They were anxious to be moving northwards from Florence, and I had some difficulty in persuading them to undertake the expedition.  A certain weight of responsibility, therefore, lay on me—­that folks whose days were so sure of being turned to good profit, should not by my fault be led to waste any of them.  But I had already seen enough of both of them to feel sure that the specialties of the very exceptional little experience I proposed to them would be appreciated and acceptable.  Neither he nor she were fitted by their habits, or indeed by the conditions of their health, to encounter much “roughing,” and a certain amount of that was assuredly inevitable—­a good deal more five-and-twenty years ago than would be the case now.  But if the flesh was weak, truly the spirit was willing!  I have heard grumbling and discontent from the young of either sex in the heyday of health and strength in going over the same ground.  But for my companions on the present occasion, let the difficulties and discomforts be what they might, the continually varied and continually suggestive interest they found in everything around them, overrode and overbore all material considerations.

Never, I think, have I met with so impressionable and so delicately sensitive a mind as that of George Eliot!  I use “sensitive” in the sense in which a photographer uses the word in speaking of his plates.  Everything that passed within the ken of that wonderful organism, whether a thing or combination of things seen, or an incident, or a trait revealing or suggesting character, was instantly reproduced, fixed, registered by it, the operating light being the wonderful native force of her intellect.  And the photographs so produced were by no means evanescent.  If ever the admirably epigrammatic phrase, “wax to receive and marble to retain,” was applicable to any human mind, it was so to that of George Eliot.  And not only were the enormous accumulations of stored-up impressions safe beyond reach of oblivion or confusion, but they were all and always miraculously ready for co-ordination with those newly coming in at each passing moment!  Think of the delight of passing, in companionship with such a mind, through scenes and circumstances entirely new to it!

Lewes, too, was a most delightful companion, the cheeriest of philosophers!  The old saying of “Comes jucundus in via pro vehiculo est,” was especially applicable to him.  Though very exhaustible in bodily force, he was inexhaustible in cheerfulness, and above all in unwearied, incessant, and minute care for “Polly.”  In truth, if any man could ever be said to have lived in another person, Lewes in those days, and to the end of his life, lived in and for George Eliot.  The talk of worshipping the ground she trod on, and the like, are pretty lovers phrases, sometimes signifying much, and sometimes very little.  But it is true accurately and literally of Lewes.  That care for her, at once comprehensive