I begin to feel for other people's wants and sorrows a little more than I used to do. Heaven help us! said the old religion; the new one, from its very lack of that faith, will teach us all the more to help one another. Tell Sara she is as good as a group of spice-islands to me; she wafts the pleasantest influences, even from a distance.
Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 10th Jan. 1853.
Pray do not lay the sins of the article on the "Atomic Theory" to poor Lewes's charge. How you could take it for his I cannot conceive. It is as remote from his style, both of thinking and writing, as anything can be.
Letter to the Brays, 18th Jan. 1853.
This week has yielded nothing to me but a crop of very large headaches. The pain has gone from my head at last, but I am feeling very much shattered, and find it easier to cry than to do anything else.
Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor, 1st Feb. 1853.
My complaint, of which I am now happily rid, was rheumatism in the right arm; a sufficient reason, you will see, for my employing a scribe to write that promise which I now fulfil. I am going into the country, perhaps for a fortnight, so that, if you are kind enough to come here on Wednesday evening, I shall not have the pleasure of seeing you. All the more reason for writing to you, in spite of cold feet and the vilest pens in the world.
Francis Newman is likely to come once or twice in the season; not more. He has, of course, a multitude of engagements, and many more attractive ones than a soirée in the Strand.
Never mention me to him in the character of editress. I think—at least, I am told—that he has no high estimate of woman's powers and functions. But let that pass. He is a very pure, noble being, and it is good only to look at such.
The article on "Slavery," in the last number of the Westminster—which I think the best article of them all—is by W. E. Forster, a Yorkshire manufacturer, who married Dr. Arnold's daughter. He is a very earnest, independent thinker, and worth a gross of literary hacks who have the "trick" of writing.