The weather, our ailments, and various other causes, have made us put off our flight from one week to another, but now we are really fluttering our wings and making a dust about us.  I wish we had seen you oftener.  I was placidly looking forward to your staying in England another year or more, and gave way to my general languor about seeing friends in these last months, which have been too full of small bodily miseries for me to feel that I had much space to give to pleasanter occupation.

Only those who knew her long and well can fitly describe such a woman as Mrs. Lewes.  Personal intimacy gives a color to the words used, and a meaning to the delicate shades of expression, that can be had in no other way.  One of her friends has described her as being of “the middle height, the head large, the brow ample, the lower face massive; the eyes gray, lighting up from time to time with a sympathetic glow; the countenance sensitive, spiritual, with ‘mind and music breathing’ from it; the general demeanor composed and gracious; her utterance fluent and finished, but somewhat measured; her voice clear and melodious, moving evenly, as it were in a monotone, though now and then rising, with a sort of quiet eagerness, into a higher note.”  The same writer speaks of the close-fitting flow of her robe, and the luxuriant mass of light-brown hair hanging low on both sides of her head, as marked characteristics of her costume.  Her features were very plain and large, too large for anything like beauty, but strongly impressive by their very massiveness.  More than one of her friends has spoken of her resemblance to Savonarola, perhaps suggested by her description of that monk-prophet in Romola.  Mr. Kegan Paul finds that she also resembled Dante and Cardinal Newman, and that these four were of the same spiritual family, with a curious interdependence of likeness.  All these persons have “the same straight wall of brow; the droop of the powerful nose; mobile lips, touched with strong passion kept resolutely under control; a square jaw, which would make the face stern were it not counteracted by the sweet smile of lips and eye.”  Her friends say that no portrait does her justice, that her massive we features could not be portrayed.  “The mere shape of the head,” says Kegan Paul, “would be the despair of any painter.  It was so grand and massive that it would scarcely be possible to represent it without giving the idea of disproportion to the frame, of which no one ever thought for a moment when they saw her, although it was a surprise, when she stood up, to see that, after all, she was but a little fragile woman who bore this weight of brow and brain.”