the stage. Nor, to my taste, does the mere music and melancholy
dignity of your style in these passages of meditation fall far below
the highest efforts of poetry. I remember that scene where Clive,
at Barnes Newcome's Lecture on the Poetry of the Affections, sees
Ethel who is lost to him. "And the past and its dear histories, and
youth and its hopes and passions, and tones and looks for ever
echoing in the heart and present in the memory--these, no doubt,
poor Clive saw and heard as he looked across the great gulf of time,
and parting and grief, and beheld the woman he had loved for many
years."

FOR EVER ECHOING IN THE HEART AND PRESENT IN THE MEMORY: who has
not heard these tones, who does not hear them as he turns over your
books that, for so many years, have been his companions and
comforters? We have been young and old, we have been sad and merry
with you, we have listened to the mid-night chimes with Pen and
Warrington, have stood with you beside the death-bed, have mourned
at that yet more awful funeral of lost love, and with you have
prayed in the inmost chapel sacred to our old and immortal
affections, e leal souvenir! And whenever you speak for yourself,
and speak in earnest, how magical, how rare, how lonely in our
literature is the beauty of your sentences! "I can't express the
charm of them" (so you write of George Sand; so we may write of
you): "they seem to me like the sound of country bells, provoking I
don't know what vein of music and meditation, and falling sweetly
and sadly on the ear." Surely that style, so fresh, so rich, so
full of surprises--that style which stamps as classical your
fragments of slang, and perpetually astonishes and delights--would
alone give immortality to an author, even had he little to say. But
you, with your whole wide world of fops and fools, of good women and