Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor, 15th Jan. 1875.
Please never wonder at my silence, or believe that I bear you in any the less lively remembrance because I do not write to you.
Writing notes is the crux of my life. It often interferes with my morning hours (before 1 o'clock), which is the only time I have for quiet work. For certain letters are unavoidable demands, and though my kind husband writes them for me whenever he can, they are not all to be done by proxy.
That glorious bit of work of yours about the Home for Girls[26] is delightful to hear of. Hardly anything is more wanted, I imagine, than homes for girls in various employments—or, rather, for unmarried women of all ages.
I heard also the other day that your name was among those of the ladies interested in the beginning of a union among the bookbinding women, which one would like to succeed and spread.
I hope, from your ability to work so well, that you are in perfect health yourself. Our friend Barbara, too, looks literally the pink of well-being, and cheers one's soul by her interest in all worthy things.
Letter to the Hon. Mrs. Ponsonby (now Lady Ponsonby), 30th Jan. 1875.
I should urge you to consider your early religious experience as a portion of valid knowledge, and to cherish its emotional results in relation to objects and ideas which are either substitutes or metamorphoses of the earlier. And I think we must not take every great physicist—or other "ist"—for an apostle, but be ready to suspect him of some crudity concerning relations that lie outside his special studies, if his exposition strands us on results that seem to stultify the most ardent, massive experience of mankind, and hem up the best part of our feelings in stagnation.
Letter to John Blackwood, 7th Feb. 1875.
Last night I finished reading aloud to Mr. Lewes the "Inkerman" volume, and we both thank you heartily for the valuable present. It is an admirable piece of writing; such pure, lucid English is what one rarely gets to read. The masterly marshalling of the material is certainly in contrast with the movements described. To my non-military mind the Inkerman affair seems nothing but a brave blundering into victory. Great traits of valor—Homeric movements—but also a powerful lack of brains in the form of generalship. I cannot see that the ordering up of the two 18-pounder guns was a vast mental effort, unless the weight of the guns is to be counted in the order as well as in the execution. But the grand fact of the thousands beaten by the hundreds remains under all interpretation. Why the Russians, in their multitudinous mass, should have chosen to retreat into Sebastopol, moving at their leisure, and carrying off all their artillery, seems a mystery in spite of General Dannenberg's memorable answer to Mentschikoff.