a widow, after a tragic year of married life during which her young
husband had developed paralysis of the brain. She was living in London,
attending Bedford College, and F.D. Maurice's sermons, much influenced,
like her brothers, by Emerson and Carlyle, and at this moment a fine,
restless, immature creature, much younger than her years in some
respects, and much older in others--with worlds hitherto unsuspected in
the quiet home life. She writes:

I have been in London for several months this year, and I have seen a
good deal of Matt, considering the very different lives we lead. I
used to breakfast with him sometimes, and then his Poems seemed to
make me know Matt so much better than I had ever done before.
Indeed it was almost like a new Introduction to him. I do not
think those Poems could be read--quite independently of their
poetical power--without leading one to expect a great deal from
Matt; without raising I mean the kind of expectation one has from
and for those who have, in some way or other, come face to face
with life and asked it, in real earnest, what it means. I felt
there was so much more of this practical questioning in Matt's
book than I was at all prepared for; in fact that it showed a
knowledge of life and conflict which was _strangely like experience_
if it was not the thing itself; and this with all Matt's great
power I should not have looked for. I do not yet know the book
well, but I think that "Mycerinus" struck me most, perhaps, as
illustrating what I have been speaking of.

And again, to another member of the family:

It is the moral strength, or, at any rate, the _moral consciousness_
which struck and surprised me so much in the poems. I could have been