I am very sensitive to words and looks and all signs of sympathy, so you may be sure that your kind wishes are not lost upon me.
As you will have your house full, the wish for a "Merry Christmas" may be literally fulfilled for you. We shall be quieter, with none but our family trio, but that is always a happy one. We are going to usher in the day by hearing the Messiah to-night at Her Majesty's.
Evening will be a pleasanter time for a little genial talk than "calling hours;" and if you will come to us without ceremony, you will hardly run the risk of not finding us. We go nowhere except to concerts.
We are longing to run away from London, but I dare say we shall not do so before March. Winter is probably yet to come, and one would not like to be caught by frost and snow away from one's own hearth.
Always believe, without my saying it, that it gladdens me to know when anything I do has value for you.
Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 26th Dec. 1862.
It is very sweet to me to have any proof of loving remembrance. That would have made the book-marker precious even if it had been ugly. But it is perfectly beautiful—in color, words, and symbols. Hitherto I have been discontented with the Coventry book-marks; for at the shop where we habitually see them they have all got—"Let the people praise Thee, O God," on them, and nothing else. But I can think of no motto better than those three words. I suppose no wisdom the world will ever find out will make Paul's words obsolete—"Now abide, etc., but the greatest of these is Charity." Our Christmas, too, has been quiet. Mr. Lewes, who talks much less about goodness than I do, but is always readier to do the right thing, thinks it rather wicked for us to eat our turkey and plum-pudding without asking some forlorn person to eat it with us. But I'm afraid we were glad, after all, to find ourselves alone with "the boy." On Christmas-eve a sweet woman, remembering me as you have done, left a beautiful plant at the door, and after that we went to hear the Messiah at Her Majesty's. We felt a considerable minus from the absence of the organ, contrary to advertisement: nevertheless it was good to be there. What pitiable people those are who feel no poetry in Christianity! Surely the acme of poetry hitherto is the conception of the suffering Messiah and the final triumph, "He shall reign for ever and for ever." The Prometheus is a very imperfect fore-shadowing of that symbol wrought out in the long history of the Jewish and Christian ages.
Mr. Lewes and I have both been in miserable health during all this month. I have had a fortnight's incessant malaise and feebleness; but as I had had many months of tolerable health, it was my turn to be uncomfortable. If my book-marker were just a little longer, I should keep it in my beautiful Bible in large print, which Mr. Lewes bought for me in prevision for my old age. He is not fond of reading the Bible himself, but "sees no harm" in my reading it.
Letter to the Brays, 29th Dec. 1862.
I am not quite sure what you mean by "charity" when you call it humbug. If you mean that attitude of mind which says "I forgive my fellow-men for not being as good as I am," I agree with you in hoping that it will vanish, as also the circumstantial form of alms-giving. But if you are alluding to anything in my letter, I meant what charity meant in the elder English, and what the translators of the Bible meant in their rendering of the thirteenth chapter of 1st Corinthians—Caritas, the highest love or fellowship, which I am happy to believe that no philosophy will expel from the world.