2
All, all are there save her alone,
Yet once along that fountain shone
Her imaged eyes within the stream
That glittered with the borrowed beam.
3
Yet—yet that fount is calm and clear,
Nor less to Hellas' daughters dear,
But there Reflection ne'er shall grace
Those waters with so fair a face.
4
She comes not there, yet linger still
My steps around that sacred rill,
Nor know I wherefore there I stray—
But cannot tear myself away.
Albany, April 15th, 1814.
Another manuscript, to which an especial interest attaches at this time, is the following letter from George Eliot:
16 Blandford Square, London, N.W.
My dear Friend—I was delighted to have your letter this morning bringing me good news not only of a literary but of a personal kind. It is pleasant to know that your labours on Adam have been so far appreciated; but I think it is pleasanter still to know that Maman has had the comfort of seeing her son Charles this Christmas, and that your prospects concerning him are hopeful. I begin, you know, to consider myself an experienced matron, knowing a great deal about parental joys and anxieties. Indeed I have rather too ready a talent for entering into anxieties of all sorts.
Mr. Lewes is very much obliged to you for sending him the prospectus and additional information, which he has already dispatched to Mr. Trollope. It will be a valuable widening of his opportunities for choosing a foreign school. I was not aware till I gathered the fact from your letter that Emile Forgues had "analysed" the Mill for the Revue des deux Mondes, for Mr. Lewes, knowing that it would vex me, had carefully concealed it. It is an impudent way of getting money—this cool appropriation of other people's property without leave asked—which seems to have become a regular practice with him. Pray consider me responsible for nothing but what you find in the Tauchnitz edition. I never alter my books after they are printed—never alter anything of importance even in the course of printing, and ce n'est point mon histoire que j'écris, or whatever else you may find in M. Forgues' edition that is not in the English is due to the gratuitous exercise of his own talents in improving my book. I can well imagine that you find the Mill more difficult to render than Adam, but would it be inadmissible to represent in French, at least in some degree, those intermédiaires entre le style commun et le style élégant to which you refer? It seems to me that I have discerned such shades very strikingly rendered in Balzac, and occasionally in George Sand. Balzac, I think, dares to be thoroughly congenial, in spite of French strait-lacing. Even in English this daring is far from being general: inferior writers are hardly ever capable of it, and in the great mass of English fiction, from Bulwer down to the latest young lady scribbler, you find scarcely anything but impossible dialogue—the character speaking as no man or woman ever spoke, except on the stage. The writers who dare to be thoroughly familiar are Shakespeare, Fielding, Scott (when he is representing the popular life with which he is familiar), and indeed every other writer of fiction of the first class. Even in his loftiest tragedies, in Hamlet, for example, Shakespeare is intensely colloquial. One hears the very accent of living men. I am not vindicating the practice, I know that is not necessary to you who have so quick a sensibility for the real and the humorous, but I want to draw your attention to what you may not have observed—the timid elegance (alias unnaturalness) of inferior English writers. You may not have observed it, because naturally you don't read our poorer literature. You, of course, have knowledge as to what is or can be done in French literature beyond any that my reading can have furnished me with. I am glad that you think there are any readers who will prefer the Mill to Adam. To my feeling there is more thought and a profounder veracity in the Mill than in Adam: but Adam is more complete and better balanced. My love of the childhood scenes made me linger over them in epic fashion, so that I could not develop as fully as I wished the concluding "Book" in which the tragedy occurs, and which I had looked forward to with much intention and preparation from the beginning. My books don't seem to belong to me after I have once written them, so I find myself delivering opinions about them as if I had nothing to do with them. I am not afraid that you will be unable to distinguish that frankness from conceit. I cannot write very boastfully about our health; both Mr. Lewes and I are very middling, easily upset, easily put out of order. But in all other respects our happiness grows daily. Our dear boy Charles is more and more precious to us, and seems to delight in pouring all his young affection out in tenderness to me. Thornton, the second, is going on well and happily with his studies at Edinburgh, and seems to have profited morally and physically by the change. I don't know how to describe our locality otherwise than by saying that it lies very near Regent's Park, westward. It is a quiet situation for London—alas, not quiet for me, who dream of still fields! London is hateful to me, and I sometimes think we shall hardly have come to stay in it three years. Mr. Lewes and I constantly recall Geneva—and for us Geneva means all that is associated with you and Maman. It was a vivid pleasure to me that he felt his liking and admiration go out to you both quite apart from the fact that you were my friends. He desires to share in all assurances of affection that I send you. But I send you few assurances. Are they necessary?
Lord Houghton once said that "the Personal is always the interesting." This gives one of the great interests to a collection of autographs, it illustrates the Personal. Take Tennyson's. There is not one word in a long letter to show that he was Poet Laureate. He begins with "Trouble not yourself about the half-crown. I am very glad to pay my debts, however small, tho' Milnes asserts that nothing under five shillings should ever be refunded.... It is not all ladies who would have tolerated my fumigation so mildly; forgive my seeming roughness at parting; there is something in the farewell shake of hands that often breaks me down and makes me seem other than I am." My letter from Rudyard Kipling has in it the sentence, "I was a chorister once, but somehow they managed to agree to get on without me after a while." Samuel Smiles, of Self-Help, etc., writes, 1891, "I think nothing the less of you because you are a Dominie. You have a great mission for training the intellects and hearts of the coming generation. I hope you are kind to the children. My Dominie, he was a hard man, though he had favourites; told me I was only fit 'to sweep the streets of my native borough,' and threatened to 'dash my brains against the wall.' This was his ordinary way of speaking of those who were not his favourites. But I understand that he became better as he grew older. Still he left a very bad taste in my mouth." Leigh Hunt writes a kind letter to a budding poet with the postscript, "Send your sonnets by all means to periodicals, but have no mercy in them on superfluous words." With equal kindness Southey writes to Mr. Ragg in 1835, "I do not remember to have seen a more beautiful little piece than 'Why Does the Sun Go Down?' It ought to find its way into all popular selections." Southey wrote out for Lady Sitwell, in 1813, "The March to Moscow." From these kindly letters let us turn to Robert Lowe: "I am a candidate for the Greek Professorship of Glasgow ... a most excellent appointment, and one which above all I should be anxious to obtain.... My chance is not a bad one, as there is no candidate with whom they are content, and to me there is no objection except my politics, and they are, you know, not very furious or indeed in any way practical principles to me.... This is the fairest chance that has ever offered to me of making myself independent and affluent for the rest of my life. It is one of the few appointments I am able to fill." This was written in 1838. In 1851 he writes to the same person, "I am a candidate for the Chair of Political Economy at Oxford. I have every hope of success as my reception in Oxford has been very flattering.... The contest seems to lie between me and Neate of Oriel, a very good man, I believe, but not very popular." Another politician, John Bright, wrote in 1865, "I fear it would not suit your object for any Englishman to interfere in the course that may be taken in reference to Jeff Davis. I have privately said all I can or ought to say, and from what I hear I incline to think that he will escape the punishment which so many men have suffered for crimes of infinitely less guilt. I am opposed to capital punishment for political or social crimes." Autographs from Prime Ministers include the Duke of Portland, "Your Parishioner named Bradley tried to usurp one of my houses. I do not consider that an amiable weakness," and Lord Salisbury, La Donna e Mobile, given to a lady during an important conversation, when she asked for his autograph. Lord Rosebery heads his letter "Waterloo Day." Mr. Gladstone shows his kindly feeling for Sir Stafford Northcote, but from Melbourne onwards the Prime Ministers content themselves with few words. So does Thackeray, "Dear Sir or Madam—Where does Mr. Ritchie live with whom I dine in 2 hours. Please tell." John Hay says "our visit to Eton will be for Helen and me one of our pleasantest memories of England." Eton is again mentioned by Mr. Justice Coleridge writing to his relation there, one of the masters, "I should like very much to know whether there is any prospect of the College making any movement towards changes." Eton does not like changes; to parody Lord Curzon's motto, "Let Eton hold what Eton held," is as true now as in the past. I will conclude with a pathetic letter from Matthew Arnold, "I lead such a bothered and hard-driven life that I forget what I wrote in better days." I wonder if he remembered writing in an autograph book: