"I thank you very much for your encouraging words, for I really need
them. I have worked so hard that I am almost tired. I hope that you
will still continue to read, and that you will not find it dull.... I
have received the books. What a wonderful fellow Hawthorne was!"
There is something truly touching to those who knew her in that phrase
"almost tired." Indeed, she was truly tired through and through, and
these later letters from which I have made the foregoing extracts are
all written by an amanuensis.
Happily the time was near for a second flight to Florida, and she
wrote with her own rested hand en route from Charleston:--
"Room fragrant with violets, banked up in hyacinths, flowers
everywhere, windows open, birds singing."
She enclosed some fans, upon which she had been painting flowers
busily during the journey in order to send them back to Boston to be
sold at a fair in behalf of the Cretans: "Make them do the Cretes all
the good you can," she said.
It appears that by this time "Oldtown Folks" was fairly off her hands,
and she was free once more. She evidently found Mandarin very much to
her mind, and wrote contentedly therefrom, save for a vision of having
to go to Canada in the early spring to obtain the copyright of her
story.
The visits to Florida had now become necessary to her health. She saw
the next step to take was to surrender her large house in Hartford and
pass her winters altogether at the South. She wrote from Florida: "I
am leaving the land of flowers on the 1st of June with tears in my
eyes, but having a house in Hartford, it must be lived in. I wish you
and ---- would just come to see it. You have no idea what a lovely
place it has grown to be, and I am trying to sell it as hard as a
snake to crawl out of his skin. Thus on, till reason is pushed out of
life. There's no earthly sense in having anything,--lordy massy, no!
By the bye, I must delay sending you the ghost in the Captain Brown
house till I can go to Natick and make a personal inspection of the
premises and give it to you hot."
Her busy brain was again at work with new plans for future books and
articles for magazines.
"Gladly would I fly to you on the wings of the wind," she says, "but I
am a slave, a bound thrall to _work_, and I cannot work and play
at the same time. After this year I hope to have a little rest, and
above all things I won't be hampered with a serial to write.... We
have sold out in Hartford."
All this routine of labor was to have a new form of interruption,
which gave her intense joy. "I am doing just what you say," she wrote,
"being first lady-in-waiting on his new majesty. He is very pretty,
very gracious and good, and his little mamma and he are a pair.... I
am getting to be an old fool of a grandma, and to think there is no
bliss under heaven to compare with a baby." Later she wrote on the
same subject: "You ought to see my baby. I have discovered a way to
end the woman controversy. Let the women all say that they won't take
care of the babies till the laws are altered. One week of this
discipline would bring all the men on their marrow-bones. Only tell us
what you want, they would say, and we will do it. Of course you may
imagine me trailing after our little king,--first granny-in-waiting."
In the summer of 1869 there was a pleasant home at St. John's Wood, in
London, which possessed peculiar attractions. Other houses were as
comfortable to look at, other hedges were as green, other drawing
rooms were gayer, but this was the home of George Eliot, and on Sunday
afternoons the resort of those who desired the best that London had to
give. Here it was that George Eliot told us of her admiration and deep
regard, her affection, for Mrs. Stowe. Her reverence and love were
expressed with such tremulous sincerity that the speaker won our
hearts by her love for our friend. Many letters had already passed
between Mrs. Stowe and herself, and she confided to us her amusement
at a fancy Mrs. Stowe had taken that Casaubon, in "Middlemarch," was
drawn from the character of Mr. Lewes. Mrs. Stowe took it so entirely
for granted in her letters that it was impossible to dispossess her
mind of the illusion. Evidently it was the source of much harmless
household amusement at St. John's Wood. I find in Mrs. Stowe's letters
some pleasant allusions to this correspondence. She writes: "We were
all full of George Eliot when your note came, as I had received a
beautiful letter from her in answer to one I wrote from Florida. She
is a noble, true woman; and if anybody doesn't see it, so much the
worse for _them_, and not her." In a note written about that time
Mrs. Stowe says she is "coming to Boston, and will bring George
Eliot's letters with her that we may read them together;" but that
pleasant plan was only one of the imagination, and was never carried
out.
Her own letter to Mrs. Lewes, written from Florida in March, 1876, may
be considered one of the most beautiful and interesting pieces of
writing she ever achieved.
Although this letter is accessible in a life of Mrs. Stowe published
by her son during her life, I am tempted to reproduce a portion of it
in these pages for those who have not seen it elsewhere. It is a
positive loss to cut such a letter, but it covers too much space to
quote in full. She dates in