After a visit to the opera she writes:
We went to see Gluck’s Orfeo. Julia Ravogli attaches one to her with that love which is almost chivalry, that one gives to a great and simple artist. Her hands are as expressive as a countenance, and her face is true, is pliant to ideal passion. Her voice is lovely, and she sits down by her dead Euridice and sings Che farò as a woodland nightingale sings her pain.
She exclaims at the “elegant Latin” used by Gerbert in his letters, “written in the dark tenth century”; agrees with Matthew Arnold that Flaubert has “neither compassion nor insight: his art cannot give us the verity of a temperament or soul”; but adds of his (Flaubert’s) correspondence, “To me each letter in which he writes of art is full of incitement, help, and subtle justness.”
She gives her impressions of Pater when delivering a lecture in December 1890:
He came forward without looking anywhere and immediately began to read, with no preface. He never gave his pleasant blue eyes to his audience.... There is great determination, a little brutality (in the French sense) about the lower part of his face; yet it is under complete, urbane control. His voice is low, and has a singular sensitive resonance in it—;an audible capacity for suffering, as it were. His courteous exterior hides a strong nature; there is something, one feels, of Denys l’Auxerrois in him—;a Bacchant, a Zagreus.
A criticism of the comedy of the nineties, and its manner of production, is thrown off lightly in a letter to Miss Louie Ellis:
We went to Pinero. He was taken at snail’s pace, and so much that was disgraceful to humanity had to be endured at that rate that we groaned. Satire should always be taken with rapier speed—;to pause on it is to make it unendurable. The malice and anger must sparkle, or the mind contracts and is bored.
On an Easter visit to the country, in 1894, she wrote to Miss Trusted:
Yesterday we saw our first daffodils: they were growing in awful peace. The sun was setting: it had reached the tranquil, not the coloured stage; the air held more of its effect than the sky yet showed. We did not pluck a daffodil: they grew inviolable. After sunset, as we came thro’ the firs, we saw a round glow behind them—;it was the Paschal moon rising. A chafer passed, like the twang of one string of an Æolian harp. The sound of the wind in the firs is cosmic, the gathering of many waters etherealized; and the sharp notes of individual birds cross it with their smallness, and with a pertinacity that can throw continuance itself into the background.
Writing to another friend at a much later date, she says: