in one of her letters in 1860 (ii. 283):—­’I have faith in the working out of higher possibilities than the Catholic or any other Church has presented; and those who have strength to wait and endure are bound to accept no formula which their whole souls—­their intellect, as well as their emotions—­do not embrace with entire reverence.  The highest calling and election is to do without opium, and live through all our pain with conscious, clear-eyed endurance.’  She would never accept the common optimism.  As she says here:—­’Life, though a good to men on the whole, is a doubtful good to many, and to some not a good at all.  To my thought it is a source of constant mental distortion to make the denial of this a part of religion—­to go on pretending things are better than they are.’

Of the afflicting dealings with the world of spirits, which in those days were comparatively limited to the untutored minds of America, but which since have come to exert so singular a fascination for some of the most brilliant of George Eliot’s younger friends (see iii. 204), she thought as any sensible Philistine among us persists in thinking to this day:—­

If it were another spirit aping Charlotte Bronte—­if here and there at rare spots and among people of a certain temperament, or even at many spots and among people of all temperaments, tricksy spirits are liable to rise as a sort of earth-bubbles and set furniture in movement, and tell things which we either know already or should be as well without knowing—­I must frankly confess that I have but a feeble interest in these doings, feeling my life very short for the supreme and awful revelations of a more orderly and intelligible kind which I shall die with an imperfect knowledge of.  If there were miserable spirits whom we could help—­then I think we should pause and have patience with their trivial-mindedness; but otherwise I don’t feel bound to study them more than I am bound to study the special follies of a peculiar phase of human society.  Others, who feel differently, and are attracted towards this study, are making an experiment for us as to whether anything better than bewilderment can come of it.  At present it seems to me that to rest any fundamental part of religion on such a basis is a melancholy misguidance of men’s minds from the true sources of high and pure emotion (iii. 161).

The period of George Eliot’s productions was from 1856, the date of her first stories, down to 1876, when she wrote, not under her brightest star, her last novel of Daniel Deronda.  During this time the great literary influences of the epoch immediately preceding had not indeed fallen silent, but the most fruitful seed had been sown.  Carlyle’s Sartor (1833-1834), and his Miscellaneous Essays (collected, 1839), were in all hands; but he had fallen into the terrible slough of his Prussian history (1858-1865), and the last word of his evangel had gone forth to all whom it concerned. In Memoriam,