After the publication of the "Logic," Mill was too big a man for the public to lose sight of.
He went his simple way, but to escape being pointed out, he kept from all crowds, and public functions were to him tabu.
When Mrs. Taylor gave birth to a baby girl, an obscure London newspaper printed, "A Malthusian Warning to the East India Company," which no doubt reflected a certain phase of public interest, but Mill continued his serene way undisturbed.
To this baby girl, Helen Taylor, Mill was always most devotedly attached. As she grew into childhood he taught her botany, and people who wanted a glimpse of Mill were advised to "look for him with a flaxen-haired little sprite of a girl any Saturday afternoon on Hampton Heath."
Mr. Taylor died in July, Eighteen Hundred Forty-nine, and in April, Eighteen Hundred Fifty-one, Mrs. Taylor and Mill were quietly married. The announcement of the marriage sent a spasm over literary England, and set the garrulous tongues a-wagging.
George Mill, a brother of John Stuart, with unconscious humor placed himself on record thus, "Mrs. Taylor was never to anybody else what she was to John." Bishop Spalding once wrote out this strange, solemn, emasculate proposition, "Mill's 'Autobiography' contains proof that a soul, with an infinite craving for God, not finding Him, will worship anything—a woman, a memory!"
This almost makes one think that the good Bishop was paraphrasing and reversing Voltaire's remark, "When a woman no longer finds herself acceptable to man she turns to God."
What the world thought of Mill's wife is not vital—what he thought of her, certainly was. I quote from the "Autobiography," which Edward Everett Hale calls "two lives in one—written by one of them":
Between the time of which I have now spoken, and the present, took place the most important events of my life.
The first of these was my marriage to the lady whose incomparable worth had made her friendship the greatest source to me both of happiness and of improvement. For seven and a half years that blessing was mine; for seven and a half only! I can say nothing which could describe, even in the faintest manner, what that loss was, and is. But because I know that she would have wished it, I endeavor to make the best of what life I have left, and to work on for her purposes with such diminished strength as can be derived from the thoughts of her, and communion with her memory.