Her letters were always admirable, but I do most deeply regret that what made one of their greatest charms unfits them for the public—­I mean their personal details.  Mr. Harness sends to me for letters, and when I bring them up, and with the greatest pain force myself to examine them (all those letters she wrote to me in her warm goodness and affectionateness), I find with wonder and sorrow how only a half-page here and there could be submitted to general readers—­could, with any decency, much less delicacy.

But no, her ‘judgment’ was not ‘unerring.’  She was too intensely sympathetical not to err often, and in fact it was singular (or seemed so) what faces struck her as most beautiful, and what books as most excellent.  If she loved a person, it was enough.  She made mistakes one couldn’t help smiling at, till one grew serious to adore her for it.  And yet when she read a book, provided it wasn’t written by a friend, edited by a friend, lent by a friend, or associated with a friend, her judgment could be fine and discriminating on most subjects, especially upon subjects connected with life and society and manners.  Shall I confess?  She never taught me anything but a very limited admiration of Miss Austen, whose people struck me as wanting souls, even more than is necessary for men and women of the world.  The novels are perfect as far as they go—­that’s certain.  Only they don’t go far, I think.  It may be my fault.

You lay down your finger and stop me, and exclaim that it’s my way perhaps to attribute a leaning of the judgment through personal sympathy to people in general—­that I do it perhaps to you.  No, indeed.  I can quite easily believe that you don’t either think or say ’the pleasantest things to your friends;’ in fact, I am sure you don’t.  You would say them as soon to your enemies—­perhaps sooner.  Also, when you began to say pleasant things to me, you hadn’t a bit of personal feeling to make a happy prejudice of, and really I can’t flatter myself that you have now.  What I meant was that you, John Ruskin, not being a critic sal merum as the ancients had it, but half critic, and half poet, may be rather encumbered sometimes by the burning imagination in you, may be apt sometimes, when you turn the light of your countenance on a thing, to see the thing lighted up as a matter of course, just as we, when we carried torches into the Vatican, were not perfectly clear how much we brought to that wonderful Demosthenes, folding the marble round him in its thousand folds—­how much we brought, and how much we received.  Was it the sculptor or was it the torch-bearer who produced that effect?  And like doubts I have had of you, I confess, and not only when you have spoken kindly of me.  You don’t mistake by your heart, through loving, but you exaggerate by your imagination, through glorifying.  There’s my thought at least.

But what I meant by ‘apprehending too intensely,’ dear Mr. Ruskin, don’t ask me.  Really I have forgotten.  I suppose I did mean something, though it was a day of chaos and packing boxes—­try to think I did therefore, and let it pass.