Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, Mch. 1846.
The last hundred pages have certainly been totally uninteresting to me, considered as matter for translation. Strauss has inevitably anticipated in the earlier part of his work all the principles and many of the details of his criticism, and he seems fagged himself. Mais courage! the neck of the difficulty is broken, and there is really very little to be done now. If one's head would but keep in anything like thinking and writing order! Mine has robbed me of half the last fortnight; but I am a little better now, and am saying to myself Frisch zu! The Crucifixion and the Resurrection are, at all events, better than the bursting asunder of Judas. I am afraid I have not made this dull part of Strauss even as tolerable as it might be, for both body and mind have recoiled from it. Thank you, dearest, for all your love and patience for me and with me. I have nothing on earth to complain of but subjective maladies. Father is pretty well, and I have not a single excuse for discontent through the livelong day.
Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, end of Mch. 1846.
As I believe that even your kindness cannot overcome your sincerity, I will cast aside my fear that your wish to see me in your own home is rather a plan for my enjoyment than for yours. I believe it would be an unmixed pleasure to me to be your visitor, and one that I would choose among a whole bouquet of agreeable possibilities; so I will indulge myself, and accept the good that the heavens and you offer me. I am miserably in want of you to stir up my soul and make it shake its wings, and begin some kind of flight after something good and noble, for I am in a grovelling, slothful condition, and you are the only friend I possess who has an animating influence over me. I have written to Mr. Hennell anent the titlepage, and have voted for critically examined, from an entire conviction of its preferableness.
Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, beginning of April, 1846.
See what it is to have a person en rapport with you, that knows all your thoughts without the trouble of communication! I am especially grateful to you for restoring the "therefore" to its right place. I was about to write to you to get you to remonstrate about this and the "dispassionate calmness," which I did not at all like; but I thought you had corrected the prefaces, as the marks against the Latin looked like yours, so I determined to indulge my laissez-faire inclinations, for I hate stickling and debating unless it be for something really important. I do really like reading our Strauss—he is so klar und ideenvoll; but I do not know one person who is likely to read the book through—do you? Next week we will be merry and sad, wise and nonsensical, devout and wicked, together.
On 19th April, 1846, Mrs. Bray writes to Miss Hennell that Miss Evans is "as happy as you may imagine at her work being done. She means to come and read Shakespeare through to us as her first enjoyment." And again, on 27th April, that she "is delighted beyond measure with Strauss's elegant preface. It is just what she likes. And what a nice letter too! The Latin is quite beyond me, but the letter shows how neatly he can express himself."
SUMMARY.
MARCH, 1841, TO APRIL, 1846.