She did not forget Mr. Lewes. In looking upon the Grande Chartreuse, she said, "I would still give up my own life willingly, if he could have the happiness instead of me."
On their return to London, they made their winter home at 4 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, a plain brick house. The days were gliding by happily. George Eliot was interested as ever in all great subjects, giving five hundred dollars for woman's higher education at Girton College, and helping many a struggling author, or providing for some poor friend of early times who was proud to be remembered.
She and Mr. Cross began their reading for the day with the Bible, she especially enjoying Isaiah, Jeremiah, and St. Paul's Epistles. Then they read Max Muller's works, Shakespeare, Milton, Scott, and whatever was best in English, French, and German literature. Milton she called her demigod. Her husband says she had "a limitless persistency in application." Her health was better, and she gave promise of doing more great work. When urged to write her autobiography, she said, half sighing and half smiling: "The only thing I should care much to dwell on would be the absolute despair I suffered from, of ever being able to achieve anything. No one could ever have felt greater despair, and a knowledge of this might be a help to some other struggler."
Friday afternoon, Dec. 17, she went to see Agamemnon performed in Greek by Oxford students, and the next afternoon to a concert at St. James Hall. She took cold, and on Monday was treated for sore throat. On Wednesday evening the doctors came, and she whispered to her husband, "Tell them I have great pain in the left side." This was the last word. She died with every faculty bright, and her heart responsive to all noble things.
She loved knowledge to the end. She said, "My constant groan is that I must leave so much of the greatest writing which the centuries have sifted for me, unread for want of time."
She had the broadest charity for those whose views differed from hers. She said, "The best lesson of tolerance we have to learn, is to tolerate intolerance." She hoped for and "looked forward to the time when the impulse to help our fellows shall be as immediate and as irresistible as that which I feel to grasp something firm if I am falling."
One Sunday afternoon I went to her grave in Highgate Cemetery, London. A gray granite shaft, about twenty-five feet high, stands above it, with these beautiful words from her great poem:--
"O may I join the choir invisible,
Of those immortal dead who live again
In minds made better by their presence."
HERE LIES THE BODY
OF
GEORGE ELIOT,
MARY ANN CROSS.
BORN, 22d NOVEMBER, 1819;
DIED, 22d DECEMBER, 1880.
A stone coping is around this grave, and bouquets of yellow crocuses and hyacinths lie upon it. Next to her grave is a horizontal slab, with the name of George Henry Lewes upon the stone.