It was then he said the following words, which two minutes later, in the garden, I jotted down in pencil at once lest I should forget even a single word, or a single change in the sequence of words. “She is a woman of genius. That is rare ... so rare anywhere, anytime, in women or, in men. Some few women ‘have genius,’ but she is more than that. Yes, she is a woman of genius: the genius too, that is rarest, that drives deep thoughts before it. Tell her I think often of her, and of the deep thought in all she has written of late. Tell her I hope great things of her yet. And now ... we’ll go, since it must be so. Goodbye, my dear fellow, and God bless you.”
Outside, the great green slope of Box Hill rose against a cloudless sky, filled with a flowing south wind. The swifts and swallows were flying high. In the beech courts thrush and blackbird called continually, along the hedgerows the wild-roses hung. But an infinite sadness was in it all. A prince among men had fallen into the lonely and dark way.
Goodbye it was in truth; but it was the older poet who recovered hold on life and outlived the younger by four years.
GEORGE MEREDITH
From a photograph by F. Hollyer, about 1898
A wet spring, and a still damper autumn affected my husband seriously; and while we were visiting Mrs. Glassford Bell in Perthshire he became so ill that we went to Llandrindod Wells for him to be under special treatment. As he explained to Mr. Ernest Rhys:
Llandrindod Wells,
Sept., 1903.