy. We do not yet know the name of the hotel where rooms have been taken for us. Our journey has not been unfortunate hitherto. The weather has been cold and cheerless, but we expected this, and on the 1st of April the sun began to shine. As for my Wenigkeit, it has never known a day of real bodily comfort since we got to Berlin: headache, sore throat, and Schnupfen have been alternately my companions, and have made my enjoyment very languid. But think of this as all past when you get my letter; for this morning I have a clearer head, the sun is shining, and the better time seems to be come for me. Mr. Lewes has had a good deal of satisfaction in his visits to laboratories and to the Charité, where he is just now gone for the third time to see more varieties of mad people, and hear more about Psychiatrie from Dr. Westphal, a quiet, unpretending little man, who seems to have been delighted with George's sympathetic interest in this (to me) hideous branch of practice. I speak with all reverence: the world can't do without hideous studies.

People have been very kind to us, and have overwhelmed us with attentions, but we have felt a little weary in the midst of our gratitude, and since my cold has become worse we have been obliged to cut off further invitations.

We have seen many and various men and women, but except Mommsen, Bunsen, and Du Bois Reymond, hardly any whose names would be known to you. If I had been in good health I should probably have continued to be more amused than tired of sitting on a sofa and having one person after another brought up to bow to me, and pay me the same compliment. Even as it was, I felt my heart go out to some good women who seemed really to have an affectionate feeling towards me for the sake of my books. But the sick animal longs for quiet and darkness.

The other night, at Dr. Westphal's, I saw a young English lady marvellously like Emily in face, figure, and voice. I made advances to her on the strength of that external resemblance, and found it carried out in the quickness of her remarks. But new gentlemen to be introduced soon divided us. Another elegant, pretty woman there was old Boeckh's daughter. One enters on all subjects by turns in these evening parties, which are something like reading the Conversations-Lexicon in a nightmare. Among lighter entertainments we have been four times to the opera, being tempted at the very beginning of our stay by Gluck, Mozart, and an opportunity of hearing Tannhäuser for the second time. Also we have enjoyed some fine orchestral concerts, which are to be had for sixpence! Berlin has been growing very fast since our former stay here, and luxury in all forms has increased so much that one only here and there gets a glimpse of the old-fashioned German housekeeping. But though later hours are becoming fashionable, the members of the Reichstag who have other business than politics complain of having to begin their sitting at eleven, ending, instead of beginning, at four, when the solid day is almost gone. We went to the Reichstag one morning, and were so fortunate as to hear Bismarck speak. But the question was one of currency, and his speech was merely a brief winding-up.

Now I shall think that I have earned a letter telling me all about you. May there be nothing but good to tell of! Pray give my best love to Emily, and my earnest wishes to Dr. Congreve, that he may have satisfaction in new work.

Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 18th May, 1870.

I gladly and gratefully keep the portrait.[10] For my own part, I should have said, without hesitation, "Prefix it to the 'Inquiry.'" One must not be unreasonable about portraits. How can a thing which is always the same be an adequate representation of a living being who is always varying—especially of a living being who is sensitive, bright, many-sided, as your brother was? But I think the impression which this portrait gives excites interest. I am often sorry for people who lose half their possible good in the world by being more alive to deficiencies than to positive merits.

I like to know that you have felt in common with me while you read "Jubal." Curiously enough, Mr. Lewes, when I first read it to him, made just the remark you make about the scene of Jubal coming with the lyre. We laughed at Mr. Bray's sharp criticism. Tell him it is not the fashion for authors ever to be in the wrong. They have always justifying reasons. But also it is the fashion for critics to know everything, so that the authors don't think it needful to tell their reasons.

Journal, 1870.

May 20.—I am fond of my little old book in which I have recorded so many changes, and shall take to writing in it again. It will perhaps last me all through the life that is left to me. Since I wrote in it last, the day after Thornie's death, the chief epochs have been our stay at Limpsfield, in Surrey, till near the beginning of December; my writing of "Jubal," which I finished on the 13th of January; the publication of the poem in the May number of Macmillan's Magazine; and our journey to Berlin and Vienna, from which we returned on the 6th of this month, after an absence of eight weeks. This is a fortnight ago, and little has been done by me in the interim. My health is in an uncomfortable state, and I seem to be all the weaker for the continual depression produced by cold and sore throat, which stretched itself all through our long journey. These small bodily grievances make life less desirable to me, though every one of my best blessings—my one perfect love, and the sympathy shown towards me for the sake of my works, and the personal regard of a few friends—have become much intensified in these latter days. I am not hopeful about future work. I am languid, and my novel languishes too. But to-morrow may be better than to-day.

May 25.—We started for Oxford, where we were to stay with the Rector of Lincoln and his wife. After luncheon G. and I walked alone through the town, which, on this first view, was rather disappointing to me. Presently we turned through Christ Church into the meadows, and walked along by the river. This was beautiful to my heart's content. The buttercups and hawthorns were in their glory, the chestnuts still in sufficiently untarnished bloom, and the grand elms made a border towards the town. After tea we went with Mrs. Pattison and the rector to the croquet-ground near the Museum. On our way we saw Sir Benjamin Brodie, and on the ground Professor Rawlinson, the "narrow-headed man;" Mrs. Thursfield and her son, who is a Fellow (I think, of Corpus); Miss Arnold, daughter of Mr. Thomas Arnold, and Professor Phillips, the geologist. At supper we had Mr. Bywater and Miss Arnold, and in chat with them the evening was passed.

May 26.—G. and I went to the Museum, and had an interesting morning with Dr. Rolleston, who dissected a brain for me. After lunch we went again to the Museum, and spent the afternoon with Sir Benjamin Brodie, seeing various objects in his laboratories; among others, the method by which weighing has been superseded in delicate matters by measuring in a graduated glass tube. Afterwards Mrs. Pattison took me a drive in her little pony carriage round by their country refuge, the Firs, Haddington, and by Littlemore, where I saw J. H. Newman's little conventual dwelling. Returning, we had a fine view of the Oxford towers. To supper came Sir Benjamin and Lady Brodie.

May 27.—In the morning we walked to see the two Martyrs' Memorial, and then to Sir Benjamin Brodie's pretty place near the river and bridge. Close by their grounds is the original ford whence the place took its name. The Miss Gaskells were staying with them, and, after chatting some time, we two walked with Sir Benjamin to New College, where we saw the gardens surrounded by the old city wall; the chapel where William of Wykeham's crosier is kept; and the cloisters, which are fine, but gloomy, and less beautiful than those of Magdalen, which we saw in our walk on Thursday before going to the Museum. After lunch we went to the Bodleian, and then to the Sheldonian Theatre, where there was a meeting à propos of Palestine Exploration. Captain Warren, conductor of the Exploration at Jerusalem, read a paper, and then Mr. Deutsch gave an account of the interpretation, as hitherto arrived at, of the Moabite Stone. I saw squeezes of this stone for the first time, with photographs taken from the squeezes. After tea Mrs. Thursfield kindly took us to see a boat-race. We saw it from the Oriel barge, under the escort of Mr. Crichton, Fellow of Merton, who, on our return, took us through the lovely gardens of his college. At supper were Mr. Jowett, Professor Henry Smith, and Miss Smith, his sister, Mr. Fowler, author of "Deductive Logic," etc.

May 28.—After a walk to St. John's College we started by the train for London, and arrived at home about two o'clock.

May 29.—Mr. Spencer, Mrs. Burne-Jones, and Mr. Crompton came. I read aloud No. 3 of "Edwin Drood."

May 30.—We went to see the autotypes of Michael Angelo's frescoes, at 36 Rathbone Place. I began Grove on the "Correlation of the Physical Forces"—needing to read it again—with new interest, after the lapse of years.

Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 13th June, 1870.

Dr. Reynolds advises Mr. Lewes to leave London again, and go to the bracing air of the Yorkshire coast. I said that we should be here till the beginning of August, but the internal order proposes and the external order disposes—if we are to be so priggish as to alter all our old proverbs into agreement with new formulas! Dickens's death came as a great shock to us. He lunched with us just before we went abroad, and was telling us a story of President Lincoln having told the Council, on the day he was shot, that something remarkable would happen, because he had just dreamt, for the third time, a dream which twice before had preceded events momentous to the nation. The dream was, that he was in a boat on a great river, all alone, and he ended with the words, "I drift—I drift—I drift." Dickens told this very finely. I thought him looking dreadfully shattered then. It is probable that he never recovered from the effect of the terrible railway accident.

Letter to Madame Bodichon, 23d June, 1870, from Cromer.

We have been driven away from home again by the state of Mr. Lewes's health. Dr. Reynolds recommended the Yorkshire coast; but we wanted to know Cromer, and so we came here first, for the sake of variety. To me the most desirable thing just now seems to be to have one home, and stay there till death comes to take me away. I get more and more disinclined to the perpetual makeshifts of a migratory life, and care more and more for the order and habitual objects of home. However, there are many in the world whose whole existence is a makeshift, and perhaps the formula which would fit the largest number of lives is "a doing without, more or less patiently." The air just now is not very invigorating anywhere, I imagine, and one begins to be very anxious about the nation generally, on account of the threatening drought.

Letter to the Hon. Mrs. Robert Lytton (now Lady Lytton), 8th July, 1870, from Harrogate.

I did not like to write to you[11] until Mr. Lytton sent word that I might do so, because I had not the intimate knowledge that would have enabled me to measure your trouble; and one dreads, of all things, to speak or write a wrong or unseasonable word when words are the only signs of interest and sympathy that one has to give. I know now, from what your dear husband has told us, that your loss is very keenly felt by you, that it has first made you acquainted with acute grief, and this makes me think of you very much. For learning to love any one is like an increase of property—it increases care, and brings many new fears lest precious things should come to harm. I find myself often thinking of you with that sort of proprietor's anxiety, wanting you to have gentle weather all through your life, so that your face may never look worn and storm-beaten, and wanting your husband to be and do the very best, lest anything short of that should be disappointment to you. At present the thought of you is all the more with me because your trouble has been brought by death; and for nearly a year death seems to me my most intimate daily companion. I mingle the thought of it with every other, not sadly, but as one mingles the thought of some one who is nearest in love and duty with all one's motives. I try to delight in the sunshine that will be when I shall never see it any more. And I think it is possible for this sort of impersonal life to attain great intensity—possible for us to gain much more independence than is usually believed of the small bundle of facts that make our own personality. I don't know why I should say this to you, except that my pen is chatting as my tongue would if you were here. We women are always in danger of living too exclusively in the affections, and though our affections are, perhaps, the best gifts we have, we ought also to have our share of the more independent life—some joy in things for their own sake. It is piteous to see the helplessness of some sweet women when their affections are disappointed; because all their teaching has been that they can only delight in study of any kind for the sake of a personal love. They have never contemplated an independent delight in ideas as an experience which they could confess without being laughed at. Yet surely women need this sort of defence against passionate affliction even more than men. Just under the pressure of grief, I do not believe there is any consolation. The word seems to me to be drapery for falsities. Sorrow must be sorrow, ill must be ill, till duty and love towards all who remain recover their rightful predominance. Your life is so full of those claims that you will not have time for brooding over the unchangeable. Do not spend any of your valuable time now in writing to me, but be satisfied with sending me news of you through Mr. Lytton when he has occasion to write to Mr. Lewes.

I have lately finished reading aloud Mendelssohn's "Letters," which we had often resolved and failed to read before. They have been quite cheering to us from the sense they give of communion with an eminently pure, refined nature, with the most rigorous conscience in art. In the evening we have always a concert to listen to—a concert of modest pretensions, but well conducted enough to be agreeable.

I hope this letter of chit-chat will not reach you at a wrong moment. In any case, forgive all mistakes on the part of one who is always yours sincerely and affectionately.

Journal, 1870.

Aug. 4.—Two months have been spent since the last record! Their result is not rich, for we have been sent wandering again by G.'s want of health. On the 15th June we went to Cromer, on the 30th to Harrogate, and on the 18th July to Whitby, where Mrs. Burne-Jones also arrived on the same day. On Monday, August 1, we came home again for a week only, having arranged to go to Limpsfield next Monday. To-day, under much depression, I begin a little dramatic poem,[12] the subject of which engaged my interest at Harrogate.

Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 12th Aug. 1870.

We, too, you see, have come back to a well-tried refuge—the same place that soothed us in our troubles last October—and we especially delight in this deep country after the fuss which belongs even to quiet watering-places, such as Cromer, Harrogate, and Whitby, which are, after all, "alleys where the gentle folks live." We are excited, even among the still woods and fields, by the vicissitudes of the war, and chiefly concerned because we cannot succeed in getting the day's Times. We have entered into the period which will be marked in future historical charts as "The period of German ascendency." But how saddening to think of the iniquities that the great harvest-moon is looking down on! I am less grieved for the bloodshed than for the hateful trust in lies which is continually disclosed. Meanwhile Jowett's "Translation of Plato" is being prepared for publication, and he has kindly sent us the sheets of one volume. So I pass from discussions of French lying and the Nemesis that awaits it to discussions about rhetorical lying at Athens in the fourth century before Christ. The translations and introductions to the "Dialogues" seem to be charmingly done.

Letter to Madame Bodichon, 25th Aug. 1870.

We shall return to town on Monday, various small reasons concurring to make us resolve on quitting this earthly paradise. I am very sorry for the sufferings of the French nation; but I think these sufferings are better for the moral welfare of the people than victory would have been. The war has been drawn down on them by an iniquitous government; but in a great proportion of the French people there has been nourished a wicked glorification of selfish pride, which, like all other conceit, is a sort of stupidity, excluding any true conception of what lies outside their own vain wishes. The Germans, it seems, were expected to stand like toy-soldiers for the French to knock them down. It is quite true that the war is in some respects the conflict of two differing forms of civilization. But whatever charm we may see in the southern Latin races, this ought not to blind us to the great contributions which the German energies have made in all sorts of ways to the common treasure of mankind. And who that has any spirit of justice can help sympathizing with them in their grand repulse of the French project to invade and divide them? If I were a Frenchwoman, much as I might wail over French sufferings, I cannot help believing that I should detest the French talk about the "Prussians." They wanted to throttle the electric eel for their own purposes.

But I imagine that you and the doctor would not find us in much disagreement with you in these matters. One thing that is pleasant to think of is the effort made everywhere to help the wounded.

Journal, 1870.

Oct. 27.—On Monday the 8th August we went to our favorite Surrey retreat—Limpsfield—and enjoyed three weeks there reading and walking together. The weather was perfect, and the place seemed more lovely to us than before. Aloud I read the concluding part of Walter Scott's Life, which we had begun at Harrogate; two volumes of Froude's "History of England," and Comte's "Correspondence with Valat." We returned on Monday the 29th.

During our stay at Limpsfield I wrote the greater part of "Armgart," and finished it at intervals during September. Since then I have been continually suffering from headache and depression, with almost total despair of future work. I look into this little book now to assure myself that this is not unprecedented.

Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 18th Nov. 1870.

Yesterday, for the first time, we went to hear A. (a popular preacher). I remembered what you had said about his vulgar, false emphasis; but there remained the fact of his celebrity. I was glad of the opportunity. But my impressions fell below the lowest judgment I ever heard passed upon him. He has the gift of a fine voice, very flexible and various; he is admirably fluent and clear in his language, and every now and then his enunciation is effective. But I never heard any pulpit reading and speaking which in its level tone was more utterly common and empty of guiding intelligence or emotion; it was as if the words had been learned by heart and uttered without comprehension by a man who had no instinct of rhythm or music in his soul. And the doctrine! It was a libel on Calvinism that it should be presented in such a form. I never heard any attempt to exhibit the soul's experience that was more destitute of insight. The sermon was against fear, in the elect Christian, as being a distrust of God; but never once did he touch the true ground of fear—the doubt whether the signs of God's choice are present in the soul. We had plenty of anecdotes, but they were all poor and pointless—Tract Society anecdotes of the feeblest kind. It was the most superficial grocer's-back-parlor view of Calvinistic Christianity; and I was shocked to find how low the mental pitch of our society must be, judged by the standard of this man's celebrity.

Mr. Lewes was struck with some of his tones as good actor's tones, and was not so wroth as I was. But just now, with all Europe stirred by events that make every conscience tremble after some great principle as a consolation and guide, it was too exasperating to sit and listen to doctrine that seemed to look no further than the retail Christian's tea and muffins. He said "Let us approach the throne of God" very much as he might have invited you to take a chair; and then followed this fine touch—"We feel no love to God because he hears the prayers of others; it is because he hears my prayer that I love him."

You see I am relieving myself by pouring out my disgust to you. Oh, how short life—how near death—seems to me! But this is not an uncheerful thought. The only great dread is the protraction of life into imbecility or the visitation of lingering pain. That seems to me the insurmountable calamity, though there is an ignorant affectation in many people of underrating what they call bodily suffering. I systematically abstain from correspondence, yet the number of acquaintances and consequent little appeals so constantly increases that I often find myself inwardly rebelling against the amount of note-writing that I cannot avoid. Have the great events of these months interfered with your freedom of spirit in writing? One has to dwell continually on the permanent, growing influence of ideas in spite of temporary reactions, however violent, in order to get courage and perseverance for any work which lies aloof from the immediate wants of society. You remember Goethe's contempt for the Revolution of '30 compared with the researches on the Vertebrate Structure of the Skull? "My good friend, I was not thinking of those people." But the changes we are seeing cannot be doffed aside in that way.

Letter to Madame Bodichon, Nov. 1870.

Lying awake early in the morning, according to a bad practice of mine, I was visited with much compunction and self-disgust that I had ever said a word to you about the faults of a friend whose good qualities are made the more sacred by the endurance his lot has in many ways demanded. I think you may fairly set down a full half of any alleged grievances to my own susceptibility, and other faults of mine which necessarily call forth less agreeable manifestations from others than as many virtues would do, if I had them. I trust to your good sense to have judged well in spite of my errors in the presentation of any matter. But I wish to protest against myself, that I may, as much as possible, cut off the temptation to what I should like utterly to purify myself from for the few remaining years of my life—the disposition to dwell for a moment on the faults of a friend.

Tell the flower and fern giver, whoever it may be, that some strength comes to me this morning from the pretty proof of sympathy.

Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 2d Dec. 1870.

I have it on my conscience that I may not have given you a clear impression of my wishes about the poor pensioner who was in question between us to-day, so I write at once to secure us both against a possible misunderstanding. I would rather not apply any more money in that direction, because I know of other channels[13] —especially a plan which is being energetically carried out for helping a considerable group of people without almsgiving, and solely by inducing them to work—into which I shall be glad to pour a little more aid. The repugnance to have relief from the parish was a feeling which it was good to encourage in the old days of contra-encouragement to sturdy pauperism; but I question whether one ought now to indulge it, and not rather point out the reasons why, in a case of real helplessness, there is no indignity in receiving from a public fund.

After you had left me, it rang in my ears that I had spoken of my greater cheerfulness as due to a reduced anxiety about myself and my doings, and had not seemed to recognize that the deficit or evil in other lives could be a cause of depression. I was not really so ludicrously selfish while dressing myself up in the costume of unselfishness. But my strong egoism has caused me so much melancholy, which is traceable simply to a fastidious yet hungry ambition, that I am relieved by the comparative quietude of personal craving which age is bringing. That is the utmost I have to boast of, and, really, to be cheerful in these times could only be a virtue in the sense in which it was felt to be so by the old Romans when they thanked their general for not despairing of the republic.

I have been reading aloud to Mr. Lewes this evening Mr. Harrison's article on "Bismarckism," which made me cry—it is in some passages movingly eloquent.

Journal, 1870.

Dec. 2.—I am experimenting in a story ("Miss Brooke") which I began without any very serious intention of carrying it out lengthily. It is a subject which has been recorded among my possible themes ever since I began to write fiction, but will probably take new shapes in the development. I am to-day at p. 44. I am reading Wolf's "Prolegomena to Homer." In the evening, aloud, "Wilhelm Meister" again!

Dec. 12.—George's mother died this morning quite peacefully as she sat in her chair.

Dec. 17.—Reading "Quintus Fixlein" aloud to G. in the evening. Grote on Sicilian history.

Dec. 31.—On Wednesday the 21st we went to Ryde to see Madame Bodichon at Swanmore Parsonage, a house which she had taken for two months. We had a pleasant and healthy visit, walking much in the frosty air. On Christmas Day I went with her to the Ritualist Church which is attached to the parsonage, and heard some excellent intoning by the delicate-faced, tenor-voiced clergyman. On Wednesday last, the 28th, Barbara came up to town with us. We found the cold here more severe than at Ryde; and the papers tell us of still harder weather about Paris, where our fellow-men are suffering and inflicting horrors.

Here is the last day of 1870. I have written only one hundred pages—good printed pages—of a story which I began about the opening of November, and at present mean to call "Miss Brooke." Poetry halts just now.

Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 2d Jan. 1871.

We spent our Christmas in the Isle of Wight, and on Christmas Day I went to a Ritualist church and heard some fine intoning of the service by a clear, strong, tenor voice, sweet singing from boys' throats, and all sorts of Catholic ceremonial in a miniature way.

It is good to see what our neighbors are doing. To live in seclusion with one's own thoughts is apt to give one very false notions as to the possibilities of the present time in the matter of conversion either to superstition or anti-superstition.

In this cruel time, I no sooner hear of an affliction than I see it multiplied in some one of the endless forms of suffering created by this hellish war. In the beginning I could feel entirely with the Germans, and could say of that calamity called "victory," I am glad. But now I can be glad of nothing. No people can carry on a long, fierce war without being brutalized by it, more or less, and it pains me that the educated voices have not a higher moral tone about national and international duties and prospects. But, like every one else, I feel that the war is too much with me, and am rather anxious to avoid unwise speech about it than to utter what may seem to me to be wisdom. The pain is that one can do so little.

I have not read "Sir Harry Hotspur," but as to your general question, I reply that there certainly are some women who love in that way, but "their sex as well as I may chide them for it." Men are very fond of glorifying that sort of dog-like attachment. It is one thing to love because you falsely imagine goodness—that belongs to the finest natures—and another to go on loving when you have found out your mistake. But married constancy is a different affair. I have seen a grandly heroic woman who, out of her view as to the responsibilities of the married relation, condoned everything, took her drunken husband to her home again, and at last nursed and watched him into penitence and decency. But there may be two opinions even about this sort of endurance—i.e., about its ultimate tendency, not about the beauty of nature which prompts it. This is quite distinct from mere animal constancy. It is duty and human pity.

Letter to Colonel Hamley (now General Sir Edward Hamley), 24th Jan. 1871.

I write to say God bless you for your letter to the Times, of this morning. It contains the best expression of right principle—I was almost ready to say, the only good, sensible words—that I have yet seen on the actual state of things between the Germans and the French.

You will not pause, I trust, but go on doing what can be done only by one who is at once a soldier, a writer, and a clear-headed man of principle.

Journal, 1871.

March 19 (Sunday).—It is grievous to me how little, from one cause or other, chiefly languor and occasionally positive ailments, I manage to get done. I have written about two hundred and thirty-six pages (print) of my novel, which I want to get off my hands by next November. My present fear is that I have too much matter—too many momenti.

Letter to Mrs. Bray, 3d April, 1871.

I happened to-day to be talking to a very sweet-faced woman (the sister of Dr. Bridges, whom I think you know something of), and she mentioned, à propos of educating children in the love of animals, that she had felt the want of some good little book as a help in this matter. I told her of yours, and when I said that it was written by Mrs. Bray, the author of "Physiology for Schools," she said, "Oh, I know that book well." I have made her a present of my copy of "Duty to Animals," feeling that this was a good quarter in which to plant that offset. For she had been telling me of her practical interest in the infant and other schools in Suffolk, where she lives. We have had a great pleasure to-day in learning that our friend Miss Bury is engaged to be married to Mr. Geddes, a Scotch gentleman. There is a streak of sadness for her family in the fact that she is to go to India with her husband next November, but all else is bright in her prospect. It is very sweet to see, and think of, the happiness of the young. I am scribbling with an infirm head, at the end of the day, just for the sake of letting you know one proof, in addition doubtless to many others which you have already had, that your pretty little book is likely to supply a want.

Letter to Mrs. Gilchrist, 19th April, 1871.

We are very much obliged to you for your kind, methodical thoughtfulness as to all which is necessary for our accommodation at Brookbank, and also for your hints about the points of beauty to be sought for in our walks. That "sense of standing on a round world," which you speak of, is precisely what I most care for among out-of-door delights. The last time I had it fully was at St. Märgen, near Freiburg, on green hilltops, whence we could see the Rhine and poor France.

The garden has been, and is being, attended to, and I trust we shall not find the commissariat unendurable.

Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor, 6th June, 1871.

It seems like a resurrection of a buried-alive friendship once more to have a letter from you. Welcome back from your absorption in the Franchise! Somebody else ought to have your share of work now, and you ought to rest.

Ever since the 1st of May we have been living in this queer cottage, which belongs to Mrs. Gilchrist, wife of the Gilchrist who wrote the life of William Blake the artist. We have a ravishing country round us, and pure air and water; in short, all the conditions of health, if the east wind were away. We have old prints for our dumb companions—charming children of Sir Joshua's, and large-hatted ladies of his and Romney's. I read aloud—almost all the evening—books of German science, and other gravities. So, you see, we are like two secluded owls, wise with unfashionable wisdom, and knowing nothing of pictures and French plays. I confess that I should have gone often to see Got act if I had been in town, he is so really great as an actor. And yet one is ashamed of seeking amusement in connection with anything that belongs to poor, unhappy France. I am saved from the shame by being safely shut out from the amusement.

Letter to Madame Bodichon, 17th June, 1871.

How about Madame Mohl and her husband? I have been wondering through all the horrors whether M. Mohl had returned to Paris, and whether their house, containing, too probably, the results of much studious work, lies buried among ruins. But I will not further recall the sorrows in that direction.

I am glad to see the words "very satisfactory" in connection with the visit to Hitchin and Cambridge. Ely Cathedral I saw last year, but too cursorily. It has more of the massive grandeur that one adores in Le Mans and Chartres than most of our English cathedrals, though I am ready to recall the comparison as preposterous.

I don't know how long we shall stay here; perhaps, more or less, till the end of August, for I have given up the idea of going to the Scott Festival at Edinburgh, to which I had accepted an invitation. The fatigue of the long journey, with the crowd at the end, would be too much for me.

Let us know beforehand when you are about coming.

George is gloriously well, and studying, writing, walking, eating, and sleeping with equal vigor. He is enjoying the life here immensely. Our country could hardly be surpassed in its particular kind of beauty—perpetual undulation of heath and copse, and clear views of hurrying water, with here and there a grand pine wood, steep, wood-clothed promontories, and gleaming pools.

If you want delightful reading get Lowell's "My Study Windows," and read the essays called "My Garden Acquaintances" and "Winter."

Get the volumes of a very cheap publication—the "Deutscher Novellenschatz." Some of the tales are remarkably fine. I am reading aloud the last three volumes, which are even better than the others. I have just been so deeply interested in one of the stories—"Diethelm von Buchenberg"—that I want everybody to have the same pleasure who can read German.

Letter to Mrs. Gilchrist, 3d July, 1871.

We are greatly obliged to you for the trouble you have so sympathetically taken on our behalf, and we shall prepare to quit our quiet shelter on Wednesday, the 2d of August. During the first weeks of our stay I did not imagine that I should ever be so fond of the place as I am now. The departure of the bitter winds, some improvement in my health, and the gradual revelation of fresh and fresh beauties in the scenery, especially under a hopeful sky such as we have sometimes had—all these conditions have made me love our little world here and wish not to quit it until we can settle in our London home. I have the regret of thinking that it was my original indifference about it (I hardly ever like things until they are familiar) that hindered us from securing the cottage until the end of September, for the chance of coming to it again after a temporary absence. But all regrets ought to be merged in thankfulness for the agreeable weeks we have had, and probably shall have till the end of July. And among the virtues of Brookbank we shall always reckon this, that our correspondence about it has been with you rather than with any one else, so that, along with the country, we have had a glimpse of your ready, quick-thoughted kindness.

Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 13th July, 1871.

One word to you in response to Emily's note, which comes to me this morning, and lets me know that by this time she is probably in the last hour of her unmarried life. My thoughts and love and tender anxiety are with her and with all of you. When you receive this she will, I suppose, be far away, and it is of little consequence that I can make no new sign to her of my joy in her joy.

For the next few weeks my anxiety will be concentrated on you and yours at Yarmouth. Pray, when your mind and body are sufficiently free from absorbing occupation, remember my need of news about you, and write to me. The other day I seemed to get a glimpse of you through Mrs. Call, who told me that you looked like a new creature—so much stronger than you were wont; and she told me of Dr. Congreve's address at the school, which raised my keenest sympathy, and made me feel myself a very helpless friend.

Please give my love to the children, and tell Sophy especially that I think her happy in this—that there is a place made for all the effort of her young life to fill it with something like the goodness and brightness which she has known and has just now to part with. I expect her to be your guardian angel, perhaps in a new way—namely, in saving you from some fatigue about details.

Letter to John Blackwood, 15th July, 1871.

I still feel that I owe you my thanks for your kind letter, although Mr. Lewes undertook to deliver them in the first instance. You certainly made a seat at the Commemoration Table[14] look more tempting to me than it had done before; but I think that prudence advises me to abstain from the fatigue and excitement of a long railway journey, with a great gathering at the end of it. If there is a chance that "Middlemarch" will be good for anything, I don't want to break down and die without finishing it. And whatever "the tow on my distaff" may be, my strength to unwind it has not been abundant lately.

À propos of bodily prosperity, I am sincerely rejoiced to know, by your postscript this morning, that Mr. Simpson is recovered. I hope he will not object to my considering him a good friend of mine, though it is so long since I saw him. The blank that is left when thorough workers like him are disabled is felt not only near at hand, but a great way off. I often say—after the fashion of people who are getting older—that the capacity for good work, of the kind that goes on without trumpets, is diminishing in the world.

The continuous absence of sunshine is depressing in every way, and makes one fear for the harvest, and so grave a fear that one is ashamed of mentioning one's private dreariness. You cannot play golf in the rain, and I cannot feel hopeful without the sunlight; but I dare say you work all the more, whereas when my spirits flag my work flags too.

I should have liked to see Principal Tulloch again, and to have made the acquaintance of Captain Lockhart, whose writing is so jaunty and cheery, yet so thoroughly refined in feeling. Perhaps I may still have this pleasure in town, when he comes up at the same time with you. Please give my kind regards to Mr. William Blackwood.

Letter to John Blackwood, 24th July, 1871.

Thanks for the prompt return of the MS., which arrived this morning.

I don't see how I can leave anything out, because I hope there is nothing that will be seen to be irrelevant to my design, which is to show the gradual action of ordinary causes rather than exceptional, and to show this in some directions which have not been from time immemorial the beaten path—the Cremorne walks and shows of fiction. But the best intentions are good for nothing until execution has justified them. And you know I am always compassed about with fears. I am in danger in all my designs of parodying dear Goldsmith's satire on Burke, and think of refining when novel-readers only think of skipping.

We are obliged to turn out of this queer cottage next week; but we have been fortunate enough to get the more comfortable house on the other side of the road, so that we can move without any trouble. Thus our address will continue to be the same until the end of August.

Tennyson, who is one of the "hill-folk" about here, has found us out.

Letter to the Hon. Mrs. Robert Lytton[15] (now Lady Lytton), 25th July, 1871.

This morning your husband's letter came to us, but if I did not know that it would be nearly a week before any words of mine could reach you, I should abstain from writing just yet, feeling that in the first days of sorrowing it is better to keep silence. For a long while after a great bereavement our only companionship is with the lost one. Yet I hope it will not be without good to you to have signs of love from your friends, and to be reminded that you have a home in their affections, which is made larger for you by your trouble. For weeks my thought has been continually going out to you, and the absence of news has made me so fearful that I have mourned beforehand. I have been feeling that probably you were undergoing the bitterest grief you had ever known. But under the heart-stroke, is there anything better than to grieve? Strength will come back for the duty and the fellowship which gradually bring new contentments, but at first there is no joy to be desired that would displace sorrow.

What is better than to love and live with the loved? But that must sometimes bring us to live with the dead; and this too turns at last into a very tranquil and sweet tie, safe from change and injury.

You see, I make myself a warrant out of my regard for you, to write as if we had long been near each other. And I cannot help wishing that we were physically nearer—that you were not on the other side of Europe. We shall trust in Mr. Lytton's kindness to let us hear of you by and by. But you must never write except to satisfy your own longing. May all true help surround you, dear Mrs. Lytton, and whenever you can think of me, believe in me as yours with sincere affection.

Letter to Miss Mary Cross, 31st July, 1871.

I read your touching story[16] aloud yesterday to Mr. Lewes, and we both cried over it. Your brother wrote to me that you had doubts about giving your name. My faith is, that signature is right in the absence of weighty special reasons against it.

We think of you all very often, and feel ourselves much the richer for having a whole dear family to reckon among our friends. We are to stay here till the end of the month. When the trees are yellow, I hope you will be coming to see us in St. John's Wood. How little like the woods we have around us! I suppose Weybridge is more agreeable than other places at present, if it has any of its extra warmth in this arctic season.

Our best love, to your dear mother supremely, and then to all.

Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor, 2d Aug. 1871.

I always say that those people are the happiest who have a peremptory reason for staying in one place rather than another. Else I should be sorry for you that you are kept in London—by Parliamentary business, of course.

There is sunshine over our fields now, but the thermometer is only 64° in the house, and in the warmest part of the day I, having a talent for being cold, sit shivering, sometimes even with a warm-water bottle at my feet. I wonder if you went to the French plays to see the supreme Got? That is a refined pleasure which I enjoyed so much in Paris a few years ago that I was sorry to be out of reach of it this spring.

About the Crystal Palace music I remember feeling just what you mention—the sublime effect of the Handel choruses, and the total futility of the solos.

Letter to Mrs. Bray, 3d Aug. 1871.

Thanks for your little picture of things. Eminently acceptable in place of vague conjectures. I am a bitter enemy to make-believe about the human lot, but I think there is a true alleviation of distress in thinking of the intense enjoyment which accompanies a spontaneous, confident, intellectual activity. This may not be a counterpoise to the existing evils, but it is at least a share of mortal good, and good of an exquisite kind.

Are you not happy in the long-wished-for sunshine? I have a pretty lawn before me, with hills in the background. The train rushes by every now and then to make one more glad of the usual silence.

A good man writes to me from Scotland this morning, asking me if he is not right in pronouncing Romŏla, in defiance of the world around him (not a large world, I hope) who will say Romōla. Such is correspondence in these days; so that quantity is magnificent en gros but shabby en détail—i.e., in single letters like this.

Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 14th Aug. 1871.

We shall stay here only till the end of this month—at least, I have no hope that our propriétaires will be induced to protract their absence; and if the lingering smell of paint does not drive us away from the Priory again, we expect to stay there from the first of September, without projects of travel for many, many months.

We enjoy our roomy house and pretty lawn greatly. Imagine me seated near a window, opening under a veranda, with flower-beds and lawn and pretty hills in sight, my feet on a warm-water bottle, and my writing on my knees. In that attitude my mornings are passed. We dine at two; and at four, when the tea comes in, I begin to read aloud. About six or half-past we walk on to the commons and see the great sky over our head. At eight we are usually in the house again, and fill our evening with physics, chemistry, or other wisdom if our heads are at par; if not, we take to folly, in the shape of Alfred de Musset's poems, or something akin to them.

Letter to John Blackwood, 29th Oct. 1871.

Yesterday we returned from Weybridge, where, for a few days, I have been petted by kind friends (delightful Scotch people), and have had delicious drives in the pure autumn air. That must be my farewell to invalidism and holiday making. I am really better—not robust or fat, but perhaps as well as I am likely to be till death mends me.

Your account of Mr. Main[17] sets my mind at ease about him; for in this case I would rather have your judgment than any opportunity of forming my own. The one thing that gave me confidence was his power of putting his finger on the right passages, and giving emphasis to the right idea (in relation to the author's feeling and purpose). Apart from that, enthusiasm would have been of little value.

One feels rather ashamed of authoresses this week after the correspondence in the Times. One hardly knows which letter is in the worst taste. However, if we are to begin with marvelling at the little wisdom with which the world is governed, we can hardly expect that much wisdom will go to the making of novels.

I should think it quite a compliment if the general got through "Miss Brooke." Mr. Lewes amused himself with the immeasurable contempt that Mr. Casaubon would be the object of in the general's mind.

I hardly dare hope that the second part will take quite so well as the first, the effects being more subtile and dispersed; but Mr. Lewes seems to like the third part better than anything that has gone before it. But can anything be more uncertain than the reception of a book by the public? I am glad to see that the "Coming Race" has got into a fourth edition. Let us hope that the Koom Posh may be at least mitigated by the sale of a good book or two.

As for me, I get more and more unable to be anything more than a feeble sceptic about all publishing plans, and am thankful to have so many good heads at work for me. Allah illah allah!

Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 22d Nov. 1871.

We who are getting old together have the tie of common infirmities. But I don't find that the young troubles seem lighter on looking back. I prefer my years now to any that have gone before. I wish you could tell me the same thing about yourself. And, surely, writing your book is, on the whole, a joy to you—it is a large share in the meagre lot of mankind. All hail for the morrow! How many sweet laughs, how much serious pleasure in the great things others have done, you and I have had together in a past islet of time that remains very sunny in my remembrance.

Journal, 1871.

Dec. 1.—This day the first part of "Middlemarch" was published. I ought by this time to have finished the fourth part, but an illness which began soon after our return from Haslemere has robbed me of two months.

Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 15th Dec. 1871.

If you have not yet fallen in with Dickens's "Life" be on the lookout for it, because of the interest there is in his boyish experience, and also in his rapid development during his first travels in America. The book is ill organized, and stuffed with criticism and other matter which would be better in limbo; but the information about the childhood, and the letters from America, make it worth reading. We have just got a photograph of Dickens, taken when he was writing, or had just written, "David Copperfield"—satisfactory refutation of that keepsakey, impossible face which Maclise gave him, and which has been engraved for the "Life" in all its odious beautification. This photograph is the young Dickens, corresponding to the older Dickens whom I knew—the same face, without the unusually severe wear and tear of years which his latest looks exhibited.

Journal, 1872.

Dec. 20.—My health has become very troublesome during the last three weeks, and I can get on but tardily. Even now I am only at page 227 of my fourth part. But I have been also retarded by construction, which, once done, serves as good wheels for progress.

Letter to John Blackwood, 1st Jan. 1872.

Your good wishes and pleasant bits of news made the best part of my breakfast this morning. I am glad to think that, in desiring happiness for you during the new year, I am only desiring the continuance of good which you already possess.

I suppose we two, also, are among the happiest of mortals, yet we have had a rather doleful Christmas, the one great lack, that of health, having made itself particularly conspicuous in the surrounding fog. Having no grandchildren to get up a Christmas-tree for, we had nothing to divert our attention from our headaches.

Mr. Main's book broke the clouds a little, and now the heavens have altogether cleared, so that we are hoping to come back from a visit of three days to Weybridge with our strength renewed—if not like the eagle's, at least like a convalescent tomtit's.

The "Sayings" are set off by delightful paper and print, and a binding which opens with inviting ease. I am really grateful to every one concerned in the volume, and am anxious that it should not be in any way a disappointment. The selections seem to me to be made with an exquisite sensibility to the various lights and shades of life; and all Mr. Main's letters show the same quality. It is a great help to me to have such an indication that there exist careful readers for whom no subtilest intention is lost.

We have both read the story of the "Megara" with the deepest interest; indeed, with a quite exceptional enjoyment of its direct, unexaggerated painting.

The prescription of two days' golfing per week will, I hope, keep up your condition to the excellent pitch at which it was on your return from Paris. Good news usually acts as a tonic when one's case is not too desperate; and I shall be glad if you and we can get it in the form of more success for "Middlemarch." Dickens's "Life," you see, finds a large public ready to pay more. But the British mind has long entertained the purchase of expensive biographies. The proofs lately given that one's books don't necessarily go out like lucifer matches, never to be taken up again, make one content with moderate immediate results, which perhaps are as much as can reasonably be expected for any writing which does not address itself either to fashions or corporate interests of an exclusive kind.

Letter to John Blackwood, 18th Jan. 1872.

It is like your kindness to write me your encouraging impressions on reading the third book. I suppose it is my poor health that just now makes me think my writing duller than usual. For certainly the reception of the first book by my old readers is quite beyond my most daring hopes. One of them, who is a great champion of "Adam Bede" and "Romola," told Mr. Lewes yesterday that he thought "Middlemarch" surpassed them. All this is very wonderful to me. I am thoroughly comforted as to the half of the work which is already written; but there remains the terror about the unwritten. Mr. Lewes is much satisfied with the fourth book, which opens with the continuation of the Featherstone drama.

We went yesterday to the Tichborne trial, which was an experience of great interest to me. We had to come away after the third hour of Coleridge's speaking; but it was a great enjoyment to me to hear what I did. Coleridge is a rare orator—not of the declamatory, but of the argumentative order.

Thanks, not formal, but sincerely felt, for the photographs. This likeness will always carry me back to the first time I saw you, in our little Richmond lodging, when I was thinking anxiously of "Adam Bede," as I now am of "Middlemarch."

I felt something like a shudder when Sir Henry Maine asked me last Sunday whether this would not be a very long book; saying, when I told him it would be four good volumes, that that was what he had calculated. However, it will not be longer than Thackeray's books, if so long. And I don't see how the sort of thing I want to do could have been done briefly.

I have to be grateful for the gift of "Brougham's Life," which will be a welcome addition to my means of knowing the time "when his ugliness had not passed its bloom."

Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 22d Jan. 1872.

Your letter seems to pierce the rainy fog with a little sunlight. Cold and clearness are the reverse of what we are usually having here. Until the last few days my chief consciousness has been that of struggling against inward as well as outward fog; but I am now better, and have only been dragged back into headachiness by a little too much fatigue from visitors. I give you this account as a preface to my renunciation of a journey to Dover, which would be very delightful, if I had not already lost too much time to be warranted in taking a holiday.

Next Saturday we are going to have a party—six to dine, and a small rush of people after dinner, for the sake of music. I think it is four years at least since we undertook anything of that kind.

A great domestic event for us has been the arrival of a new dog, who has all Ben's virtues, with more intelligence, and a begging attitude of irresistible charm. He is a dark-brown spaniel. You see what infantine innocence we live in!

Glad you are reading my demigod Milton! We also are rather old-fashioned in our light reading just now; for I have rejected Heyse's German stories, brand new, in favor of dear old Johnson's "Lives of the Poets," which I read aloud in my old age with a delicious revival of girlish impressions.

Journal, 1872.

Jan. 29.—It is now the last day but one of January. I have finished the fourth part—i.e., the second volume—of "Middlemarch." The first part, published on December 1, has been excellently well received; and the second part will be published the day after to-morrow. About Christmas a volume of extracts from my works was published, under the title, "Wise, Witty, and Tender Sayings, in Prose and Verse." It was proposed and executed by Alexander Main, a young man of thirty, who began a correspondence with me by asking me how to pronounce Romola, in the summer, when we were at Shottermill. Blackwood proposed that we should share the profits, but we refused.

Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 29th Jan. 1872.

I do lead rather a crawling life under these rainy fogs and low behavior of the barometer. But I am a little better, on the whole, though just now overdone with the fatigue of company. We have been to hear Coleridge addressing the jury on the Tichborne trial—a very interesting occasion to me. He is a marvellous speaker among Englishmen; has an exquisitely melodious voice, perfect gesture, and a power of keeping the thread of his syntax to the end of his sentence, which makes him delightful to follow. We are going some other day, if possible, to hear a cross-examination of Ballantyne's. The digest of the evidence which Coleridge gives is one of the best illustrations of the value or valuelessness of testimony that could be given. I wonder if the world, which retails Guppy anecdotes, will be anything the wiser for it.

Letter to John Blackwood, 21st Feb. 1872.

To hear of a friend's illness after he has got well through it is the least painful way of learning the bad news. I hope that your attack has been a payment of insurance.

You probably know what it grieved us deeply to learn the other day—that our excellent friend Mr. William Smith is dangerously ill. They have been so entirely happy and wrapped up in each other that we cannot bear to think of Mrs. Smith's grief.

Thanks for the list of sales since February 12th. Things are encouraging, and the voices that reach us are enthusiastic. But you can understand how people's interest in the book heightens my anxiety that the remainder should be up to the mark. It has caused me some uneasiness that the third part is two sheets less than the first. But Mr. Lewes insisted that the death of old Featherstone was the right point to pause at; and he cites your approbation of the part as a proof that effectiveness is secured in spite of diminished quantity. Still it irks me to ask 5s. for a smaller amount than that already given at the same price. Perhaps I must regard the value as made up solely by effectiveness, and certainly the book will be long enough.

I am still below par in strength, and am too much beset with visitors and kind attentions. I long for the quiet spaces of time and the absence of social solicitations that one enjoys in the country, out of everybody's reach.

I am glad to hear of the pleasure "Middlemarch" gives in your household: that makes quite a little preliminary public for me.

Letter to Mrs. H. B. Stowe, 4th Mch. 1872.

I can understand very easily that the two last years have been full for you of other and more imperative work than the writing of letters not absolutely demanded either by charity or business. The proof that you still think of me affectionately is very welcome now it is come, and all the more cheering because it enables me to think of you as enjoying your retreat in your orange orchard—your western Sorrento—the beloved Rabbi still beside you. I am sure it must be a great blessing to you to bathe in that quietude—as it always is to us when we go out of reach of London influences, and have the large space of country days to study, walk, and talk in. Last year we spent our summer months in Surrey, and did not leave England. Unhappily, the country was not so favorable to my bodily health as to my spiritual, and on our return to town I had an illness which was the climax of the summer's malaise. That illness robbed me of two months, and I have never quite recovered a condition in which the strict duties of the day are not felt as a weight. But just now we are having some clear spring days, and I am in hope of prospering better, the sunshine being to me the greatest visible good of life—what I call the wealth of life, after love and trust.

Letter to Mrs. H. B. Stowe, 8th Mch. 1872.

When I am more at liberty I will certainly read Mr. Owen's books, if he is good enough to send them to me. I desire on all subjects to keep an open mind, but hitherto the various phenomena reported or attested in connection with ideas of spirit-intercourse, "psychion," and so on, have come before me here in the painful form of the lowest charlatanerie. Take Mr. H. as an example of what I mean. I could not choose to enter a room where he held a séance. He is an object of moral disgust to me; and nothing of late reported by Mr. Crookes, Lord Lindsay, and the rest carries conviction to my mind that Mr. H. is not simply an impostor, whose professedly abnormal manifestations have varied their fashion in order to create a new market, just as if they were papier mâché wares or pomades for the idle rich. But apart from personal contact with people who get money by public exhibitions as mediums, or with semi-idiots, such as those who make a court for a Mrs. Guppy or other feminine personage of that kind, I would not willingly place any barriers between my mind and any possible channel of truth affecting the human lot.

The spirit in which you have written in the paper you kindly sent me is likely to teach others—to rouse them, at least, to attention in a case where you have been deeply impressed.

I write to you quite openly, dear friend, but very imperfectly, for my letters are always written in shreds of time.

Letter to John Blackwood, 14th Mch. 1872.

Thanks for the budget of this morning. The sales, we think, are very cheering, and we may well be content if they continue in the same ratio. But the Greek proverb about the beginning being the half of the whole wants as much defining and excepting from as most other proverbs.

I have just had sent me a copy of the magazine Für die Literatur des Auslander, containing a review of "Miss Brooke," which will be good for Asher's edition, and is otherwise satisfactory as an intelligent appreciation. It mentions at the end the appearance of Mr. Main's book, "The Sayings." A Frenchman, apparently accomplished, a M. Landolphe, who has made some important translations, is going to translate the whole of "Middlemarch;" and one of the contributors to the Revue des Deux Mondes has written for leave to extract Dorothea's history.

I fancy we have done a good turn to English authors generally by setting off Asher's series, for we have heard that Tauchnitz has raised his offers. There is another way in which benefit might come that would be still more desirable—namely, to make him more careful in his selections of books for reprint. But I fear that this effect is not so certain. You see Franz Duncker, who publishes the German translation of "Middlemarch," has also begun an English series. This is really worth while, for the Germans are excellent readers of our books. I was astonished to find so many in Berlin who really knew one's books, and did not merely pay compliments after the fashion of the admirers who made Rousseau savage—running after him to pay him visits, and not knowing a word of his writing.

You and other good readers have spoiled me, and made me rather shudder at being read only once; and you may imagine how little satisfaction I get from people who mean to please me by saying that they shall wait till "Middlemarch" is finished, and then sit up to read it "at one go-off."

We are looking for a country retreat not too far from town, so that we may run up easily. There is nothing wanting to our happiness except that "Middlemarch" should be well ended without growing signs of its author's debility.

Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor, 17th March, 1872.

Before I received your letter this morning, I was going to write you a word of sympathy, knowing how deeply you would be feeling the death of Mazzini. Such a man leaves behind him a wider good than the loss of his personal presence can take away.

"The greatest gift the hero leaves his race
Is to have been a hero."

I must be excused for quoting my own words, because they are my credo. I enter thoroughly into your sense of wealth in having known him.

Brighton does not suit Mr. Lewes. But he was near going there for a night a little while ago to see our friends, Mr. and Mrs. William Smith. He (the author of "Thorndale," etc.) is, I fear, wasting fatally with organic disease, and we grieve much at the too-probably near parting of a husband and wife who have been among the perfectly happy couples of the world. She is a charming woman, and I wish that you may happen to know her.

Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 22d March, 1872.

Owing to my loss of two months in illness, and my infirm health ever since, I have not yet finished the writing of "Middlemarch." This payment of wintry arrears makes one prefer the comforts of a London home; but we are obliged to see more company than my health is equal to, and for this reason I dare say we shall soon migrate. To-day we have been to our last morning concert—or Saturday Pop.—held on a Friday because of the University boat-race to-morrow. These concerts are an easy pleasure which we are sorry to part with. This is one of my bad weeks, owing probably to the change in the weather, and I am constantly struggling with hemicrania and malaise. Even writing this scrap of a note is the feather too much, and I must leave off. You have known too much of nervous weakness not to understand this.

Journal, 1872.

May 8.—I have been reposing for more than a week in the hope of getting stronger, my life having been lately a swamp of illness, with only here and there a bit of firm walking. In consequence of this incessant interruption (almost every week having been half nullified for me so far as my work has been concerned) I have only finished the fifth book, and have still three books to write—equal to a large volume and a half.

The reception of the book hitherto has been quite beyond what I could have believed beforehand, people exalting it above everything else I have written. Kohn is publishing an English edition in Germany; Duncker is to publish a translation; and Harpers pay me £1200 for reprinting it in America.

Letter to Madame Bodichon, 4th June, 1872.

I am glad to know that you are having a time of refreshing in fine scenery, with entire freedom to paint. I am in a corresponding state of relief from the noises and small excitements that break up the day and scatter one's nervous energy in London.

We have been in our hiding-place about twelve days now, and I am enjoying it more and more—getting more bodily ease and mental clearness than I have had for the last six months. Our house is not in the least beautiful, but it is well situated and comfortable, perfectly still in the middle of a garden surrounded by fields and meadows, and yet within reach of shops and civilization.

We managed to get to the Academy one day before leaving town. I was delighted with Walker's picture—were you?—and Mason's unfinished Reaper, and a few, very few, others.

Also we went twice to the opera in order to save ourselves from any yearnings after it when we should have settled in the country.

We tell no one our address, and have our letters sent on from the Priory.

Letter to Mrs. H. B. Stowe, 4th June, 1872.

We too are in a country refuge, you see, and this bit of Surrey, as I dare say you know, is full of beauty of the too garden-like sort for which you pity us. How different from your lodge in the wilderness! I have read your description three or four times—it enchants me so thoroughly—and Mr. Lewes is just as much enamoured of it. We shall never see it, I imagine, except in the mirror of your loving words; but thanks, many and warm, dear friend, for saying that our presence would be welcome. I have always had delight in descriptions of American forests since the early days when I read "Atala," which I believe that you would criticise as half unveracious. I dwelt on the descriptions in "Dred" with much enjoyment.

Pray give my special thanks to the Professor for his letter. His handwriting, which does really look like Arabic—a very graceful character, surely—happens to be remarkably legible to me, and I did not hesitate over a single word. Some of the words, as expressions of fellowship, were very precious to me, and I hold it very good of him to write to me that best sort of encouragement. I was much impressed with the fact—which you had told me—that he was the original of the "visionary boy" in "Old Town Folk;" and it must be deeply interesting to talk with him on his experience. Perhaps I am inclined, under the influence of the facts, physiological and psychological, which have been gathered of late years, to give larger place to the interpretation of vision-seeing as subjective than the Professor would approve. It seems difficult to limit—at least to limit with any precision—the possibility of confounding sense by impressions, derived from inward conditions, with those which are directly dependent on external stimulus. In fact, the division between within and without in this sense seems to become every year a more subtle and bewildering problem.

Your experience with the planchette is amazing; but that the words which you found it to have written were dictated by the spirit of Charlotte Brontë is to me (whether rightly or not) so enormously improbable, that I could only accept it if every condition were laid bare, and every other explanation demonstrated to be impossible. If it were another spirit aping Charlotte Brontë—if here and there at rare spots and among people of a certain temperament, or even at many spots and among people of all temperaments, tricksy spirits are liable to rise as a sort of earth-bubbles and set furniture in movement, and tell things which we either know already or should be as well without knowing—I must frankly confess that I have but a feeble interest in these doings, feeling my life very short for the supreme and awful revelations of a more orderly and intelligible kind which I shall die with an imperfect knowledge of. If there were miserable spirits whom we could help, then I think we should pause and have patience with their trivial-mindedness; but otherwise I don't feel bound to study them more than I am bound to study the special follies of a particular phase of human society. Others who feel differently, and are attracted towards this study, are making an experiment for us as to whether anything better than bewilderment can come of it. At present it seems to me that to rest any fundamental part of religion on such a basis is a melancholy misguidance of men's minds from the true sources of high and pure emotion.

I am comforted to think that you partly agree with me there.

I have not time to write more than this very imperfect fragmentary sketch of only one aspect which the question of spirit-communications wears to me at present—being always rather brain-weary after my morning's work, and called for by my husband to walk with him and read aloud to him. I spend nearly three hours every day in this exercise of reading aloud, which, happily, I can carry on without fatigue of lungs. Yet it takes strength as well as time.

Mr. Lewes is gone into town to-day, so I have an additional hour at liberty, and have been glad to be able to send you a letter which is not worth anything, indeed, but which satisfies my need to thank you and the Professor for your sweet friendliness—very sweet to me, I assure you. Please accept my entire frankness as a proof of that high value I set on you. And do not call anything I may have written a prejudice—it is simply a statement of how certain things appear to my inward eyesight, which I am ready to have rectified by more light.

About photographs—I have no photograph of myself, having always avoided having one taken. That makes me seem very selfish in being particularly glad to get yours.

Mrs. Fields, with the beautiful face and charming manners, sent me a letter a little while ago, inviting us in the most tempting way to go to Boston. She said that this pretty action was done at your prompting, which is just like you as you have always shown yourself to me.

Dear friend, how much you have lived through, both in the flesh and in the spirit! My experience has been narrow compared with yours. I assure you I feel this, so do not misinterpret anything I say to you as being written in a flippant or critical spirit. One always feels the want of the voice and eyes to accompany a letter and give it the right tone.

Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 4th July, 1872.

You were very good and dear to want to give me the pleasure of knowing that the news was good, instead of leaving me to my small stock of hopefulness. Ask Emily to care a little even now, with baby on her mind, that her old friends are the better for hearing that she is well. Four or five months ago it happens that I was writing some playfulness about a baby and baby's hair, which is now in print, to appear next month. I am not afraid that Emily should be revolted by my blasphemy!

Mr. Lewes had "a lovely time" from Saturday to Monday at Weybridge. He was feeling languid, and yet was tempted to sit at his desk. The little change has been very serviceable, and he is now bright.

Our first book, read aloud by me after we came down, was Wallace's "Eastern Archipelago," which, I think, you had spoken well of to Mr. Lewes. It is delightful. The biography of the infant ourang-outang alone is worth getting the book for. We are now in the middle of Tylor's "Primitive Culture," which is worth studying, and useful for reference on special points, if you happen to want knowledge about the ideas of the savage tribes.

Our days go by in delicious peace, unbroken except by my little inward anxieties about all unfinished work.

Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 19th July, 1872.

This morning came the joyful news that Gertrude has a fine healthy baby—a daughter. We have just been saying in our walk that by the end of this century our one-day-old granddaughter will probably be married and have children of her own, while we are pretty sure to be at rest. This obvious kind of wisdom does very well for discourse in the delicious sunshine, as we wander over a hilly, half fern-clad, half grassy wilderness called South Park, from which we can overlook two fertile bosky valleys. We like this bit of country better and better. As to health, I am not quite so prosperous as I was at first, but to make amends, Mr. Lewes is in a good average condition, and only now and then has a morning in which he is forced to wander about instead of going to his beloved work. We have had much happiness here, much sympathy in letters from far-off friends unknown in the flesh, and peaceful enjoyment of our occupations. But we have longed for more continuous warmth and brightness, and to-day may perhaps be the beginning of that one wanting condition.

Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 1st Aug. 1872(?).

The death of that honored, good creature, Mr. William Smith, touched us particularly, because of the perfect marriage-bond which had made the last eleven years of his life unspeakably precious both to him and his wife. Mr. Lewes offered to go to Brighton to see him; but he was so reduced, so very feeble in body, though he kept to the last much brightness of mind, that Mrs. Smith feared for him the excitement of seeing friends who came, specially, from a distance.

Letter to John Blackwood, 4th Aug. 1872.

I like to think that your journey was a success. But I had felt sure, that unless bad health or bad weather overtook you, both Mrs. Blackwood and you must have great happiness in taking that bright, lovely daughter abroad and watching her fresh impressions. I imagine her laudable indignation at the crushing of the little lizard! Those little creatures darting about the stones seem part of the happiness of Italian sunshine, as the small birds hopping after the rain seem part of the moist happiness at home.

I shall send Part VII. in a few days. Since Mr. Lewes tells me that the Spectator considers me the most melancholy of authors, it will perhaps be a welcome assurance to you that there is no unredeemed tragedy in the solution of the story.

Mr. Lewes examines the newspapers before I see them, and cuts out any criticisms which refer to me, so as to save me from these spiritual chills—though, alas! he cannot save me from the physical chills which retard my work more seriously. I had hoped to have the manuscript well out of my hands before we left this place at the end of the month, but the return of my dyspeptic troubles makes me unable to reckon on such a result.

It will be a good plan, I think, to quicken the publication towards the end; but we feel convinced that the slow plan of publication has been of immense advantage to the book in deepening the impression it produces. Still I shudder a little to think what a long book it will be—not so long as "Vanity Fair" or "Pendennis," however, according to my calculation.

How good the articles on French manners and domestic life are in "Maga." The spirit in which they are written is excellent.

The manuscript of "Middlemarch" bears the following inscription:

"To my dear Husband, George Henry Lewes, in this nineteenth year of our blessed union."

Letter to Mrs. Cross, Sept. 1872.

I am tired of behaving like an ungrateful wretch—making no sign in answer to affectionate words which have come to me with cheering effect. And I want to tell you and Mr. Hall (alas! for the dear old name[18] which had such cherished associations) that I long too much to see you all at Six-Mile Bottom, to give up utterly the prospect of that good. We imagine that the place is near Ipswich, which is no more than an hour and fifty minutes from London. If so, the journey would be easily managed, and would be worth taking for the sake of one whole day and two half days with you—just as if you were the hour nearer, at Weybridge—before we set our faces towards Germany. I am not hopeless that we might do that in the second week of September, if you are not quite disgusted with the thought of me as a person who is always claiming pity for small ailments, and also if Mr. Hall can secure me against being shot from the other side of the hedge by the Prince of Wales,[19] while we are discussing plantations.

I dare not count much on fulfilling any project, my life for the last year having been a sort of nightmare, in which I have been scrambling on the slippery bank of a pool, just keeping my head above water. But I shall be the happier for having told you that I delight in the double invitation for the sake of the love it assures me of, and that I do want to see you all.

You are all gloriously well, I hope, and Alkie looking more and more cherubic, and Emily and Florence blooming. My best love to all. Particular regards to J., and regrets that we were not on his route from Brindisi. I read his paper on New York with much interest and satisfaction.

You are often among my imaged companions both in dreaming and waking hours.

Letter to Mrs. Cross, Oct. 1872, from Homburg.

It was a delightful surprise to see your handwriting when we went to inquire at the Poste Restante. We had, on the whole, a fortunate journey, and are especially grateful to Mr. Hall for suggesting the route by Trèves, where we spent two nights and an exquisite day. I was continually reminded of Rome when we were wandering in the outskirts in search of the antiquities, and the river banks are a loveliness into the bargain which Rome has not. We had even an opportunity of seeing some dissipation, for there happened to be an excellent circus, where we spent our evening. The pretty country through which we passed had an additional interest for us about Libramont.

The air, the waters, the plantations here are all perfect—"only man is vile." I am not fond of denouncing my fellow-sinners, but gambling being a vice I have no mind to, it stirs my disgust even more than my pity. The sight of the dull faces bending round the gaming-tables, the raking up of the money, and the flinging of the coins towards the winners by the hard-faced croupiers, the hateful, hideous women staring at the board like stupid monomaniacs—all this seems to me the most abject presentation of mortals grasping after something called a good that can be seen on the face of this little earth. Burglary is heroic compared with it. I get some satisfaction in looking on, from the sense that the thing is going to be put down. Hell is the only right name for such places.

It was cruel to find the bitter cold just set in as we arrived. For two days we were as cold as in clear winter days at Berlin. There are no amusements for the evening here, and the pleasure of listening to the excellent band in the afternoons is diminished by the chillness which makes one fear to sit down in the open air. But we like being idle, and the days pass easily.

It is good to have in our memories the two happy days at Six-Mile Bottom; and the love that surrounded me and took care of me there is something very precious to believe in among hard-faced strangers. Much gratitude for the anticipated letter that will come to tell us more news of you by-and-by.

Letter to John Blackwood, 4th Oct. 1872.

At last I begin a letter which is intended not as a payment but as an acknowledgment of debt. It will have at least the recommendation of requiring no answer. After some perfect autumnal days we are languishing with headache from two days' damp and mugginess, and feel it almost as much work as we are equal to to endure our malaise. But on the whole we are not sorry that we came to this place rather than any other. On dry days the air is perfect, and the waters are really an enticing drink. Then there is a wood close by where we can wander in delicious privacy: which is really better than the company here, save and except a few friends whom we found at first, and who have now moved off to Baden. The Kursaal is to me a hell, not only for the gambling but for the light and heat of the gas, and we have seen enough of its monstrous hideousness. There is very little dramatic Stoff to be picked up by watching or listening. The saddest thing to be witnessed is the play of a young lady, who is only twenty-six years old, and is completely in the grasp of this mean, money-making demon. It made me cry to see her young, fresh face among the hags and brutally stupid men around her. Next year, when the gambling has vanished, the place will be delightful; there is to be a subvention from Government to keep up the beautiful grounds; and it is likely that there will be increase enough in the number of decent visitors to keep the town tolerably prosperous. One attraction it has above other German baths that I have seen is the abundance of pleasant apartments to be had, where one can be as peaceful as the human lot allows in a world of pianos.

Asher's cheap editions are visible everywhere by the side of Tauchnitz, but the outside is not, I think, quite equally recommendable and recommending.

We brought no books with us, but have furnished our table with German books which we bought at Frankfort, from learned writing about Menschlich Sprache and Vernunft down to Kotzebue's comedies, so that we have employment for the rainy hours when once our heads are clear of aches. The certainty that the weather is everywhere else bad will help our resolution to stay here till the 12th at least. In the mean time we hope to have the proof of the finale to "Middlemarch."

I am rejoiced to learn from Mr. William's letter that Mr. Simpson has returned from his excursion in good condition. That must be a comfort to you, both for friendship and for work's sake.

We mean to return by Paris, and hope that the weather will not drive us away from health and pleasure-seeking until the end of the month. I fear, from the accounts of your Scottish weather, that you will have enjoyed Strathtyrum less than usual, and will be resigned to Edinburgh before your proper time. How one talks about the weather! It is excusable here where there is no grave occupation, and no amusement for us, who don't gamble, except seeking health in walks and water drinking.

Letter to Mrs. Cross, 27th Oct. 1872, from Boulogne.

I had meant to write to you again from Germany, but I was hindered from doing so by the uncertainty of our plans, which vacillated between further wanderings in South Germany and the usual dreary railway journeying by Strasburg to Paris. As it was, we left Homburg on the 13th and had ten days of delicious autumnal weather and quietude at Stuttgart and Carlsruhe—ten days which made the heart of our enjoyment. We still hesitated whether we should go to Augsburg, and even Munich, making our way home through Germany and Belgium, and turning our shoulders on Paris. Our evil genius persuaded us to go to Paris and to make the journey by night—whence came headache and horrible disgust with the shops of the Rue de la Paix and the Boulevard. After going to Versailles in the rain, seeing the sad ruins of the Hotel de Ville, missing the Theatre Français, and getting "Patrie" in exchange, we rushed away to this place, where we are trying to recover the sense of benefit from our change, which forsook us on quitting old Germany. We have an affinity for what the world calls "dull places," and always prosper best in them. We are sure to be at home next week, and I hope before long to have some news of you there—some dear faces coming to bring it. We shall linger here a few days and take a favorable time for crossing, but our patience will hardly last beyond Friday.

Letter to Mrs. Wm. Smith, 1st Nov. 1872.

We returned yesterday evening from six weeks' absence in Germany, and I found your dear, sad letter among the many awaiting me. I prize very highly the fact that you like to write to me and bear me in your mind as one who has a certain fellowship in your sorrow; and I do trust that this letter may reach you in time to prevent you from thinking, even for a moment, that I could be indifferent about responding to any word you send me. I shall address it to the care of Blackwood & Sons, because I imagine you to be by this time in Edinburgh with that delightful friend, Mrs. Stirling, whom I had much kindness from many years ago when I was on a visit to Mr. and Mrs. George Combe. She took me to hear Dr. Guthrie and Dr. Candlish, and through her I saw Craigcrook. I like to think of those hours and her pleasant talk.

Mr. Lewes, I am thankful to say, has been getting more robust for the last two years, and is very bright and active. I think there is hardly any one left to whom he would so willingly have written or talked about the subjects which are filling his mind as that dear one who is gone from your side, but is perpetually present in your consciousness. To-day I have been reading the memorial article in Blackwood, and have been hoping that there is nothing in it which jars on your feeling. Everybody will think as I do—that the bits from your pen are worth all the rest. I have been especially moved, though, by the two stanzas quoted at the end. Mr. Lewes judges that the writer of the article did not personally know your husband, and wishes that more special touches had been given. I know, dear friend, that the sorrow is irremediable; but the pain—the anguish—will become less sharp and life will be less difficult. You will think of things to do such as he would approve of your doing, and every day will be sacred with his memory—nay, his presence. There is no pretence or visionariness in saying that he is still part of you. Mr. Lewes sends his affectionate regards, which you will not reject. We mention your name to each other with a certain tenderness, as if your sorrow somehow belonged to our love for each other. But I hardly dare to think of what these words which I have written mean. Sometimes in the midst of happiness I cry suddenly at the thought that there must come a parting. Are not you and I very near to one another? I mean in feeling.

Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor, 19th Nov. 1872.

I found a letter from dear Mrs. William Smith on my return, and I have had another since in answer to mine. It is inevitable that her sense of loss should deepen for some time to come. I am hoping that by-and-by active interests will arise to make her feel that her life is useful.

The article in Blackwood was chiefly valuable for the extracts it contained from Mrs. Smith's own memoir. One felt that the writer of the article had not known Mr. William Smith personally; but her sketches did something to supply that defect. Mr. Lewes felt a peculiar attachment to him. He had always been thoroughly sympathetic, both morally and intellectually, and it was a constant regret to us that he and Mrs. Smith were so far away. There was no man with whom Mr. Lewes would have found it so pleasant to discuss questions of science and philosophy—his culture was so rare and his disposition so free from littleness: and his wife was worthy of him.

Gertrude's little Blanche is a charming young lady—fat, cooing, and merry. It is a great comfort to see her with this hope fulfilled—I mean to see Gertrude with her hope fulfilled, and not Blanche, as the grammar seemed to imply. That small person's hopes are at present easy of fulfilment.

We have made but one expedition since our return, and that was to see the pictures at Bethnal Green—altogether a cheering and delightful sight. Of course you saw them long ago. The Troyon is my favorite.

Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 19th Nov. 1872.

I will impute your total silence towards me for many, many months to your preoccupation with the work now announced, and will not believe that a greeting from me at this time of the year will be less welcome than of old. I remember that last year one of your prettily-expressed wishes was that I should write another book and—I think you added—send it to you to read. On the strength of this remembrance, you will be one of the three exceptional people to whom we order "Middlemarch" to be sent. But do not write to me about it, because until a book has quite gone away from me and become entirely of the non-ego—gone thoroughly from the wine-press into the casks—I would rather not hear or see anything that is said about it.

Cara sent me word that you were looking, as usual, very pretty, and showing great energy on interesting occasions. But this was two months ago, and some detailed news from yourself would be a delightful gift.

I am getting stronger, and showing some meagre benefit from being indulged in all possible ways. Mr. Lewes makes a martyr of himself in writing all my notes and business letters. Is not that being a sublime husband? For all the while there are studies of his own being put aside—studies which are a seventh heaven to him.

Is there any one who does not need patience? For when one's outward lot is perfect, the sense of inward imperfection is the more pressing.

You are never long without entering into my thoughts, though you may send nothing fresh to feed them. But I am ashamed of expressing regard for my friends, since I do no earthly thing for them.

Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 22d Nov. 1872.

A kiss to you on your birthday! with gratitude for your delightful letter, such as only you can write me. How impossible it is to feel that we are as old as we are! Sometimes it seems a little while since you and I were walking over the Radford fields, with the youth in our limbs, talking and laughing with that easy companionship which it is difficult to find in later life. I am busy now reading Mr. Lewes's manuscript, which has been accumulating fast during my "Middlemarch" time. Did I tell you that in the last two years he has been mastering the principles of mathematics? That is an interesting fact, impersonally, at his age. Old Professor Stowe—Mrs. H. B. Stowe's husband—sent me this story, which is almost better than Topsy. He heard a school-master asking a little black girl the usual questions about creation—who made the earth, the sea, etc. At last came, "And who made you?" Some deliberation was necessary, after which she said, "Nobody; I was so afore." Expect to be immensely disappointed with the close of "Middlemarch." But look back to the Prelude. I wish I could take the wings of the morning every now and then to cheer you with an hour's chat, such as you feel the need of, and then fly back on the wings of the wind. I have the most vivid thoughts of you, almost like a bodily presence; but these do you no good, since you can only believe that I have them—and you are tired of believing after your work is done.

Letter to John Blackwood, 1st Dec. 1872.

Before your letter came, Mr. Lewes had been expressing to me his satisfaction (and he is very hard to satisfy with articles on me) in the genuineness of judgment, wise moderation, and excellent selection of points in "Maga's" review of "Middlemarch." I have just now been reading the review myself—Mr. Lewes had meant at first to follow his rule of not allowing me to see what is written about myself—and I am pleased to find the right moral note struck everywhere, both in remark and quotation. Especially I am pleased with the writer's sensibility to the pathos in Mr. Casaubon's character and position, and with the discernment he shows about Bulstrode. But it is a perilous matter to approve the praise which is given to our own doings.

I think that such an article as that which you hint at on the tone of the Bar is very desirable. We are usually at one on points of feeling. Is it not time now to insist that ability and not lying is the force of a barrister—that he has not to make himself a bad actor in order to put a case well, but to get the clearness and breadth of vision which will enable him to handle the evidence effectively? Untruthfulness usually ends by making men foolish. I have never read "Spiritual Wives," but judging from the extracts which have come before me, it must be a nasty book. Still, if people will be censors, let them weigh their words. I mean that the words were unfair by the disproportionateness of the condemnation which everybody with some conscience must feel to be one of the great difficulties in denouncing a particular person. Every unpleasant dog is only one of many, but we kick him because he comes in our way, and there is always some want of distributive justice in the kicking.

I shall be agreeably surprised if there is a respectable subscription for the four volumes. Already the numbers taken have been satisfactorily large, considering the indisposition of the public to buy books by comparison with other wares, and especially to buy novels at a high price. I fancy every private copy has done duty for a circle. Friends of mine in the country have implied that they lent their copies to all the readers in their neighborhood. A little fuss of advertisement, together with the reviews, will perhaps create a few more curious inquirers after the book, and impress its existence on the slower part of the reading world. But really the reading world is, after all, very narrow, as, according to the Spectator, the "comfortable" world also is—the world able to give away a sovereign without pinching itself. Those statistics just given about incomes are very interesting.

Letter to J. W. Cross, 11th Dec. 1872.

A thousand thanks for your kind interest in our project, and for the trouble you have taken in our behalf. I fear the land buying and building[20] is likely to come to nothing, and our construction to remain entirely of the aerial sort. It is so much easier to imagine other people doing wise things than to do them one's self! Practically, I excel in nothing but paying twice as much as I ought for everything. On the whole, it would be better if my life could be done for me, and I could look on. However, it appears that the question of the land at Shere may remain open until we can discuss it with you at Weybridge; and there is no telling what we may not venture on with your eyes to see through.

But, oh dear, I don't like anything that is troublesome under the name of pleasure.

Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 12th Dec. 1872.

I have had the news that you are safely landed at Pooree, so now I can write with some courage. I have got some comfort—I trust it is not false comfort—out of the probability that there will be much good mingled with the evil of this winter's exile for you. You must be the richer for it mentally, and your health may be the better—and then, you will be back again in the late spring. In this way I make myself contented under the incompleteness of our life without you, and I am determined not to grumble at my share of the loss which falls so sadly on Dr. Congreve and the children. Dr. Congreve kindly let me know when you had got through the trials of the Red Sea, rather better than might have been expected; and Sophie tells me that you speak of the brilliant coloring in your new world as quite equal to any description you had read. Beyond that all is a blank to me except the fact of your arrival at Pooree, and all my feeling is taken up with the joy there must have been in the meeting with Mr. Geddes. You find it very difficult to write in the heat—so don't make the thought of me disagreeable by associating it with a claim on you for a letter. I will be grateful for scraps from your correspondence with home, and wait for my turn when you come back to us. For ourselves, we think our little granddaughter, Blanche, the perfection of a baby. She is, dispassionately speaking, very pretty, and has a cooing, chanting song of her own which it makes me happy to hear. Mr. Lewes goes on at his writing with as much interest as ever, and is bringing the first part of his work into its final shape. Since we came home I have been reading his manuscript, which has been piling itself up in preparation for my leisure, and I have been wearing my gravest philosophic cap. Altogether we are dangerously happy. You remember Mrs. Blank of Coventry? You know hers was another name for astonishing cleverness in that town. Now, of course, she is old, and her cleverness seems to have a mouldy flavor. Apropos of the seventh book of "Middlemarch"—which you may not have read, but never mind—Mrs. Blank, having lain awake all night from compassion for Bulstrode, said, "Poor, dear creature, after he had done so much for that wretch, sitting up at night and attending on him! and I don't believe it was the brandy that killed him—and what is to become of Bulstrode now, he has nobody left but Christ!" I think this is worth sending to India, you see; it is a little bit of old Coventry life that may make you and Emily laugh with all the more lively memory in the midst of your strange scenery. But there is a hovering terror while I write to you from far off, lest my trivialities should find you when you are ill or have some cause for being sad. In any case, however, you will take my letter for a simple proof that I dwell on you and Emily as images constantly present in my mind, and very often moving to the foreground in my contemplation. Mr. Lewes is one with me in many affectionate thoughts about you, and your names are often on our lips. We are going to pass the Christmas week with our friends at Weybridge; and I shall be glad to escape the London aspects of that season—aspects that are without any happy association for me. Mr. Lewes has just been in to speak to me, and begs me to say that he hopes baby is raised to the n^th power. You see the lofty point of view from which he regards the world at present. But there is enough of the sap of affection in him to withstand all the dryness of the dryest mathematics, and he has very hearty regards for you all, including Mr. Geddes, not as a matter of course, but with special emphasis. Good-bye, dear, dear friend. May it give you some little satisfaction to think of me as yours always lovingly.

Letter to Mrs. Wm. Smith, 18th Dec. 1872.

Your letter was very welcome to me. I wanted to know how you were; and I think that I discern in your words some growth of courage to face the hard task—it is a hard task—of living a separate life. I reckon it a great good to me that any writing of mine has been taken into companionship by you, and seemed to speak with you of your own experience. Thank you for telling me of that.

This weather, which is so melancholy in the privation it must cause to those who are worst off in the world, adds a little weight to everybody's griefs. But I trust that you find it a comfort, not an oppression, to be among friends who make a little claim on your attention. When you go to How, please tell me all about the place, and whom you have near you, because I like to be able to imagine your circumstances.

I have been, and am still, reading Mr. Lewes's manuscript—and I often associate this with your dear husband, to whom I imagine mine would have liked to send his proofs when the matter had reached the printing stage.

We are both very well, and Mr. Lewes is enjoying his morning at his desk. He likes very much to be included in your love, and has always thought you one of the most charming women among our acquaintance. Please not to say that he has bad taste in women. We both cherish very tender thoughts of your sorrow, dear friend. Let me always be assured that you think of me as yours affectionately.

Letter to Mr. Simpson, 18th Dec. 1872.

We have to thank you for two things especially. First, for the good bargain you have made for "Middlemarch" with Australia; and secondly, for the trouble you have kindly taken with the MS., which has come to us safely in its fine Russian coat.

The four volumes, we imagine, must have been subscribed long ago; and we should be glad to know, if it were convenient—perhaps even if it were inconvenient—what are the figures representing the courage of "the trade" in the matter of a 42s. novel, which has already been well distributed.

We both hope that your health is well confirmed, and that you are prepared for Christmas pleasures, among which you would probably, like Caleb Garth, reckon the extra "business" which the jolly season carries in its hinder wallet.

SUMMARY.

JANUARY, 1869, TO DECEMBER, 1872.

Poem on Agatha—Reading on Philology, "Iliad," "Faery Queen," Clough's Poems, Bright's Speeches, "Volpone," Lecture by Sir Wm. Thomson—Writing "How Lisa Loved the King"—Browning and Rector of Lincoln on Versification—Letter to Miss Hennell—Browning's "Elisha"—Fourth visit to Italy—Two months away—Letter to Mrs. Congreve from Paris—Dr. Congreve's Reply to Professor Huxley in Fortnightly—Meeting in Rome with Mrs. Bullock and Mr. and Mrs. Cross—Letter to Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe—Effect of books—Religion of the future—Arrival of Thornton Lewes from Natal—Letter to Mrs. Congreve—Marriage engagements of Mr. Beesley, Mr. Frederic Harrison, and Dr. Clifford Allbut—Finished five "Sonnets on Childhood"—Letter to Mrs. Stowe—"Old Town Folks"—Presentation of alien religious convictions—Spiritualism—Reading Drayton and Grote—Writing Introduction to "Middlemarch"—Reading Theocritus—Burne-Jones's Pictures—Reading Littré on Comte—Sainte Beuve—Thornton Lewes's continued illness—Visit to Mrs. Cross at Weybridge—Reading for "Middlemarch"—Asks Mrs. Congreve to get information about provincial hospitals—Letter to Miss Hennell—The Byron scandal—Byron a vulgar-minded genius—The Kovilevskys—"Legend of Jubal" begun—Mr. W. G. Clark—Reading Max Müller—Lecky and Herbert Spencer—Death of Thornton Lewes—Letter to Miss Hennell describing month's visit to Limpsfield—Letter to Mrs. Congreve—Mr. Doyle—Letter to F. Harrison on the Positivist Problem—Aversion to personal statements—Shrinking from deliverances—Letter to Miss Hennell on Charles Hennell's "Inquiry"—Letter to Mrs. Congreve from Berlin—Sees Mommsen, Bunsen, and Du Bois Reymond—Visit to Vienna—Return to London—Three days' visit to the Rector of Lincoln College, Oxford, and Mrs. Pattison—Meets Sir Benjamin Brodie—Professor Rawlinson and Professor Phillips—Dr. Rolleston and the Miss Gaskells, and Miss Arnold—Mr. Jowett, Professor Henry Smith, and Mr. Fowler—Re-reading Grove "On the Correlation of the Physical Forces"—Letter to Miss Hennell—Dickens's Death, and his story of President Lincoln—Letter to Mme. Bodichon—Visit to Cromer—Growing dislike of migratory life—Letter to Mrs. Lytton on the death of Lord Clarendon—Danger of women living too exclusively in the affections—Reading Mendelssohn's letters—From Cromer to Harrogate and Whitby—Meets Mrs. Burne-Jones there—"Armgart" begun—Three weeks' visit to Limpsfield—Letter to Miss Hennell on the beginning of the war between Germany and France—Jowett's "Plato"—Letter to Mme. Bodichon—The French nation—"Armgart" finished at Limpsfield—Return to the Priory—Letter to Miss Hennell—A popular preacher—Growing influence of ideas—Goethe's contempt for revolution of 1830—Letter to Mme. Bodichon on the faults of one's friends—Letter to Mrs. Congreve—Industrial schemes—Greater cheerfulness—Frederic Harrison on Bismarckism—Writing "Miss Brooke"—Reading Wolf's "Prolegomena to Homer" and "Wilhelm Meister"—Visit to Mme. Bodichon at Ryde—Letter to Miss Hennell—Ritualism at Ryde—Brutalizing effect of German war—Trollope's "Sir Harry Hotspur"—Limits of woman's constancy—Miss Bury's engagement to Mr. Geddes—Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor—Three and a half months' visit to Petersfield—Mode of life—Letter to Mme. Bodichon—Lowell's "My Study Windows"—"Diethelm von Buchenberg" in Deutschen Novellenschatz—Letter to Mrs. Congreve—Mrs. Geddes's marriage—Letter to John Blackwood—Relinquishment of Scott Commemoration—Captain Lockhart—Letter to John Blackwood on MS. of "Middlemarch"—Visit from Tennyson—Letter to Mrs. Lytton on death of her son—Letter to Miss Mary Cross on story in Macmillan's Magazine—Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor—Suffering from cold—Got's acting—Crystal Palace music—Letter to Mrs. Bray—Delight in intellectual activity—Letter to Mrs. Congreve—Enjoyment of Cherrimans—Letter to John Blackwood—Visit to Weybridge—Mr. Main, the collector of the "Sayings"—Reception of "Middlemarch"—Letters to Miss Hennell—Foster's "Life of Dickens"—Low health—Tichborne trial—Letters to John Blackwood: pleased with the "Sayings"—Visit to Weybridge—Length of "Middlemarch"—Letter to Mrs. Congreve—Reading Johnson's "Lives of the Poets"—Finished second volume of "Middlemarch"—Letter to Mrs. Stowe—Spiritualistic phenomena—Letter to John Blackwood—German and French interest in "Middlemarch"—Asher's edition—German readers—Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor on death of Mazzini—Letter to Miss Hennell—Low health—Letter to Mrs. Stowe—Spirit communications—Letter to Mrs. Congreve on Wallace's "Eastern Archipelago"—Tylor's "Primitive Culture"—Letter to John Blackwood—"Middlemarch" finished—Letter to Mrs. Cross on invitation to Six-Mile Bottom, Cambridge—Month's visit to Homburg—Letter to Mrs. Cross—Trèves—On gambling at Homburg—Letter to John Blackwood—Play of a young lady at Homburg—German reading—Letter to Mrs. Cross from Boulogne—Letter to Mrs. Wm. Smith of condolence on loss of her husband—Memorial article on Mr. Wm. Smith—Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor on Mr. Wm. Smith—Letters to Miss Hennell—Presentation copies of "Middlemarch"—Mr. Lewes studying mathematics—Letter to John Blackwood—"Maga's" review of "Middlemarch"—Tone of the Bar—Letter to J. W. Cross on building a house at Shere—Letter to Mrs. Congreve—Happiness—Story of Coventry lady and Bulstrode—Letter to Mr. Simpson—MS. of "Middlemarch."

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