XIII

If I add to the foregoing a few lines more from my brother's hand, these

are of a day separated by long years from that time of our youth of

which I have treated. Addressed after the immense interval to an

admirable friend whom I shall not name here, they yet so vividly

refer--and with something I can only feel as the first authority--to one

of the most prized interests of our youth that, under the need of still

failing to rescue so many of these values from the dark gulf, I find

myself insist the more on a place here, before I close, for that

presence in our early lives as to which my brother's few words say so

much. To have so promptly and earnestly spoken of Mary Temple the

younger in this volume is indeed I think to have offered a gage for my

not simply leaving her there. The opportunity not so to leave her comes

at any rate very preciously into my hands, and I can not better round

off this record than by making the most of it. The letter to which

William alludes is one that my reader will presently recognise. It had

come back to him thus clearly at the far end of time.

I am deeply thankful to you for sending me this letter, which

revives all sorts of poignant memories and makes her live again in

all her lightness and freedom. Few spirits have been more free than

hers. I find myself wishing so that she could know me as I am now.

As for knowing her as _she_ is now--??!! I find that she means as

much in the way of human character for me now as she ever did,

being unique and with no analogue in all my subsequent experience

of people. Thank you once more for what you have done.

The testimony so acknowledged was a letter in a copious succession, the

product of little more than one year, January '69 to February '70,

sacredly preserved by the recipient; who was not long after the day of

my brother's acknowledgment to do me the honour of communicating to me

the whole series. He could have done nothing to accord more with the

spirit in which I have tried to gather up something of the sense of our

far-off past, his own as well as that of the rest of us; and no loose

clue that I have been able to recover unaided touches into life anything

like such a tract of the time-smothered consciousness. More charming and

interesting things emerge for me than I can point to in their order--but

they will make, I think, their own appeal. It need only further be

premised that our delightful young cousin had had from some months back

to begin to reckon with the progressive pulmonary weakness of which the

letters tell the sad story. Also, I can scarce help saying, the whole

world of the old New York, that of the earlier dancing years, shimmers

out for me from the least of her allusions.

I will write you as nice a letter as I can, but would much rather

have a good talk with you. As I can't have the best thing I am

putting up with the second-best, contrary to my pet theory. I feel

as if I were in heaven to-day--all because the day is splendid and

I have been driving about all the morning in a small sleigh in the

fresh air and sunshine, until I found that I had in spite of

myself, for the time being, stopped asking the usual inward

question of why I was born. I am not going to Canada--I know no

better reason for this than because I said I _was_ going. My

brother-in-law makes such a clamour when I propose departure that I

am easily overcome by his kindness and my own want of energy.

Besides, it is great fun to live here; the weather just now is

grand, and I knock about all day in a sleigh, and do nothing but

enjoy it and meditate. Then we are so near town that we often go in

for the day to shop and lunch with some of our numerous friends,

returning with a double relish for the country. We all went in on a

spree the other night and stayed at the Everett House; from which,

as a starting-point we poured ourselves in strong force upon Mrs.

Gracie King's ball--a very grand affair, given for a very pretty

Miss King, at Delmonico's. Our raid consisted of thirteen Emmets

and a moderate supply of Temples, and the ball was a great success.

It was two years since I had been to one and I enjoyed it so much

that I mean very soon to repeat the experiment--at the next

Assembly if possible. The men in society, in New York, this winter,

are principally a lot of feeble-minded boys; but I was fortunate

enough to escape them, as my partner for the German was a man of

thirty-five, the solitary _man_, I believe, in the room. Curiously

enough, I had danced my last German, two years before, in that very

place and with the same person. He is a Mr. Lee, who has spent

nearly all his life abroad; two of his sisters have married German

princes, and from knocking about so much he has become a thorough

cosmopolite. As he is intelligent, with nothing to do but amuse

himself, he is a very agreeable partner, and I mean to dance with

him again as soon as possible. I don't know why I have tried your

patience by writing so about a person you have never seen; unless

it's to show you that I haven't irrevocably given up the world, the

flesh and the devil, but am conscious of a faint charm about them

still when taken in small doses. I agree with you perfectly about

Uncle Henry--I should think he would be very irritating to the

legal mind; he is not at all satisfactory even to mine. Have you

seen much of Willy James lately? That is a rare creature, and one

in whom my intellect, if you will pardon the misapplication of the

word, takes more solid satisfaction than in almost anybody. I

haven't read Browning's new book--I mean to wait till you are by to

explain it to me--which reminds me, along with what you say about

wishing for the spring, that we shall go to North Conway next

summer, and that in that case you may as well make up your mind to

come and see us there. I can't wait longer than that for the

Browning readings. (Which would have been of The Ring and the

Book.) Arthur Sedgwick has sent me Matthew Arnold's photograph,

which Harry had pronounced so disappointing. I don't myself, on the

whole, find it so; on the contrary, after having looked at it much,

I like it--it quite harmonises with my notion of him, and I have

always had an affection for him. You must tell me something that

you are _sure_ is true--I don't care much what it may be, I will

take your word for it. Things get into a muddle with me--how can I

give you "a start on the way of righteousness"? You know that way

better than I do, and the only advice I can give you is not to stop

saying your prayers. I hope God may bless you, and beyond those

things I hardly know what is right, and therefore what to wish you.

Good-bye.

"North Conway" in the foregoing has almost the force for me of a

wizard's wand; the figures spring up again and move in a harmony that is

not of the fierce present; the sense in particular of the August of '65

shuts me in to its blest unawarenesses not less than to all that was

then exquisite in its current certainties and felicities; the

fraternising, endlessly conversing group of us gather under the rustling

pines--and I admire, precisely, the arrival, the bright revelation as I

recover it, of the so handsome young man, marked with military

distinction but already, with our light American promptitude, addressed

to that high art of peace in which a greater eminence awaited him, of

whom this most attaching member of the circle was to make four years

later so wise and steady a confidant. Our circle I fondly call it, and

doubtless then called it, because in the light of that description I

could most rejoice in it, and I think of it now as having formed a

little world of easy and happy interchange, of unrestricted and yet all

so instinctively sane and secure association and conversation, with all

its liberties and delicacies, all its mirth and its earnestness

protected and directed so much more from within than from without, that

I ask myself, perhaps too fatuously, whether any such right conditions

for the play of young intelligence and young friendship, the reading of

Matthew Arnold and Browning, the discussion of a hundred human and

personal things, the sense of the splendid American summer drawn out to

its last generosity, survives to this more complicated age. I doubt if

there be circles to-day, and seem rather to distinguish confusedly gangs

and crowds and camps, more propitious, I dare say, to material affluence

and physical riot than anything we knew, but not nearly so appointed for

ingenious and ingenuous talk. I think of our interplay of relation as

attuned to that fruitful freedom of what we took for speculation, what

we didn't recoil from as boundless curiosity--as the consideration of

life, that is, the personal, the moral inquiry and adventure at large,

so far as matter for them had up to then met our view--I think of this

fine quality in our scene with no small confidence in its having been

rare, or to be more exact perhaps, in its having been possible to the

general American felicity and immunity as it couldn't otherwise or

elsewhere have begun to be. Merely to say, as an assurance, that such

relations shone with the light of "innocence" is of itself to breathe on

them wrongly or rudely, is uncouthly to "defend" them--as if the very

air that consciously conceived and produced them didn't all tenderly and

amusedly take care of them. I at any rate figure again, to my customary

positive piety, all the aspects now; that in especial of my young

orphaned cousins as mainly composing the maiden train and seeming as if

they still had but yesterday brushed the morning dew of the dear old

Albany naturalness; that of the venerable, genial, erect great-aunt,

their more immediately active guardian, a model of antique spinsterhood

appointed to cares such as even renewals of wedlock could scarce more

have multiplied for her, and thus, among her many ancient and curious

national references--one was tempted to call them--most impressive by

her striking resemblance to the portraits, the most benignant, of

General Washington. She might have represented the mother, no less

adequately than he represented the father, of their country. I can only

feel, however, that what particularly drew the desired circle sharpest

for me was the contribution to it that I had been able to effect by

introducing the companion of my own pilgrimage, who was in turn to

introduce a little later the great friend of _his_ then expanding

situation, restored with the close of the War to civil pursuits and

already deep in them; the interesting pair possessed after this fashion

of a quantity of common fine experience that glittered as so much

acquired and enjoyed luxury--all of a sort that I had no acquisition

whatever to match. I remember being happy in that I might repeatedly

point our moral, under permission (for we were always pointing morals),

with this brilliant advantage of theirs even if I might with none of my

own; and I of course knew--what was half the beauty--that if we were

just the most delightful loose band conceivable, and immersed in a

regular revel of all the harmonies, it was largely by grace of the three

quite exceptional young men who, thanks in part to the final sublime

coach-drive of other days, had travelled up from Boston with their

preparation to admire inevitably quickened. I was quite willing to offer

myself as exceptional through being able to promote such exceptions and

see them justified to waiting apprehension. There was a dangling fringe,

there were graceful accessories and hovering shades, but, essentially,

we of the true connection made up the drama, or in other words, for the

benefit of my imagination, reduced the fond figment of the Circle to

terms of daily experience. If drama we could indeed feel this as being,

I hasten to add, we owed it most of all to our just having such a

heroine that everything else inevitably came. Mary Temple was

beautifully and indescribably _that_--in the technical or logical as

distinguished from the pompous or romantic sense of the word; wholly

without effort or desire on her part--for never was a girl less

consciously or consentingly or vulgarly dominant--everything that took

place around her took place as if primarily in relation to her and in

her interest: that is in the interest of drawing her out and displaying

her the more. This too without her in the least caring, as I say--in the

deep, the morally nostalgic indifferences that were the most finally

characteristic thing about her--whether such an effect took place or

not; she liked nothing in the world so much as to see others fairly

exhibited; not as they might best please her by being, but as they might

most fully reveal themselves, their stuff and their truth: which was the

only thing that, after any first flutter for the superficial air or

grace in an acquaintance, could in the least fix her attention. She had

beyond any equally young creature I have known a sense for verity of

character and play of life in others, for their acting out of their

force or their weakness, whatever either might be, at no matter what

cost to herself; and it was this instinct that made her care so for

life in general, just as it was her being thereby so engaged in that

tangle that made her, as I have expressed it, ever the heroine of the

scene. Life claimed her and used her and beset her--made her range in

her groping, her naturally immature and unlighted way from end to end of

the scale. No one felt more the charm of the actual--only the actual

comprised for her kinds of reality (those to which her letters perhaps

most of all testify), that she saw treated round her for the most part

either as irrelevant or as unpleasant. She was absolutely afraid of

nothing she might come to by living with enough sincerity and enough

wonder; and I think it is because one was to see her launched on that

adventure in such bedimmed, such almost tragically compromised

conditions that one is caught by her title to the heroic and pathetic

mark. It is always difficult for us after the fact not to see young

things who were soon to be lost to us as already distinguished by their

fate; this particular victim of it at all events might well have made

the near witness ask within himself how her restlessness of spirit, the

finest reckless impatience, was to be assuaged or "met" by the common

lot. One somehow saw it nowhere about us as up to her terrible young

standard of the interesting--even if to say this suggests an air of

tension, a sharpness of importunity, than which nothing could have been

less like her. The charming, irresistible fact was that one had never

seen a creature with such lightness of forms, a lightness all her own,

so inconsequently grave at the core, or an asker of endless questions

with such apparent lapses of care. It is true that as an effect of the

state of health which during the year '69 grew steadily worse the

anxious note and serious mind sound in her less intermittently than by

her former wont.

This might be headed with that line of a hymn, "Hark, from the

tombs etc.!"--but perhaps it won't prove as bad as that. It looks

pretty doubtful still, but I have a sort of feeling that I shall

come round this one time more; by which I don't mean to brag! The

"it" of which I speak is of course my old enemy hemorrhage, of

which I have had within the last week seven pretty big ones and

several smaller, hardly worth mentioning. I don't know what has

come over me--I can't stop them; but, as I said, I mean to try and

beat them yet. Of course I am in bed, where I shall be

indefinitely--not allowed to speak one word, literally, even in a

whisper. The reason I write this is because I don't think it will

hurt me at all--if I take it easy and stop when I feel tired. It is

a pleasant break in the monotony of gruel and of thinking of the

grave--and then too a few words from somebody who is strong and

active in the good old world (as it seems to me now) would be very

refreshing. But don't tell anyone I have written, because it will

be sure to reach the ears of my dear relatives and will cause them

to sniff the air and flounce! You see I am a good deal of a

baby--in the sense of not wanting the reproaches of my relatives

on this or any other subject.... All the Emmets are so good and

kind that I found, when it came to the point, that there was a good

deal to make life attractive, and that if the choice were given me

I would much rather stay up here on the solid earth, in the air and

sunshine, with an occasional sympathetic glimpse of another

person's soul, than to be put down underground and say good-bye for

ever to humanity, with all its laughter and its sadness. Yet you

mustn't think me now in any _special_ danger of dying, or even in

low spirits, for it isn't so--the doctor tells me I am _not_ in

danger, even if the hemorrhages should keep on. However, "you can't

fool a regular boarder," as Mr. Holmes would say, and I can't see

why there is any reason to think they will heal a week hence, when

I shall be still weaker, if they can't heal now. Still, they _may_

be going to stop--I haven't had one since yesterday at 4, and now

it's 3; nearly twenty-four hours. I am of a hopeful temperament and

not easily scared, which is in my favour. If this _should_ prove to

be the last letter you get from me, why take it for a good-bye;

I'll keep on the lookout for you in the spirit world, and shall be

glad to see you when you come there, provided it's a better place

than this. Elly is in New York, enjoying herself immensely, and I

haven't let her know how ill I have been, as there were to be

several parties this last week and I was afraid it might spoil her

fun. I didn't mean you to infer from my particularising Willy

James's intellect that the rest of him isn't to my liking--he is

one of the very few people in this world that I love. He has the

largest heart as well as the largest head, and is thoroughly

interesting to me. He is generous and affectionate and full of

sympathy and humanity--though you mustn't tell him I say so, lest

he should think I have been telling you a lie to serve my own

purposes. Good-bye.

I should have little heart, I confess, for what is essentially the

record of a rapid illness if it were not at the same time the image of

an admirable soul. Surrounded as she was with affection she had yet

greatly to help herself, and nothing is thus more penetrating than the

sense, as one reads, that a method of care would have been followed for

her to-day, and perhaps followed with signal success, that was not in

the healing or nursing range of forty years ago.

It is a week ago to-day, I think, since I last wrote to you, and I

have only had one more hemorrhage--the day after. I feel pretty

sure they have stopped for the present, and I am sitting up in my

room, as bright as possible. Yesterday when I walked across it I

thought I should never be strong again, but now it's quite

different, and so nice to be out of bed that my spirits go up

absurdly. As soon as I am able I am to be taken to town for another

examination, and then when I know my fate I will do the best I can.

This climate is trying, to be sure, but such as it is I've got to

take my chance in it, as there is no one I care enough for, or who

cares enough for me, to take charge of me to Italy, or to the south

anywhere. I don't believe any climate, however good, would be of

the least use to me with people I don't care for. You may let your

moustache grow down to your toes if you like, and I shall but smile

scornfully at your futile precautions.

Of the following, in spite of its length, I can bring myself to abate

nothing.

....Well, "to make a long story short," as Hannah (her old nurse)

says, I caught a cold, and it went to the weak spot, and I had

another slight attack of hemorrhage; but I took the necessary steps

at once, stayed in bed and didn't speak for six days, and then it

stopped and I felt better than I had at all since I was first taken

ill. But I began to tire so of such constant confinement to my room

that they promised to take me to town as soon as I was well enough,

and perhaps to the Opera. This of course would have been a wild

excitement for me, and I had charming little plans of music by day

and by night, for a week, which I meant to spend with Mrs.

Griswold. Accordingly a cavalcade set out from here on Monday,

consisting of myself escorted by sisters and friends, who were to

see me safely installed in my new quarters and leave me. I arrived,

bundled up, at Mrs. Griswold's, and had begun to consider myself

already quite emancipated from bondage--so that I was discussing

with my brother-in-law the propriety of my going that evening to

hear Faust, this but the beginning of a mad career on which I

proposed to rush headlong--when Dr. Bassett arrived, who is the

medical man that I had meant to consult during my stay

_incidentally_ and between the pauses in the music. The first thing

he said was: "What are you doing here? Go directly back to the

place you came from and don't come up again till the warm weather.

As for music, you mustn't hear of it or even think of it for two

months." This was pleasant, but there was nothing to be done but

obey; which I did a few hours later, with my trunk still unpacked

and my immediate plan of life somewhat limited.

I say my immediate plan because my permanent found itself by no

means curtailed, but on the contrary expanded and varied in a

manner I had not even dared to hope. This came from what Dr. B.

said subsequently, when he had examined my lungs; that is to say

after he had laid his head affectionately first under one of my

shoulders and then the other, and there kept it solemnly for about

ten minutes, in a way that was irresistibly ludicrous, especially

with Kitty as spectator. His verdict was that my lungs were

_sound_, that he couldn't detect the least evidence of disease, and

that hemorrhage couldn't have come from the lung itself, but from

their membraneous lining, and that of the throat, whatever this may

be. So he gave me to understand that I have as sound a pair of

lungs at present as the next person; in fact from what he said one

would have thought them a pair that a prize-fighter might covet. At

the same time he sent me flying back to the country, with orders

not to get excited, nor to listen to music, nor to speak with

anybody I care for, nor to do anything in short that the

unregenerate nature longs for. This struck my untutored mind as

somewhat inconsistent, and I ventured a gentle remonstrance, which

however was not even listened to, and I was ignominiously thrust

into a car and borne back to Pelham. The problem still bothers me:

either sound lungs are a very dangerous thing to have, or there is

a foul conspiracy on foot to oppress me. Still, I cling to the

consoling thought of my matchless lungs, and this obliterates my

present sufferings.

Harry came to see me before he sailed for Europe; I'm very glad he

has gone, though I don't expect to see him again for a good many

years. I don't think he will come back for a long time, and I hope

it will do him good and that he will enjoy himself--which he hasn't

done for several years. I haven't read all of Faust, but I think I

know the scenes you call divine--at least I know some that are

exquisite. But why do you speak so disparagingly of King David,

whom I always had a weakness for? Think how charming and lovable a

person he must have been, poet, musician and so much else

combined--with however their attendant imperfections. I don't think

I should have cared to be _Queen_ David exactly. I am possessed

with an overpowering admiration and affection for George Eliot. I

don't know why this has so suddenly come over me, but everything I

look at of hers nowadays makes me take a deeper interest in her. I

should love to see her, and I hope Harry will; I asked him to give

my love to her. But I don't remember ever to have heard _you_ speak

of her. Good-bye. I wish conventionality would invent some other

way of ending a letter than "yours truly"; I am so tired of it, and

as one says it to one's shoemaker it would be rather more

complimentary to one's friends to dispense with it altogether and

just sign one's name without anything, after the manner of Miss

Emerson and other free Boston citizens. But I am a slave to

conventionality, and after all _am_ yours truly....

Singularly present has remained to "Harry," as may be imagined, the

rapid visit he paid her at Pelham that February; he was spending a

couple of days in New York, on a quick decision, before taking ship for

England. I was then to make in Europe no such stay as she had

forecast--I was away but for fifteen months; though I can well believe

my appetite must have struck her as open to the boundless, and can

easily be touched again by her generous thought of this as the right

compensatory thing for me. That indeed is what I mainly recall of the

hour I spent with her--so unforgettable none the less in its general

value; our so beautifully agreeing that quite the same course would be

the right thing for _her_ and that it was wholly detestable I should be

voyaging off without her. But the precious question and the bright

aspect of her own still waiting chance made our talk for the time all

gaiety; it was, strangely enough, a laughing hour altogether, coloured

with the vision of the next winter in Rome, where we should romantically

meet: the appearance then being of particular protective friends with

Roman designs, under whose wing she might happily travel. She had at

that moment been for many weeks as ill as will here have been shown; but

such is the priceless good faith of youth that we perfectly kept at bay

together the significance of this. I recall no mortal note--nothing but

the bright extravagance of her envy; and see her again, in the old-time

Pelham parlours, ever so erectly slight and so more than needfully, so

transparently, fair (I fatuously took this for "becoming"), glide as

swiftly, toss her head as characteristically, laugh to as free a

disclosure of the handsome largeish teeth that made her mouth almost the

main fact of her face, as if no corner of the veil of the future had

been lifted. The house was quiet and spacious for the day, after the

manner of all American houses of that age at those hours, and yet spoke

of such a possible muster at need of generous, gregarious, neighbouring,

sympathising Emmets; in spite of which, withal, the impression was to

come back to me as of a child struggling with her ignorance in a sort of

pathless desert of the genial and the casual. Three months before I

returned to America the struggle had ended. I _was_, as happened, soon

to see in London her admiration, and my own, the great George Eliot--a

brief glimpse then, but a very impressive, and wellnigh my main

satisfaction in which was that I should have my cousin to tell of it. I

found the Charles Nortons settled for the time in London, with social

contacts and penetrations, a give and take of hospitality, that I felt

as wondrous and of some elements of which they offered me, in their

great kindness, the benefit; so that I was long to value having owed

them in the springtime of '69 five separate impressions of distinguished

persons, then in the full flush of activity and authority, that affected

my young provincialism as a positive fairytale of privilege. I had a

Sunday afternoon hour with Mrs. Lewes at North Bank, no second visitor

but my gentle introducer, the younger Miss Norton, sharing the

revelation, which had some odd and for myself peculiarly thrilling

accompaniments; and then the opportunity of dining with Mr. Ruskin at

Denmark Hill, an impression of uneffaced intensity and followed by a

like--and yet so unlike--evening of hospitality from William Morris in

the medieval mise-en-scene of Queen Square. This had been preceded by a

luncheon with Charles Darwin, beautifully benignant, sublimely simple,

at Down; a memory to which I find attached our incidental wondrous

walk--Mrs. Charles Norton, the too near term of her earthly span then

smoothly out of sight, being my guide for the happy excursion--across a

private park of great oaks, which I conceive to have been the admirable

Holwood and where I knew my first sense of a matter afterwards, through

fortunate years, to be more fully disclosed: the springtime in such

places, the adored footpath, the first primroses, the stir and scent of

renascence in the watered sunshine and under spreading boughs that were

somehow before aught else the still reach of remembered lines of

Tennyson, ached over in nostalgic years. The rarest hour of all perhaps,

or at least the strangest, strange verily to the pitch of the sinister,

was a vision, provided by the same care, of D. G. Rossetti in the vernal

dusk of Queen's House Chelsea--among his pictures, amid his poetry

itself, his whole haunting "esthetic," and yet above all bristling with

his personality, with his perversity, with anything, as it rather

awfully seemed to me, but his sympathy, though it at the same time left

one oddly desirous of more of him. These impressions heaped up the

measure, goodness knew, of what would serve for Minnie's curiosity--she

was familiarly Minnie to us; the point remaining all along, however,

that, impatient at having overmuch to wait, I rejoiced in possession of

the exact vivid terms in which I should image George Eliot to her. I was

much later on to renew acquaintance with that great lady, but I think I

scarce exceed in saying that with my so interested cousin's death half

the savour of my appreciation had lost itself. Just in those days, that

month of April, the latter had made a weak ineffectual move to

Philadelphia in quest of physical relief--which expressed at the same

time even more one of those reachings out for appeasement of the soul

which were never too publicly indulged in, but by which her power to

interest the true subjects of her attraction was infinitely quickened.

It represented wonderments, I might well indeed have said to myself,

even beyond any inspired by the high muse of North Bank.

I suppose I ought to have something special to say after having

been suddenly transplanted to a new place and among new people, yet

there isn't much to tell. I came because they all thought at home

that the climate might do me good; I don't feel, however, any

difference in my sensations between this and New York--if I do it's

in favour of New York. I wish it might turn out that an inland

climate isn't after all necessary for me, as I like the other sort

much better and really think I feel stronger in it too. My doctor

told me that Boston would kill me in six months--though he is

possibly mistaken. I am going to try it a little longer here, and

then go back to Pelham, where I'm pretty sure I shall find myself

better again. It may be that the mental atmosphere is more to me

than any other, for I feel homesick here all the while, or at least

what I call so, being away from what is most _like_ home to me, and

what if I were there I should call tired. The chief object I had in

coming was to listen to Phillips Brooks; I have heard him several

times and am not, I think, disappointed. To be sure he didn't say

anything new or startling, but I certainly oughtn't to have

expected that, though I believe I did have a secret hope that he

was going to expound to me the old beliefs with a clearness that

would convince me for ever and banish doubt. I had placed all my

hopes in him as the one man I had heard of who, progressive in all

other ways, had yet been able to keep his faith firm in the things

that most earnest men have left far behind them. Yet in preaching

to his congregation he doesn't, or didn't, touch the real

difficulties at all. He was leading them forward instead of trying

to make it clear to _me_ that I have any good reason for my

feelings. Still, it was something to feel that he has them too, and

isn't afraid to trust them and live for them. I wonder what he

really does believe or think about it all, and whether he knows the

reaction that comes to me about Thursday, after the enthusiasm and

confidence made by his eloquence and earnestness on Sunday.

To-morrow will be Saturday, and I shall be glad when Sunday comes

to wind me up again. I feel sadly run down to-night and as if I

should like to see some honest old pagan and shake him by the hand.

It will seem all right and easy again soon, I know, but is it

always thus? Is there no more of that undoubting faith in the

world that there used to be? But I won't talk any more about it

now, or I shan't sleep; it is getting late and all themes but the

least interesting must be put away.

"Quaint," as we now say, it at this end of time seems to me that

Phillips Brooks, the great Episcopal light of the period, first in

Philadelphia and then in Boston, and superior character, excellent, even

ardent, thoughtful, genial, practical man, should have appeared to play

before her a light possibly of the clear strain, the rich abundance, the

straight incidence, that she so desired to think attainable. A large, in

fact an enormous, softly massive and sociably active presence, of

capacious attention and comforting suggestion, he was a brave worker

among those who didn't too passionately press their questions and

claims--half the office of such a minister being, no doubt, to abate the

high pitch, and the high pitch being by the same token too much Minnie's

tendency. She was left with it in the smug Philadelphia visibly on her

hands; she had found there after all but a closed door, to which she was

blandly directed, rather than an open, and the sigh of her falling back

with her disappointment seems still to reach one's ears. She found them

too much all round, the stiff blank barriers that, for whatever

thumping, didn't "give;" and in fine I like not too faintly to colour

this image of her as failing, in her avid young sincerity, to draw from

the honest pastor of more satisfied souls any assurance that she could

herself honestly apply. I confess that her particular recorded case,

slender enough in its lonely unrest, suggests to me a force, or at least

a play, of effective criticism more vivid to-day than either of the

several rich monuments, honourably as these survive, to Phillips

Brooks's positive "success." She had no occasion or no chance to find

the delightful harmonising friend in him--which was part of the success

for so many others. But her letter goes on after a couple of days--she

had apparently not sent the previous part, and it brings her back, we

can rejoicingly note, to George Eliot, whose poem, alluded to, must have

been The Spanish Gipsy. This work may indeed much less have counted for

her than the all-engulfing Mill on the Floss, incomparably privileged

production, which shone for young persons of that contemporaneity with a

nobleness that nothing under our actual star begins in like case to

match. These are great recognitions, but how can I slight for them a

mention that has again and again all but broken through in my

pages?--that of Francis Boott and his daughter (she to become later on

Mrs. Frank Duveneck and to yield to the same dismal decree of death

before her time that rested on so many of the friends of our youth).

When I turn in thought to the happiness that our kinswoman was still to

have known in her short life, for all her disaster, Elizabeth Boott,

delightful, devoted and infinitely under the charm, at once hovers for

me; this all the more, I hasten to add, that we too on our side, and not

least Mary Temple herself, were under the charm, and that _that_ charm,

if less immediately pointed, affected all our young collective

sensibility as a wondrous composite thing. There was the charm for

us--if I must not again speak in assurance but for myself--that

"Europe," the irrepressible even as the _ewig Weibliche_ of literary

allusion was irrepressible, had more than anything else to do with; and

then there was the other that, strange to say (strange as I, once more,

found myself feeling it) owed nothing of its authority to anything so

markedly out of the picture. The spell to which I in any case most

piously sacrificed, most cultivated the sense of, was ever of this

second cast--and for the simple reason that the other, serene in its

virtue, fairly insolent in its pride, needed no rites and no care. It

must be allowed that there was nothing composite in any spell

proceeding, whether directly or indirectly, from the great Albany

connection: this form of the agreeable, through whatever appeals, could

certainly not have been more of a piece, as we say--more of a single

superfused complexion, an element or principle that we could in the

usual case ever so easily and pleasantly account for. The case of that

one in the large number of my cousins whom we have seen to be so

incomparably the most interesting was of course anything but the usual;

yet the Albany origin, the woodnote wild, sounded out even amid her

various voices and kept her true, in her way, to something we could only

have called local, or perhaps family, type. Essentially, however, she

had been a free incalculable product, a vivid exception to rules and

precedents; so far as she had at all the value of the "composite" it was

on her own lines altogether--the composition was of things that had lain

nearest to hand. It mattered enormously for such a pair as the Bootts,

intimately associated father and daughter, that what had lain nearest

_their_ hand, or at least that of conspiring nature and fortune in

preparing them for our consumption, had been the things of old Italy, of

the inconceivable Tuscany, that of the but lately expropriated Grand

Dukes in particular, and that when originally alighting among us _en

plein_ Newport they had seemed fairly to reek with a saturation,

esthetic, historic, romantic, that everything roundabout made precious.

I was to apprehend in due course, and not without dismay, that what they

really most reeked with was the delight of finding us ourselves exactly

as we were; they fell so into the wondrous class of inverted romantics,

several other odd flowers of which I was later on to have anxiously to

deal with: we and our large crude scene of barbaric plenty, as it might

have been called, beguiled them to appreciations such as made our

tribute to themselves excite at moments their impatience and strike them

as almost silly. It was _our_ conditions that were picturesque, and I

had to make the best of a time when they themselves appeared to consent

to remain so but by the beautiful gaiety of their preference. This, I

remember well, I found disconcerting, so that my main affectionate

business with them became, under amusement by the way, that of keeping

them true to type. What above all contributed was that they really

couldn't help their case, try as they would to shake off the old

infection; they were of "old world" production through steps it was too

late to retrace; and they were in the practical way and in the course of

the very next years to plead as guilty to this as the highest proper

standard for them could have prescribed. They "went back," and again and

again, with a charming, smiling, pleading inconsequence--any pretext but

the real one, the fact that the prime poison was in their veins, serving

them at need; so that, as the case turned, all my own earlier sense, on

the spot, of Florence and Rome was to mix itself with their delightfully

rueful presence there. I could then perfectly put up with that flame of

passion for Boston and Newport in them which still left so perfect their

adaptability to Italian installations that would have been impossible

save for subtle Italian reasons.

I speak of course but of the whole original view: time brings strange

revenges and contradictions, and all the later history was to be a

chapter by itself and of the fullest. We had been all alike accessible

in the first instance to the call of those references which played

through their walk and conversation with an effect that their qualifying

ironies and amusing reactions, where such memories were concerned,

couldn't in the least abate; for nothing in fact lent them a happier

colour than just this ability to afford so carelessly to cheapen the

certain treasure of their past. They had enough of that treasure to give

it perpetually away--in our subsequently to be more determined, our

present, sense; in short we had the fondest use for their leavings even

when they themselves hadn't. Mary Temple, with her own fine quality so

far from composite, rejoiced in the perception, however unassisted by

any sort of experience, of what their background had "meant"; she would

have liked to be able to know just that for herself, as I have already

hinted, and I actually find her image most touching perhaps by its so

speaking of what she with a peculiar naturalness dreamed of and missed.

Of clear old English stock on her father's side, her sense for what was

English in life--so we used to simplify--was an intimate part of her,

little chance as it enjoyed for happy verifications. In the Bootts,

despite their still ampler and more recently attested share in that

racial strain, the foreign tradition had exceedingly damped the English,

which didn't however in the least prevent her being caught up by it as

it had stamped itself upon the admirable, the infinitely civilised and

sympathetic, the markedly _produced_ Lizzie. This delightful girl,

educated, cultivated, accomplished, toned above all, as from steeping in

a rich old medium, to a degree of the rarest among her coevals "on our

side," had the further, the supreme grace that she melted into American

opportunities of friendship--and small blame to her, given such as she

then met--with the glee of a sudden scarce believing discoverer. Tuscany

could only swoon away under comparison of its starved sociabilities and

complacent puerilities, the stress of which her previous years had so

known, with the multiplied welcomes and freedoms, the exquisite and easy

fellowships that glorified to her the home scene. Into not the least of

these quick affinities had her prompt acquaintance with Mary Temple

confidently ripened; and with no one in the aftertime, so long as that

too escaped the waiting shears, was I to find it more a blest and

sacred rite, guarded by no stiff approaches, to celebrate my cousin's

memory. That really is my apology for this evocation--which might under

straighter connections have let me in still deeper; since if I have

glanced on another page of the present miscellany at the traps too often

successfully set for my wandering feet my reader will doubtless here

recognise a perfect illustration of our danger and will accuse me of

treating an inch of canvas to an acre of embroidery. Let the poor canvas

figure time and the embroidery figure consciousness--the proportion will

perhaps then not strike us as so wrong. Consciousness accordingly still

grips me to the point of a felt pressure of interest in such a matter as

the recoverable history--history in the esthetic connection at least--of

its insistent dealings with a given case. How in the course of time for

instance was it not insistently to deal, for a purpose of application,

with the fine prime image deposited all unwittingly by the "picturesque"

(as I absolutely required to feel it) Boott situation or Boott _data_?

The direct or vital value of these last, in so many ways, was

experiential, a stored and assimilated thing; but the seed of suggestion

proved after long years to have kept itself apart in order that it

should develop under a particular breath. A not other than lonely and

bereft American, addicted to the arts and endowed for them, housed to

an effect of long expatriation in a massive old Florentine villa with a

treasured and tended little daughter by his side, _that_ was the germ

which for reasons beyond my sounding the case of Frank Boott had been

appointed to plant deep down in my vision of things. So lodged it

waited, but the special instance, as I say, had lodged it, and it lost

no vitality--on the contrary it acquired every patience--by the fact

that little by little each of its connections above ground, so to speak,

was successively cut. Then at last after years it raised its own head

into the air and found its full use for the imagination. An Italianate

bereft American with a little moulded daughter in the setting of a

massive old Tuscan residence was at the end of years exactly what was

required by a situation of my own--conceived in the light of the Novel;

and I _had_ it there, in the authenticated way, with its essential fund

of truth, at once all the more because my admirable old friend had given

it to me and none the less because he had no single note of character or

temper, not a grain of the non-essential, in common with my Gilbert

Osmond. This combination of facts has its shy interest, I think, in the

general imaginative or reproductive connection--testifying as it so

happens to do on that whole question of the "putting of people into

books" as to which any ineptitude of judgment appears always in order.

I probably shouldn't have had the Gilbert Osmonds at all without the

early "form" of the Frank Bootts, but I still more certainly shouldn't

have had them with the _sense_ of my old inspirers. The form had to be

disembarrassed of that sense and to take in a thoroughly other; thanks

to which account of the matter I am left feeling that I scarce know

whether most to admire, for support of one's beautiful business of the

picture of life, the relation of "people" to art or the relation of art

to people. Adorable each time the mystery of which of these factors, as

we say, has the more prevailingly conduced to a given effect--and too

much adored, at any rate, I allow, when carrying me so very far away. I

retrace my steps with this next.

I have made several attempts lately to write you a letter, but I

have given it up after two or three pages, because I have always

been in a blue state of mind at the time, and have each time

charitably decided before it was too late to spare you. But if I

were to wait until things change to rose-colour I might perhaps

wait till I die, or longer even, in which case your next

communication from me would be a spiritual one. I am going to

Newport in the early part of May to meet the Bootts--Henrietta has

just come back from there delighted with her visit; why, heaven

knows, I suppose, but I don't--except that she is in that blissful

state of babyhood peculiar to herself where everything seems

delightful.... I like George Eliot not through her poem so much,

not nearly so much, as through her prose. The creature interests me

personally, and I feel a desire to know something of her life; how

far her lofty moral sentiments have served her practically--for

instance in her dealings with Lewes. I see that she understands the

character of a _generous_ woman, that is of a woman who believes in

generosity and who must be that or nothing, and who feels keenly,

notwithstanding, how hard it is practically to follow this out, and

how (looking at it from the point of view of comfort as far as this

world goes) it "pays" not at all. We are having weather quite like

summer and rather depressing; I don't feel very well and am always

catching cold--that is I suppose I am, as I have a cough nearly all

the time. As for Phillips Brooks, what you say of him is, no doubt,

all true--he didn't touch the main point when I heard him, at all

events, and that satisfaction you so kindly wish me is, I am

afraid, not to be got from any man. The mystery of this world grows

and grows, and sticks out of every apparently trivial thing,

instead of lessening. I hope this feeling may not be the incipient

stage of insanity. Paul told the truth when he said that now we see

through a glass, _very_ darkly. I hope and trust that the rest may

be equally true, and that some day we shall see face to face. You

say it is easy to drown thought by well-doing, and is it not also

the soundest philosophy (so long of course as one doesn't humbug

oneself); since by simply thinking out a religion who has ever

arrived at anything that did not leave one's heart empty? Do you

ever see Willy James? Good-bye.

Needless enough surely to declare that such pages were essentially not

love-letters: that they could scarce have been less so seems exactly

part of their noble inevitability, as well as a proof singularly

interesting and charming that confident friendship may obey its force

and insist on its say quite as much as the sentiment we are apt to take,

as to many of its occasions, for the supremely vocal. We have so often

seen this latter beat distressfully about the bush for something still

deficient, something in the line of positive esteem or constructive

respect, whether offered or enjoyed, that an esteem and a respect such

as we here apprehend, explicit enough on either side to dispense with

those superlatives in which graceless reaction has been known

insidiously to lurk, peculiarly refresh and instruct us. The fine

special quietude of the relation thus promoted in a general

consciousness of unrest--and even if it could breed questions too, since

a relation that breeds none at all is not a living one--was of the

highest value to the author of my letters, who had already sufficiently

"lived," in her generous way, to know well enough in how different a

quarter to look for the grand inconclusive. The directness, the ease,

the extent of the high consideration, the felt need of it as a support,

indeed one may almost say as an inspiration, in trouble, and the free

gift of it as a delightful act of intelligence and justice, render the

whole exhibition, to my sense, admirable in its kind. Questions luckily

_could_ haunt it, as I say and as we shall presently see, but only to

illustrate the more all the equilibrium preserved. I confess I can

imagine no tribute to a manly nature from a feminine more final even

than the confidence in "mere" consideration here embodied--the comfort

of the consideration being in the fact that the character with which the

feminine nature was dealing lent it, could it but come, such weight. We

seem to see play through the whole appeal of the younger person to the

somewhat older an invocation of the weight suspended, weight of

judgment, weight of experience and authority, and which may ever so

quietly drop. How kindly in another relation it had been in fact capable

of dropping comes back to me in the mention of my brother Wilky, as to

whom this aspect of his admiring friendship for our young relative's

correspondent, the fruit of their common military service roundabout

Charleston, again comprehensively testifies. That comradeship was a

privilege that Wilky strongly cherished, as well as what one

particularly liked to think for him of his having known--he was to have

known nothing more fortunate. In no less a degree was our elder brother

to come to prize _his_ like share in the association--this being

sufficiently indicated, for that matter, in the note I have quoted from

him. That I have prized my own share in it let my use of this benefit

derived strongly represent. But again for Minnie herself the sadder

admonition is sharp, and I find I know not what lonely pluck in her

relapses shaken off as with the jangle of silver bells, her expert

little efforts to live them down, Newport and other matters aiding and

the general preoccupied good will all vainly at her service. Pitiful in

particular her carrying her trouble experimentally back to the Newport

of the first gladness of her girlhood and of the old bright spectacle.

I know quite well I don't owe you a letter, and that the custom for

maidens is to mete out strictly letter for letter; but if you don't

mind it I don't, and if you _do_ mind that kind of thing you had

better learn not to at once--if you propose to be a friend of mine;

or else have your feelings from time to time severely shocked.

After which preamble I will say that there is a special reason in

this case, though there might not be in another.

She mentions having seen a common friend, in great bereavement and

trouble, who has charged her with a message to her correspondent "if you

know of anything to comfort a person when the one they love best dies,

for heaven's sake say it to her--_I_ hadn't a word to say." And she goes

on:

I wrote to you that I was going to Newport, and I meant to go next

Tuesday, but I had another hemorrhage last night, and it is

impossible to say when I shall be able to leave here. I think I was

feeling ill when I last wrote to you, and ever since have been

coughing and feeling wretchedly, until finally the hemorrhage has

come. If that goes over well I think I shall be better. I am in bed

now, on the old plan of gruel and silence, and I may get off

without any worse attack this time. It is a perfect day, like

summer--my windows are up and the birds sing. It seems quite out of

keeping that I should be in bed. I should be all right if I could

only get rid of coughing. The warm weather will set me up again. I

wonder what you are doing to-day. Probably taking a solitary walk

and meditating--on what? Good-bye.

But she went to Newport after a few days apparently; whence comes this.

I believe I was in bed when I last wrote to you, but that attack

didn't prove nearly so bad a one as the previous; I rather bullied

it, and after the fourth hemorrhage it ceased; moreover my cough is

better since I came here. But I am, to tell the truth, a little

homesick--and am afraid I am becoming too much of a baby. Whether

it's from illness or from the natural bent I know not, but there is

no comfort in life away from people who care for you--not an heroic

statement, I am fully aware. I hear that Wilky is at home, and dare

say he will have the kindness to run down and see me while I am

here; at least I hope so. But I am not in the mood for writing

to-day--I am tired and can only bore you if I kept on. It is just a

year since we began to write, and aren't you by this time a little

tired of it? If you are, say so like a man--don't be afraid of me.

Now I am going to lie down before dressing for dinner. Good-bye.

This passage more than a month later makes me ask myself of which of the

correspondents it strikes me as most characteristic. The gay clearness

of the one looks out--as it always looked out on the least chance

given--at the several apparent screens of the other; each of which is

indeed disconnectedly, independently clear, but tells too small a part

(at least for her pitch of lucidity) of what they together enclose, and

what was _quand meme_ of so fine an implication. Delightful at the same

time any page from her that is not one of the huddled milestones of her

rate of decline.

How can I write to you when I have forgotten all about you?--if one

_can_ forget what one has never known. However, I am not quite sure

whether it isn't knowing you too much rather than too little that

seems to prevent. Do you comprehend the difficulty? Of course you

don't, so I will explain. The trouble is, I think, that to me you

have no distinct personality. I don't feel sure to whom I am

writing when I say to myself that I will write to you. I see

mentally three men, all answering to your name, each liable to read

my letters and yet differing so much from each other that if it is

proper for one of them it's quite unsuitable to the others. Do you

see? If you can once settle for me the question of which gets my

letters I shall know better what to say in them. Is it the man I

used to see (I can't say know) at Conway, who had a beard, I think,

and might have been middle-aged, and who discussed Trollope's

novels with Kitty and Elly? This was doubtless one of the best of

men, but he didn't _interest_ me, I never felt disposed to speak to

him, and used to get so sleepy in his society at about eight

o'clock that I wondered how the other girls could stay awake till

eleven. Is it _that_ person who reads my letters? Or is it the

young man I recently saw at Newport, with a priestly countenance,

calm and critical, with whom I had certainly no fault to find as a

chance companion for three or four days, but whom I should never

have dreamt of writing to or bothering with my affairs one way or

the other, happiness or no happiness, as he would doubtless at once

despise me for my nonsense and wonder at me for my gravity? Does

_he_ get my letters?--or is it finally the being who has from time

to time himself written to me, signing by the same name that the

other gentlemen appropriate? If my correspondent is this last I

know where I stand--and, please heaven, shall stand there some time

longer. Him I won't describe, but he's the only one of the three I

care anything about. My only doubt is because I always address him

at Pemberton Square, and I think him the least likely of the three

to go there much. But good-bye, whichever you are!

It was not at any rate to be said of her that she didn't live

surrounded, even though she had to go so far afield--very far it may at

moments have appeared to her--for the freedom of talk that was her

greatest need of all. How happily and hilariously surrounded this next,

of the end of the following August, and still more its sequel of the

mid-September, abundantly bring back to me; so in the habit were the

numerous Emmets, it might almost be said, of marrying the numerous young

women of our own then kinship: they at all events formed mainly by

themselves at that time the figures and the action of her immediate

scene. The marriage of her younger sister was as yet but an

engagement--to the brother-in-law of the eldest, already united to

Richard Emmet and with Temple kinship, into the bargain, playing between

the pairs. All of which animation of prospective and past wedding-bells,

with whatever consolidation of pleasant ties, couldn't quench her

ceaseless instinct for the obscurer connections of things or keep

passionate reflections from awaiting her at every turn. This disposition

in her, and the way in which, at the least push, the gate of thought

opened for her to its widest, which was to the prospect of the soul and

the question of interests on _its_ part that wouldn't be ignored, by no

means fails to put to me that she might well have found the

mystifications of life, had she been appointed to enjoy more of them,

much in excess of its contentments. It easily comes up for us over the

relics of those we have seen beaten, this sense that it was not for

nothing they missed the ampler experience, but in no case that I have

known has it come up for me so much. In none other have I so felt the

naturalness of our asking ourselves what such spirits would have done

with their extension and what would have satisfied them; since dire as

their defeat may have been we don't see them, in the ambiguous light of

some of their possibilities, at peace with victory. This may be perhaps

an illusion of our interest in them, a mere part of its ingenuity; and

I allow that if our doubt is excessive it does them a great wrong--which

is another way in which they were not to have been righted. We soothe a

little with it at any rate our sense of the tragic.

...The irretrievableness of the step (her sister E.'s marriage)

comes over my mind from time to time in such an overwhelming way

that it's most depressing, and I have to be constantly on my guard

not to let Temple and Elly see it, as it would naturally not please

them. After all, since they are not appalled at what they've done,

and are quite sure of each other, as they evidently are, why should

I worry myself? I am well aware that if all other women felt the

seriousness of the matter to the extent I do, hardly any would

_ever_ marry, and the human race would stop short. So I ought

perhaps to be glad so many people can find and take that "little

ease" that Clough talks about, without consciously giving up the

"highest thing." And may not this majority of people be the truly

wise and my own notions of the subject simply fanatical and

impracticable? I clearly see in how small a minority I am, and that

the other side has, with Bishop Blougram, the best of it from one

point of view; but I can't help that, can I? We must be true to

_ourselves_, mustn't we? though all the rest of humanity be of a

contrary opinion, or else throw discredit upon the wisdom of God,

who made us as we are and not like the next person. Do you remember

my old hobby of the "remote possibility of the best thing" being

better than a clear certainty of the second best? Well, I believe

it more than ever, every day I live. Indeed I don't believe

anything else--but is not that everything? And isn't it exactly

what Christianity means? Wasn't Christ the only man who ever lived

and died _entirely_ for his faith, without a shadow of selfishness?

And isn't that reason enough why we should all turn to Him after

having tried everything else and found it wanting?--turn to Him as

the only pure and _unmixed_ manifestation of God in humanity? And

if I believe this, which I think I do, how utterly inconsistent and

detestable is the life I lead, which, so far from being a loving

and cheerful surrender of itself once for all to God's service, is

at best but a base compromise--a few moments or acts or thoughts

consciously and with difficulty divested of actual selfishness.

Must this always be so? Is it owing to the indissoluble mixture of

the divine and the diabolical in us all, or is it because I myself

am hopelessly frivolous and trifling? Or is it finally that I

really don't _believe_, that I have still a doubt in my mind

whether religion _is_ the one exclusive thing to live for, as

Christ taught us, or whether it will prove to be only _one_ of the

influences, though a great one, which educate the human race and

help it along in that culture which Matthew Arnold thinks the most

desirable thing in the world? In fine is it the meaning and end of

our lives, or only a moral principle bearing a certain part in our

development----?

Since I wrote this I have been having my tea and sitting on the

piazza looking at the stars and thinking it most unfaithful and

disloyal of me even to speak as I did just now, admitting the

possibility of that faith not being everything which yet at moments

is so divinely true as to light up the whole of life suddenly and

make everything clear. I know the trouble is with _me_ when doubt

and despondency come, but on the other hand I can't altogether

believe it wrong of me to have written as I have, for then what

becomes of my principle of saying what one really thinks and

leaving it to God to take care of his own glory? The truth will

vindicate itself in spite of my voice to the contrary. If you think

I am letting myself go this way without sufficient excuse I won't

do it again; but I can't help it this time, I have nobody else to

speak to about serious things. If by chance I say anything or ask a

question that lies at all near my heart my sisters all tell me I am

"queer" and that they "wouldn't be me for anything"--which is, no

doubt, sensible on their part, but which puts an end to anything

but conversation of the most superficial kind on mine. You know one

gets lonely after a while on such a plan of living, so in sheer

desperation I break out where I perhaps more safely can.

Such is the magic of old letters on its subtlest occasions that I

reconstitute in every detail, to a vivid probability--even if I may not

again proportionately project the bristling image--our scene of next

mention; drawing for this upon my uneffaced impression of a like one, my

cousin Katharine Temple's bright nuptials, in the same general setting,

very much before, and in addition seeming to see the very muse of

history take a fresh scroll in order to prepare to cover it, in her very

handsomest hand, well before my eyes. Covered is it now for me with that

abounding and interesting life of the generations then to come at the

pair of preliminary flourishes ushering in the record of which I thus

feel myself still assist.

But a line to-day to tell you that Elly was safely married on

Wednesday. She looked simply beautiful in her wedding garment, and

behaved herself throughout with a composure that was as delightful

as it was surprising. I send you a photograph of myself that I had

taken a few weeks ago. It looks perhaps a trifle melancholy, but I

can't help that--I did the best I could. But I won't write more--it

wouldn't be enlivening. Everything looks grey and blue in the world

nowadays. It will all be bright again in time, I have no doubt;

there is no special reason for it; I think I am simply tired with

knocking about. Yet my week in Newport might have been pleasant

enough if the dentist hadn't taken that occasion to break my bones

for me in a barbarous manner. You are very kind and friendly to

me--you don't know how much happiness your letters give me. You

will be surprised, I dare say, but I shall not, at the last day,

when the accounts are all settled, to find how much this counts in

your favour. Good-bye.

I find my story so attaching that I prize every step of its course, each

note of which hangs together with all the others. The writer is

expressed to my vision in every word, and the resulting image so worth

preserving. Much of one's service to it is thus a gathering-in of the

ever so faded ashes of the happiness that did come to her after all in

snatches. Everything could well, on occasion, look "grey and blue," as

she says; yet there were stretches, even if of the briefest, when other

things still were present than the active symptoms of her state. The

photograph that she speaks of above is before me as I write and

blessedly helpful to memory--so that I am moved to reproduce it only

till I feel again how the fondness of memory must strike the light for

apprehension. The plan of the journey to California for the advantage of

the climate there was, with other plans taken up and helplessly dropped,

but beguiling for the day, to accompany her almost to the end.

The Temple-Emmet caravan have advanced as far as Newport and now

propose to retreat again to Pelham without stopping at Boston or

anywhere else. My brother-in-law has business in New York and can't

be away any longer. I haven't been well of late, or I should have

run up to Boston for a day or two to take a sad farewell of all I

love in that city and thereabouts before I cross the Rocky

Mountains. This little trip has been made out for me by my friends;

I have determined to go, and shall probably start with Elly and

Temple in about ten days, possibly not for a fortnight, to spend

the winter in San Francisco. I can't be enthusiastic about it, but

suppose I might as well take all the means I can to get better: a

winter in a warm climate _may_ be good for me. In short I am going,

and now what I want _you_ to do about it is simply to come and see

us before that. Kitty is going to send you a line to add her

voice--perhaps that may bring you. You may never see me again, you

know, and if I were to die so far away you'd be sorry you hadn't

taken leave of me, wouldn't you?

The idea of California held, and with other pleasant matters really

occupied the scene; out of which moreover insist on shining to me

accessory connections, or connections that then were to be: intensely

distinct for example the figure of Miss Crawford, afterwards Madame von

Rabe, sister of my eminent friend F. Marion of the name and, in her

essence, I think, but by a few shades less entire a figure than

he--which is saying much. The most endowed and accomplished of men Frank

Crawford, so that I have scarcely known another who had more aboundingly

lived and wrought, about whom moreover there was singularly more to be

said, it struck me, than at all found voice at the time he might have

been commemorated. Therefore if the young lady alluded to in my cousin's

anecdote was at all of the same personal style and proportion--well, I

should draw the moral if it didn't represent here too speciously the

mouth of a trap, one of those I have already done penance for; the

effect of my yielding to which would be a shaft sunk so straight down

into matters interesting and admirable and sad and strange that, with

everything that was futurity to the occasion noted in our letter and is

an infinitely mixed and a heavily closed past now, I hurry on without so

much as a glance.

The present plan is to send me to California in about three weeks

by water, under the care of one of the Emmet boys and Temple's

valet--for nurse; and by the time I get there, early in December,

they will be settled in San Francisco for the winter. The idea of a

twenty-one days' sea-voyage is rather appalling--what do you think

of it? This day is but too heavenly here. I haven't been to

church, but walking by myself, as happy as possible. When one

sleeps well and the sun shines, what happiness to live! I wish you

were here--wouldn't I show you Pelham at high tide, on a day that

is simply intoxicating, with a fresh breeze blown through the red

and yellow leaves and sunshine "on field and hill, in heart and

brain," as Mr. Lowell says. I suppose you remember the pony I

drove, and Punch, the little Scotch terrier that tried so to

insinuate himself into your affections, on the piazza, the morning

you left. The former has been "cutting up," the latter _cut_ up,

since then. You wouldn't believe me when I told you the pony was a

highly nervous creature--but she behaved as one the other day when

I took the Roman Miss Crawford, who has been staying near here, a

ride. She shied at a dog that frightened her, and dragged the cart

into a ditch, and tried to get over a stone wall, waggon and all. I

of course had to hang on to the reins, but I suggested to Miss

Crawford that she should get out, as the cart was pretty steady

while the horse's forefeet were on top of the wall; which she did,

into a mud-puddle, and soiled her pretty striped stockings and

shoes in a horrible way. It ended by the dear little beast's

consenting to get back upon all fours, but I found it very amusing

and have liked her better ever since.... How does Mr. Holmes

persevere about smoking? I pity him if he can't sleep, and wish _I_

had a vicious habit so that I might give it up. But I must finish

my tale of the quadruped Punch, who was called upon in the dead of

night by five dogs of the neighbourhood and torn to pieces by them.

The coachman heard him crying in the night, and in the morning we

found him--that is to say we gathered him together, his dear little

tail from one place and his head from another etc! So went out a

very sweet little spirit--I wonder where it is now. Don't tell me

he hadn't more of a soul than that Kaufmann, the fat oysterman.

I find bribes to recognition and recovery quite mercilessly multiply,

and with the effort to brush past them more and more difficult; with the

sense for me at any rate (whatever that may be worth for wisdom or

comfort) of sitting rather queerly safe and alone, though as with a

dangle of legs over the edge of a precipice, on the hither side of great

gulfs of history. But these things, dated toward the end of that

November, speak now in a manner for themselves.

My passage for California is taken for the 4th of December; Elly

and Temple have written to me to come at once--they are settled in

San Francisco for the winter. My brother-in-law here has been

promised that I shall be made so comfortable I shan't want to tear

myself from the ship when I arrive. The captain is a friend of

Temple's, and also of my uncle Captain Temple, and both of them are

going to arrange so for me that I fully expect the ship to be hung

with banners and flowers when I step on board.... I enjoyed my time

in Boston far more than I had expected--in fact immensely, and

wouldn't have missed it for anything; I feel now as if it had

_necessarily_ had to happen. I don't know how I should have done

the winter, and especially started off for an indefinitely long

absence in the west without the impetus that it gave me in certain

directions--the settling down and shaking up, the dissipating of

certain impressions that I had thought fixed and the strengthening

of others that I hadn't been so sure of: an epoch in short. I dare

say you have had such--in which a good deal of living was done in a

short time, to be turned over and made fruitful in days to come. I

saw Mr. Holmes once, and was very glad of that glimpse, short as it

was. I went home by way of Newport, where I stayed two days--and

where I was surprised to hear of Fred Jones's engagement to Miss

Rawle of Philadelphia. Do you know her? When I got to New York I

went to the Hones' to ask something about Fred and his affairs and

found that Miss Rawle was staying next door with Mrs. Willy Duncan;

so I went in to see her on the spur of the moment, very much as I

had come from the boat, not particularly presentable for a first

call: however, I thought if she had a soul she wouldn't mind

it--and such I found the case.... Lizzie Boott was as sweet and

good to me as ever; I think she is at once the most unselfish and

most unegotistical girl I know--they don't always go together.

What follows here has, in its order, I think, that it still so testifies

to life--if one doesn't see in it indeed rather perhaps the instinct on

the writer's part, though a scarce conscious one, to wind up the affairs

of her spirit, as it were, and be able to turn over with a sigh of

supreme relief for an end intimately felt as at hand. The moral

fermentation breaking through the bustle of outward questions even at a

time when she might have thrown herself, as one feels, on the great soft

breast of equalising Nature, or taken her chance of not being too wrong,

is a great stroke of truth. No one really could be less "morbid"; yet

she would take no chance--it wasn't in her--of not being right with the

right persons; among whom she so ranked her correspondent.

My address at San Francisco will be simply Care of C. Temple Emmet,

Esq.; and I am surely off this time unless heaven interposes in a

miraculous way between now and Saturday. I've no great courage

about it, but after all it's much the same to me where I am; life

is always full of interest and mystery and happiness to me, and as

for the voyage, the idea of three weeks of comparative solitude

between sea and sky isn't unattractive.... I know that by my

question [as to why he had written, apparently, that she was, of

her nature, "far off" from him] I am putting an end to that

delightful immunity I have enjoyed so much with you from sickening

introspection, analysis of myself and yourself, that exhausting and

nauseating subjectivity, with which most of my other friends see

fit to deluge me, thereby taking much that is refreshing out of

life. Don't be afraid of "hurting my feelings" by anything you can

say. Our friendship has always been to my mind a one-sided thing,

and if you should tell me you find me in any way unsympathetic or

unsatisfactory it won't disappoint me, and I won't even allow

myself to think I'm sorry. I feel so clearly that God knows best,

and that we ought neither of us surely to wish to distort his

creatures from the uses he made them for, just to serve our own

purposes--that is to get a little more sympathy and comfort. We

must each of us, after all, live out our own lives apart from

everyone else; and yet, this being once understood as a fundamental

truth, there is nobody's sympathy and approval that would encourage

me so much as yours. I mean that if one's heart and motives could

be known by another as God knows them, without disguise or

extenuation, and if it should _then_ prove that on the _whole_ you

didn't think well of me, it would, more than anything else could,

shake my confidence in my own instincts, which must after all

forever be my guide. And yet, as I said before, I am quite prepared

for the worst, and shall listen to it, if necessary, quite humbly.

I am very much inclined to trust your opinion before my own.

An hour later. _Sold_ again, by all that's wonderful--I had almost

said by all that's damnable, though it isn't exactly that. My

brother Dick has just walked in with a telegram from Temple: "I

shall be back in December--don't send M." A tremendous revulsion of

feeling and a general sigh of relief have taken place on this

announcement, and it's all right, I'm sure, though when I wrote you

an hour ago I thought the same of the other prospect.

One catches one's breath a little, frankly, at what was to follow the

above within a few days--implying as it does that she had drawn upon

herself some fairly direct statement of her correspondent's reserves of

view as to her human or "intellectual" composition. To have _had_ such

reserves at such an hour, and to have responded to the invitation to

express them--for invitation there had been--is something that our

actual larger light quite helps us to flatter ourselves _we_ shouldn't

have been capable of. But what was of the essence between these

admirable persons was exactly the tone of truth; the larger light was

all to wait for, and the real bearings of the hour were as unapparent as

the interlocutors themselves were at home in clearness, so far as they

might bring that ideal about. And whatever turn their conversation took

is to the honour always of the generous girl's passion for truth. As

this long letter admirably illustrates that, I withdraw from it almost

nothing. The record of the rare commerce would be incomplete without it;

all the more perhaps for the wonder and pain of our seeing the noble and

pathetic young creature have, of all things, in her predicament, to

plead for extenuations, to excuse and justify herself.

I understood your letter perfectly well--it was better than I

feared it might be, but bad enough. Better because I knew already

all it told me, and had been afraid there might be some new and

horrible development in store for me which I hadn't myself felt;

but bad enough because I find it in itself, new or old, such a

disgusting fact that I am intellectually so unsympathetic. It is a

fault I feel profoundly conscious of, but one that, strange to say,

I have only of late been conscious of _as_ a fault. I dare say I

have always known, in a general way, that I am very unobservant

about things and take very little interest in subjects upon which

my mind doesn't naturally dwell; but it had never occurred to me

before that it is a fault that ought to be corrected. Whether

because I have never been given to studying myself much, but have

just let myself go the way my mind was most inclined to, more

interested in the subject itself than in the fact that it

interested me; or whether because one is averse to set oneself down

as indolent and egotistic I don't know; at all events I have of

late seen the thing in all its unattractiveness, and I wish I could

get over it. Do you think that, now I am fully roused to the fact,

my case is hopeless? Or that if I should try hard for the next

twenty-five years I might succeed in modifying it? I am speaking

now of a want of interest in _all_ the rest of the world; of not

having the desire to investigate subjects, naturally uninteresting

to me, just because they are interesting to some other human being

whom I don't particularly owe anything to except that he _is_ a

human being, and so his thoughts and feelings ought to be respected

by me and sympathised with. Not to do this is, I know,

unphilosophic and selfish, conceited and altogether inhuman. To be

unselfish, to live for other people, to mould our lives as much as

possible on the model of Christ's all-embracing humanity, seems

most clearly to my mind the one thing worth living for; and yet it

is still the hardest thing for me to do, and I think I do it less

than anybody else who feels the necessity of it strongly at all.

I am glad you still go to an occasional ball--I should rather like

to meet you at one myself; it's a phase of life we have seen so

little of together. I have been feeling so well lately that I don't

know what to make of it. I don't remember ever in my life being in

such good spirits. Not that they are not in general pretty natural

to me when there is the slightest excuse for them, but now

everything seems bright and happy, my life so full of interest, my

time so thoroughly filled and such a delicious calm to have settled

down on my usually restless spirit. Such an enjoyment of the

_present_, such a grateful contentment, is in each new day as I see

it dawn in the east, that I can only be thankful and say to myself:

"Make a note of this--you are happy; don't forget it, nor to be

thankful for this beautiful gift of life." This is Sunday morning,

and I wonder whether you are listening to Phillips Brooks. I

understand how you feel about his preaching--that it is all feeling

and no reason; I found it so myself last winter in Philadelphia: he

was good for those within the pale, but not good to convince

outsiders that they should come in. I am glad, however, that he

preaches in this way--I think his power lies in it; for it seems to

me, after all, that what comfort we get from religion, and what

light we have upon it, come to us through feeling, that is through

trusting our instinct as the voice of God, the Holy Ghost, though

it may at the same time appear to us directly against what our

intellect teaches us. I don't mean by this that we should deny the

conclusions arrived at by our intellect--which on the contrary I

believe we should trust and stand by to the bitter end, whenever

this may be. But let us fearlessly trust our _whole_ nature,

showing our faith in God by being true to ourselves all through,

and not dishonouring Him by ignoring what our heart says because it

is not carried out by our intellect, or by wilfully blunting our

intellectual perception because it happens to run against some

cherished wish of our heart.

"But," you will say, "how can a man live torn to pieces this way by

these contrary currents?" Well, I know it is hard to keep our faith

_sure_ of a standpoint where these apparent inconsistencies are all

reconciled and the jangle and discord sound the sweetest harmony;

but I do believe there _is_ one, in God, and that we must only try

to have that faith and never mind how great the inconsistency may

seem, nor how perplexing the maze it leads us through. Let us never

give up one element of the problem for the sake of coming to a

comfortable solution of it in this world. I don't blame those eager

minds that are always worrying, studying, investigating, to _find_

the solution here below; it is a noble work, and let them follow it

out (and without a bit of compromise) to whom God has given the

work. But whether we find it or not I would have them and all of us

feel that it is to _be_ found, if God wills--and through no other

means surely than by our being _true_. Blessed are they who have

not seen and who have yet believed. But I am going out now for a

walk! We have had the most delightful weather this whole week, and

capital sleighing, and I have spent most of my time driving myself

about with that same dear little pony. I went to town yesterday to

a matinee of William Tell; it was delightful and I slept all night

after it too. I am reading German a little every day, and it's

beginning to go pretty well. Good-bye. Don't tire yourself out

between work and dissipation.

I find myself quite sit up to her, as we have it to-day, while she sits

there without inconvenience, after all that has happened, under the dead

weight of William Tell; the relief of seeing her sublimely capable of

which, with the reprieve from her formidable flight to the Pacific

doubtless not a little contributing, helps to draw down again the

vision, or more exactly the sound, of the old New York and Boston Opera

as our young generation knew and artlessly admired it; admired it, by my

quite broken memories of the early time, in Brignoli the sweet and

vague, in Susini the deep and rich, in Miss Kellogg the native and

charming, in Adelaide Phillipps the universal, to say nothing of other

acclaimed warblers (they appear to me to have warbled then so much more

than since) whom I am afraid of not placing in the right perspective.

They warbled Faust a dozen times, it comes back to me, for once of

anything else; Miss Kellogg and Brignoli heaped up the measure of that

success, and I well remember the great yearning with which I heard my

cousin describe her first enchanted sense of it. The next in date of the

letters before me, of the last day but one of December '69, is mainly an

interesting expression of the part that music plays in her mental

economy--though but tentatively offered to her correspondent, who, she

fears, may not be musical enough to understand her, understand how much

"spiritual truth has been 'borne in' upon me by means of harmony: the

relation of the part to the whole, the absolute value of the individual,

the absolute necessity of uncompromising and unfaltering truth, the

different ways in which we like our likes and our unlikes," things all

that have been so made clearer to her. Of a singular grace in movement

and attitude, a grace of free mobility and activity, as original and

"unconventional" as it was carelessly natural, she never looked more

possessed of her best resources than at the piano in which she

delighted, at which she had ardently worked, and where, slim and

straight, her shoulders and head constantly, sympathetically swaying,

she discoursed with an admirable touch and a long surrender that was

like a profession of the safest relation she could know. Comparatively

safe though it might have been, however, in the better time, she was

allowed now, I gather, but little playing, and she is deep again toward

the end of January '70 in a quite other exposure, the old familiar

exposure to the "demon," as she calls it, "of the Why, Whence, Whither?"

Long as the letter is I feel it a case again for presentation whole; the

last thoughts of her life, as they appear, breathe in it with such

elevation. They seem to give us her last words and impulses, and, with

what follows of the middle of February, constitute the moving climax of

her rich short story.

There have been times (and they will come again no doubt) when I

could write to you about ordinary things in a way at least not

depressing; but for a good while now I have felt so tired out,

bodily and mentally, that I couldn't conscientiously ask you to

share my mood. The life I live here in the country, and so very

much alone, is capable of being the happiest or the unhappiest of

existences, as it all depends so on oneself and is so very little

interfered with by outside influences. Perhaps I am more than

usually subject to extremes of happiness and of depression, yet I

suppose everyone must have moments, even in the most varied and

distracting life, when the old questioning spirit, the demon of the

Why, Whence, Whither? stalks in like the skeleton at the feast and

takes a seat beside him. I say everyone, but I must except those

rare and happy souls who really believe in Christianity, who no

longer strive after even goodness as it comes from one's own

effort, but take refuge in the mysterious sacrifice of Christ, his

merit sufficing, and in short throw themselves in the orthodox way

on the consoling truth of the Atonement--to me hitherto neither

comprehensible nor desirable. These people, having completely

surrendered self, having lost their lives, as it were in Christ,

must truly have found them, must know the rest that comes from

literally casting their care of doubt and strife and thought upon

the Lord.

I say hitherto the doctrine of the vicarious suffering of Christ

has been to me not only incomprehensible but also unconsoling; I

didn't want it and didn't understand even intellectually the

feeling of people who do. I don't mean to say that the life and

death of Christ and the example they set for us have not been to me

always the brightest spot in history--for they have; but they have

stood rather as an example that we must try to follow, that we must

by constant and ceaseless effort bring our lives nearer to--but

always, to some extent at least, through ourselves, that is through

ourselves with God's help, got by asking Him for it and by His

giving it to us straight and with no mediation. When I have seen as

time went by my own shortcomings all the more instead of the less

frequent, I have thought: "Well, you don't try hard enough; you are

not really in earnest in thinking that you believe in the Christian

life as the only true one." The more I tried, nevertheless, the

less it seemed like the model life; the best things I did continued

to be the more spontaneous ones; the greatest efforts had the least

success; until finally I couldn't but see that if this was

Christianity it was not the "rest" that Christ had promised his

disciples--it was nothing more than a pagan life with a high ideal,

only an ideal so high that nothing but failure and unhappiness came

from trying to follow it. And one night when I was awake through

all the hours it occurred to me: What if this were the need that

Christianity came to fill up in our hearts? What if, after all,

that old meaningless form of words that had been sounded in my

unheeding ears all my days were suddenly to become invested with

spirit and truth? What if this were the good tidings that have made

so many hearts secure and happy in the most trying situations? For

if morality and virtue were the test of a Christian, certainly

Christ would never have likened the kingdom of heaven to a little

child, in whose heart is no struggle, no conscious battle between

right and wrong, but only unthinking love and trust.

However it may turn out, whether it shall seem true or untrue to me

finally, I am at least glad to be able to put myself intellectually

into the place of the long line of Christians who have felt the

need and the comfort of this belief. It throws a light upon Uncle

Henry's talk, which has seemed to me hitherto neither reasonable

nor consoling. When I was with him it so far disgusted me that I

fear I showed him plainly that I found it not only highly

unpractical, but ignoble and shirking. I knew all the while that he

disliked what he called my pride and conceit, but felt all the same

that his views didn't touch my case a bit, didn't give me the least

comfort or practical help, and seemed to me wanting in earnestness

and strength. _Now_ I say to myself: What if the good gentleman had

all along really got hold of the higher truth, the purer

spirituality? Verily there are two sides to everything in this

world, and one becomes more charitable the older one grows.

However, if I write at this length it is because I am feeling

to-day too seedy for anything else. I had a hemorrhage a week ago,

which rather took the life out of me; but as it was the only one I

feel I should by this time be coming round again--and probably

might if I hadn't got into a sleepless state which completely

knocks me up. The old consolatory remark, "Patience, neighbour, and

shuffle the cards," ought to impart a little hope to me, I suppose;

but it's a long time since I've had any trumps in my hand, and you

know that with the best luck the game always tired me. Willy James

sometimes tells me to behave like a man and a gentleman if I wish

to outwit fate. What a _real_ person he is! He is to me in nearly

all respects a head and shoulders above other people. How is

Wendell Holmes? Elly is having the gayest winter in Washington and

wants me to go to them there, which I had meant to do before the

return of my last winter's illness. But it's not for me now.

Later.--I have kept my letter a day or two, thinking I might feel

in tune for writing you a better one and not sending this at all.

But alas I shall have to wait some time before I am like my old

self again, so I may as well let this go. You see I'm not in a

condition, mentally or physically, to take bright and healthy views

of life. But if you really care you may as well see this mood as

another, for heaven only knows when I shall get out of it. Can you

understand the utter weariness of thinking about one thing all the

time, so that when you wake up in the morning consciousness comes

back with a sigh of "Oh yes, here it is again; another day of

doubting and worrying, hoping and fearing has begun." If I don't

get any sleep at all, which is too frequently the case, the strain

is a "leetle" bit too hard, and I am sometimes tempted to take a

drop of "pison" to put me to sleep in earnest. That momentary

vision of redemption from thinking and striving, of a happy rest

this side of eternity, has vanished away again. I can't help it;

peaceful, desirable as it may be, the truth is that practically I

don't believe it. It was such a sudden thing, such an entire change

from anything that had ever come to me before, that it seemed

almost like an inspiration, and I waited, almost expecting it to

continue, to be permanent. But it doesn't stay, and so back swings

the universe to the old place--paganism, naturalism, or whatever

you call the belief whose watchword is "God and our own soul." And

who shall say there is not comfort in it? One at least feels that

here one breathes one's native air, welcoming back the old _human_

feeling, with its beautiful pride and its striving, its despair,

its mystery and its faith. Write to me and tell me whether, as one

goes on, one must still be tossed about more and more by these

conflicting feelings, or whether they finally settle themselves

quietly one way or the other and take only their proper share at

least of one's life. This day is like summer, but I should enjoy it

more if last night hadn't been quite the most unpleasant I ever

spent. I got so thoroughly tired about two in the morning that I

made up my mind in despair to give the morphine another trial, and

as one dose had no effect took two; the consequence of which is

that I feel as ill to-day as one could desire. I can tell you, sir,

you had better prize the gift of sleep as it deserves while you

have it. If I don't never write to you no more you'll know it's

because I really wish to treat you kindly. But one of these days

you'll get another kind of letter, brim-full perhaps with health

and happiness and thoroughly ashamed of my present self. I had a

long letter yesterday from Harry James at Florence--enjoying Italy

but homesick. Did you see those verses in the North American

translated from the Persian? Good-bye.

The last of all is full both of realities and illusions, the latter

insistently living through all the distress of the former. And I should

like to say, or to believe, that they remained with her to the end,

which was near.

Don't be alarmed at my pencil--I am not in bed but only bundled-up

on the piazza by order of the doctor.... I started for New York

feeling a good deal knocked up, but hoping to get better from the

change; I was to stay there over Sunday and see Dr. Metcalfe, who

has a high reputation and was a friend of my father's. I left a

request at his office that he would come to me on Sunday P.M.; but

in the meantime my cousin Mrs. Minturn Post, with whom I was

staying, urged upon me her physician, Dr. Taylor, who came on

Saturday night, just as I was going to bed, and, after sounding my

lungs, told me very dreadful things about them. As his verdict was

worse than Metcalfe's proved I will tell you what he said first. He

began very solemnly: "My dear young lady, your right lung is

diseased; all your hemorrhages have come from there. It must have

been bad for at least a year before they began. You must go to

Europe as soon as possible." This was not cheerful, as I had been

idiot enough to believe some time ago such a different explanation.

But of course I wanted to learn what he absolutely thought, and

told him I wasn't a bit afraid. If there weren't tubercles was I

curable and if there _were_• was I hopeless? I asked him for the

very worst view he had conscientiously to take, but didn't mean

definitely to ask how long I should live, and so was rather

unprepared for his reply of "Two or three years." I didn't however

wish to make him regret his frankness, so I said, "Well, Doctor,

even if my right lung were all gone I should make a stand with my

left," and then, by way of showing how valiant the stand would be,

fainted away. This, I should say, was owing a good deal to my

previous used-up condition from want of sleep. It made him at any

rate hasten to assure me that there was every possibility of my

case being not after all so bad--with which he took his departure;

to my great relief as I didn't think him at all nice. His grammar

was bad, and he made himself generally objectionable.

The next night dear Dr. Metcalfe came, whom I love for the gentlest

and kindest soul I have ever seen. To start with he's a gentleman,

as well as an excellent physician, and to end with he and my father

were fond of each other at West Point, and he takes a sort of

paternal interest in me. He told me that my right lung is decidedly

weaker than my left, which is quite sound, and that the hemorrhage

has been a good thing for it and kept it from actual disease; and

also that if I can keep up my general health I may get all right

again. He has known a ten times worse case get entirely well. He

urged me not to go to Washington, but decidedly to go to Europe; so

this last is what I am to do with my cousin Mrs. Post if I am not

dead before June. In a fortnight I'm to go back to New York to be

for some time under Metcalfe's care. I feel tired out and hardly

able to stir, but my courage is good, and I don't propose to lose

it if I can help, for I know it all depends on myself whether I get

through or not. That is if I begin to be indifferent to what

happens I shall go down the hill fast. I have fortunately, through

my mother's father, enough Irish blood in me rather to enjoy a good

fight. I feel the greatest longing for summer or spring; I should

like it to be always spring for the rest of my life and to have all

the people I care for always with me! But who _wouldn't_ like it

so? Good-bye.

To the gallantry and beauty of which there is little surely to add. But

there came a moment, almost immediately after, when all illusion failed;

which it is not good to think of or linger on, and yet not pitiful not

to note. One may have wondered rather doubtingly--and I have expressed

that--what life would have had for her and how her exquisite faculty of

challenge could have "worked in" with what she was likely otherwise to

have encountered or been confined to. None the less did she in fact

cling to consciousness; death, at the last, was dreadful to her; she

would have given anything to live--and the image of this, which was long

to remain with me, appeared so of the essence of tragedy that I was in

the far-off aftertime to seek to lay the ghost by wrapping it, a

particular occasion aiding, in the beauty and dignity of art. The figure

that was to hover as the ghost has at any rate been of an extreme

pertinence, I feel, to my doubtless too loose and confused general

picture, vitiated perhaps by the effort to comprehend more than it

contains. Much as this cherished companion's presence among us had

represented for William and myself--and it is on _his_ behalf I

especially speak--her death made a mark that must stand here for a too

waiting conclusion. We felt it together as the end of our youth.