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 wonmn 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,
_a' le'al 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 brave men, of honest absurdities and cheery
adventurers: you who created the Steynes and Newcomes, the Beckys and
Blanches, Captain Costigan and F. B., and the Chevalier Strong--all that host
of friends imperishable--you must survive with Shakespeare and Cervantes in
the memory and affection of men.