In waiting to send you this news I seem to have deferred too long the expression of my warm thanks for your kindness in sending me the Hebrew translations of Leasing and the collection of Hebrew poems, a kindness which I felt myself rather presumptuous in asking for, since your time must be well filled with more important demands.  Yet I must further beg you, when you have an opportunity, to assure Herr Bacher that I was most gratefully touched by the sympathetic verses with which he enriched the gift of his work.

I see by your last letter to my husband that your Theological Seminary was to open on the 4th of this month, so that this too retrospective letter of mine will reach you in the midst of your new duties.  I trust that this new institution will be a great good to professor and students, and that your position is of a kind that you contemplate as permanent.  To teach the young personally has always seemed to me the most satisfactory supplement to teaching the world through books, and I have often wished that I had such a means of having fresh, living, spiritual children within sight.

One can hardly turn one’s thought toward Eastern Europe just now without a mingling of pain and dread; but we mass together distant scenes and events in an unreal way, and one would like to believe that the present troubles will not at any time press on you in Hungary with more external misfortune than on us in England.

Mr. Lewes is happily occupied in his psychological studies.  We both look, forward to the reception of the work you kindly promised us, and he begs me to offer you his best regards.

Believe me, my dear sir,
Yours with much esteem,
M.E.  LEWES.

It was a part of George Eliot’s purpose in Daniel Deronda to criticise the social life of England in the spirit in which she had criticised it in Middlemarch, as being deficient in spiritual power, moral purpose and noble sentiment.  If she made it clear in Middlemarch that the individual is crippled and betrayed by society, it was her purpose to make it quite as clear in Daniel Deronda how society may become the true inspirer of the individual.  We may quarrel with her theory of the origin and nature of the spiritual life in man, but she has somewhat truly conceived its vast importance and shown the character of that influence it everywhere has over man’s life.  As types of spiritual lifts, and as individual conceptions of human character, the personages of this novel are drawn with marvellous skill.  Mr. E.P.  Whipple says that Daniel Deronda is “one of the noblest and most original characters among the heroes imagined by poets, dramatists and novelists.”  With equal or even greater justice can it be said that Gwendolen Harleth is one of the most powerful and grandly conceived of imaginary creations in all literature.  In the characters, the situations, and the whole working out of this novel, George Eliot shows herself one of the great masters of literary creation.