'While I am speculating to little purpose, perhaps you are doing—what? Might not a biography from your pen bring forth again some great, half-obscured soul to act on the world? Even Sir Philip Sidney ought to be superseded by a still nobler type.
'This must go immediately, to be in time for the bearer, of whose meeting with you I shall think as the friend of both. May it be happy!
'Your affectionate
A. I. N. B.'
One letter more from Lady Byron I give,—the last I received from her:—
London, May 3, 1859.
'Dear Friend,—I have found, particularly as to yourself, that, if I did not answer from the first impulse, all had evaporated. Your letter came by 'The Niagara' which brought Fanny Kemble to learn the loss of her best friend, the Miss F—— whom you saw at my house.
'Her death, after an illness in which she was to the last a minister of good to others, is a soul-loss to me also; and your remarks are most appropriate to my feelings. I have been taught, however, to accept survivorship; even to feel it, in some cases, Heaven's best blessing.
'I have an intense interest in your new novel.[33] More power in these few numbers than in any of your former writings, relating, at least, to my own mind. It would amuse you to hear my grand-daughter and myself attempting to foresee the future of the love-story; being, for the moment, quite persuaded that James is at sea, and the minister about to ruin himself. We think that Mary will labour to be in love with the self-devoted man, under her mother's influence, and from that hyper-conscientiousness so common with good girls; but we don't wish her to succeed. Then what is to become of her older lover? Time will show.
'The lady you desired to introduce to me will be welcomed as of you. She has been misled with respect to my having any house in Yorkshire (New Leeds). I am in London now to be of a little use to A——; not ostensibly, for I can neither go out, nor give parties: but I am the confidential friend to whom she likes to bring her social gatherings, as she can see something of the world with others. Age and infirmity seem to be overlooked in what she calls the harmony between us,—not perfect agreement of opinion (which I should regret, with almost fifty years of difference), but the spirit-union: can you say what it is?