For the next few weeks my anxiety will be concentrated on you and yours at Yarmouth. Pray, when your mind and body are sufficiently free from absorbing occupation, remember my need of news about you, and write to me. The other day I seemed to get a glimpse of you through Mrs. Call, who told me that you looked like a new creature—so much stronger than you were wont; and she told me of Dr. Congreve's address at the school, which raised my keenest sympathy, and made me feel myself a very helpless friend.
Please give my love to the children, and tell Sophy especially that I think her happy in this—that there is a place made for all the effort of her young life to fill it with something like the goodness and brightness which she has known and has just now to part with. I expect her to be your guardian angel, perhaps in a new way—namely, in saving you from some fatigue about details.
Letter to John Blackwood, 15th July, 1871.
I still feel that I owe you my thanks for your kind letter, although Mr. Lewes undertook to deliver them in the first instance. You certainly made a seat at the Commemoration Table[14] look more tempting to me than it had done before; but I think that prudence advises me to abstain from the fatigue and excitement of a long railway journey, with a great gathering at the end of it. If there is a chance that "Middlemarch" will be good for anything, I don't want to break down and die without finishing it. And whatever "the tow on my distaff" may be, my strength to unwind it has not been abundant lately.
À propos of bodily prosperity, I am sincerely rejoiced to know, by your postscript this morning, that Mr. Simpson is recovered. I hope he will not object to my considering him a good friend of mine, though it is so long since I saw him. The blank that is left when thorough workers like him are disabled is felt not only near at hand, but a great way off. I often say—after the fashion of people who are getting older—that the capacity for good work, of the kind that goes on without trumpets, is diminishing in the world.
The continuous absence of sunshine is depressing in every way, and makes one fear for the harvest, and so grave a fear that one is ashamed of mentioning one's private dreariness. You cannot play golf in the rain, and I cannot feel hopeful without the sunlight; but I dare say you work all the more, whereas when my spirits flag my work flags too.
I should have liked to see Principal Tulloch again, and to have made the acquaintance of Captain Lockhart, whose writing is so jaunty and cheery, yet so thoroughly refined in feeling. Perhaps I may still have this pleasure in town, when he comes up at the same time with you. Please give my kind regards to Mr. William Blackwood.
Letter to John Blackwood, 24th July, 1871.
Thanks for the prompt return of the MS., which arrived this morning.
I don't see how I can leave anything out, because I hope there is nothing that will be seen to be irrelevant to my design, which is to show the gradual action of ordinary causes rather than exceptional, and to show this in some directions which have not been from time immemorial the beaten path—the Cremorne walks and shows of fiction. But the best intentions are good for nothing until execution has justified them. And you know I am always compassed about with fears. I am in danger in all my designs of parodying dear Goldsmith's satire on Burke, and think of refining when novel-readers only think of skipping.