account of genius, but nobody illustrates more effectively the infinite
capacity of taking pains. In reading, in looking at pictures, in playing
difficult music, in talking, she was equally importunate in the search,
and equally insistent on mastery. Her faculty of sustained concentration
was part of her immense intellectual power. 'Continuous thought did not
fatigue her. She could keep her mind on the stretch hour after hour; the
body might give way, but the brain remained unwearied' (iii. 422). It is
only a trifling illustration of the infection of her indefatigable
quality of taking pains, that Lewes should have formed the important
habit of rewriting every page of his work, even of short articles for
Reviews, before letting it go to the press. The journal shows what sore
pain and travail composition was to her. She wrote the last volume of
_Adam Bede_ in six weeks; she 'could not help writing it fast, because
it was written under the stress of emotion.' But what a prodigious
contrast between her pace and Walter Scott's twelve volumes a year! Like
many other people of powerful brains, she united strong and clear
general retentiveness with a weak and untrustworthy verbal memory. 'She
never could trust herself to write a quotation without verifying it.'
'What courage and patience,' she says of some one else, 'are wanted for
every life that aims to produce anything,' and her own existence was one
long and painful sermon on that text.

Over few lives have the clouds of mental dejection hung in such heavy
unmoving banks. Nearly every chapter is strewn with melancholy words. 'I
cannot help thinking more of your illness than of the pleasure in
prospect--according to my foolish nature, which is always prone to live
in past pain.' The same sentiment is the mournful refrain that runs
through all. Her first resounding triumph, the success of _Adam Bede_,
instead of buoyancy and exultation, only adds a fresh sense of the
weight upon her future life. 'The self-questioning whether my nature