poetry into pounds, shillings, and pence with such force that he worked the base element into spiritual splendours.  Oh! to think of our having missed seeing that man.  It is painful.  A little book is published of his ‘thoughts and maxims,’ the sweepings of his desk I suppose; broken notes, probably, which would have been wrought up into some noble works, if he had lived.  Some of these are very striking.

Lamartine has not yet paid us the promised visit.  Just as we were beginning to feel vexed we heard that the intermediate friend who was to have brought him had been caught up by the Government and sent off to Saint-Germain to ‘faire le mort,’ on pain of being sent farther.  I mean Eugene Belleton.  If he talked in many places as he talked in this room, I can’t be very much surprised, but I am really very sorry.  He is one of those amiable domestic men who delight in talking ’battle, murder, and sudden death.’

[The end of this letter is wanting]

* * * * *

To Miss Mulock

[Paris], 138 Avenue des Champs-Elysees:  June 2, [1852].

My husband went directly to Rue Vivienne and came back without the book.  We waited and waited, but at last it reached us, and we have read it, and since then I have let some days go by through having been unwell.  You seemed to let me sit still in my chair and do nothing; you did not call too loud.  So was it with most other things in the universe.  Now, having awakened from my somnolency, recovered from ‘La Grippe’ (or what mortal Londoners call the influenza), the first person and first book I think of must naturally be you and yours.

So I thank you much, much, for the book.  It has interested me, dear Miss Mulock, as a book should, and I am delighted to recognise everywhere undeniable talent and faculty, combined with high and pure aspiration.  A clever book, a graceful book, and with the moral grace besides—­thank you.  Many must have thanked you as well as myself.

At the same time, precisely because I feel particularly obliged to you, I mean to tell you the truth.  Your hero is heroic from his own point of view—­accepting his own view of the situation, which I, for one, cannot accept, do you know, for I am of opinion that both you and he are rather conventional on the subject of his marriage.  I don’t in the least understand, at this moment, why he should not have married in the first volume; no, not in the least.  It was a matter of income, he would tell me, and of keeping two establishments; and I would answer that it ought rather to have been a matter of faith in God and in the value of God’s gifts, the greatest of which is love.  I am romantic about love—­oh, much more than you are, though older than you.  A man’s life does not develop rightly without it, and what is called an ‘improvident marriage’ often appears to me a noble, righteous, and prudent act.  Your Ninian was a man before he was a brother.  I hold that he had no right to sacrifice a great spiritual good of his own to the worldly good of his family, however he made it out.  He should have said:  ’God gives me this gift, He will find me energy to work for it and suffer for it.  We will all live together, struggle together if it is necessary, a little more poorly, a little more laboriously, but keeping true to the best aims of life, all of us.’