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Lives of Girls Who Became Famous

<h3>George Eliot.</h3> <ANTIMG src="images/c13eliot_t.jpg" alt= "GEORGE ELIOT--1864." /> Going to the Exposition at New Orleans, I took for reading on the journey, the life of George Eliot, by her husband, Mr. J.W. Cross, written with great delicacy and beauty. An accident delayed us, so that for three days I enjoyed this insight into a wonderful life. I copied the amazing list of books she had read, and transferred to my note-book many of her beautiful thoughts. To-day I have been reading the book again; a clear, vivid picture of a very great woman, whose works, says the Spectator, "are the best specimens of powerful, simple English, since Shakespeare." What made her a superior woman? Not wealthy parentage; not congenial surroundings. She had a generous, sympathetic heart for a foundation, and on this she built a scholarship that even few men can equal. She loved science, and philosophy, and language, and mathematics, and grew broad enough to discuss great questions and think great thoughts. And yet she was affectionate, tender, and gentle. Mary Ann Evans was born Nov. 22, 1819, at Arbury Farm, a mile from Griff, in Warwickshire, England. When four months old the family moved to Griff, where the girl lived till she was twenty-one, in a two-story, old-fashioned, red brick house, the walls covered with ivy. Two Norway firs and an old yew-tree shaded the lawn. The father, Robert Evans, a man of intelligence and good sense, was bred a builder and carpenter, afterward becoming a land-agent for one of the large estates. The mother was a woman of sterling character, practical and capable. For the three children, Christiana, Isaac, and Mary Ann, there was little variety in the commonplace life at Griff. Twice a day the coach from Birmingham to Stamford passed by the house, and the coachman and guard in scarlet were a great diversion. She thus describes, the locality in Felix Holt: "Here were powerful men walking queerly, with knees bent outward from squatting in the mine, going home to throw themselves down in their blackened flannel, and sleep through the daylight, then rise and spend much of their high wages at the alehouse with their fellows of the Benefit Club; here the pale, eager faces of handloom weavers, men and women, haggard from sitting up late at night to finish the week's work, hardly begun till the Wednesday. Everywhere the cottages and the small children were dirty, for the languid mothers gave their strength to the loom." Mary Ann was an affectionate, sensitive child, fond of out-door sports, imitating everything she saw her brother do, and early in life feeling in her heart that she was to be "somebody." When but four years old, she would seat herself at the piano and play, though she did not know one note from another, that the servant might see that she was a distinguished person! Her life was a happy one, as is shown in her Brother and Sister Sonnet:-- <div class="poetry"> "But were another childhood's world my share, I would be born a little sister there."</div> At five, the mother being in poor health, the child was sent to a boarding-school with her sister, Chrissy, where she remained three or four years. The older scholars petted her, calling her "little mamma." At eight she went to a larger school, at Nuneaton, where one of the teachers, Miss Lewis, became her life-long friend. The child had the greatest fondness for reading, her first book, a Linnet's Life, being tenderly cared for all her days. Aesop's Fables were read and re-read. At this time a neighbor had loaned one of the Waverley novels to the older sister, who returned it before Mary Ann had finished it. Distressed at this break in the story, she began to write out as nearly as she could remember, the whole volume for herself. Her amazed family re-borrowed the book, and the child was happy. The mother sometimes protested against the use of so many candles for night reading, and rightly feared that her eyes would be spoiled. At the next school, at Coventry, Mary Ann so surpassed her comrades that they stood in awe of her, but managed to overcome this when a basket of dainties came in from the country home. In 1836 the excellent mother died. Mary Ann wrote to a friend in after life, "I began at sixteen to be acquainted with the unspeakable grief of a last parting, in the death of my mother." In the following spring Chrissy was married, and after a good cry with her brother over this breaking up of the home circle, Mary Ann took upon herself the household duties, and became the care-taker instead of the school-girl. Although so young she took a leading part in the benevolent work of the neighborhood. Her love for books increased. She engaged a well-known teacher to come from Coventry and give her lessons in French, German, and Italian, while another helped her in music, of which she was passionately fond. Later, she studied Greek, Latin, Spanish, and Hebrew. Shut up in the farm-house, hungering for knowledge, she applied herself with a persistency and earnestness that by-and-by were to bear their legitimate fruit. That she felt the privation of a collegiate course is undoubted. She says in Daniel Deronda: "You may try, but you can never imagine what it is to have a man's force of genius in you, and yet to suffer the slavery of being a girl." She did not neglect her household duties. One of her hands, which were noticeable for their beauty of shape, was broader than the other, which, she used to say with some pride, was owing to the butter and cheese she had made. At twenty she was reading the Life of Wilberforce, Josephus' History of the Jews, Spenser's Faery Queen, Don Quixote, Milton, Bacon, Mrs. Somerville's Connection of the Physical Sciences, and Wordsworth. The latter was always an especial favorite, and his life, by Frederick Myers in the Men of Letters series, was one of the last books she ever read. Already she was learning the illimitableness of knowledge. "For my part," she says, "I am ready to sit down and weep at the impossibility of my understanding or barely knowing a fraction of the sum of objects that present themselves for our contemplation in books and in life." About this time Mr. Evans left the farm, and moved to Foleshill, near Coventry. The poor people at Griff were very sorry, and said, "We shall never have another Mary Ann Evans." Marian, as she was now called, found at Foleshill a few intellectual and companionable friends, Mr. and Mrs. Bray, both authors, and Miss Hennell, their sister. Through the influence of these friends she gave up some of her evangelical views, but she never ceased to be a devoted student and lover of the Bible. She was happy in her communing with nature. "Delicious autumn," she said. "My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird, I would fly about the earth, seeking the successive autumns.... I have been revelling in Nichol's Architecture, of the Heavens and Phenomena of the Solar System, and have been in imagination winging my flight from system to system, from universe to universe." In 1844, when Miss Evans was twenty-five years old, she began the translation of Strauss' Life of Jesus. The lady who was to marry Miss Hennell's brother had partially done the work, and asked Miss Evans to finish it. For nearly three years she gave it all the time at her command, receiving only one hundred dollars for the labor. It was a difficult and weary work. "When I can work fast," she said, "I am never weary, nor do I regret either that the work has been begun or that I have undertaken it. I am only inclined to vow that I will never translate again, if I live to correct the sheets for Strauss." When the book was finished, it was declared to be "A faithful, elegant, and scholarlike translation ... word for word, thought for thought, and sentence for sentence." Strauss himself was delighted with it. The days passed as usual in the quiet home. Now she and her father, the latter in failing health, visited the Isle of Wight, and saw beautiful Alum Bay, with its "high precipice, the strata upheaved perpendicularly in rainbow,--like streaks of the brightest maize, violet, pink, blue, red, brown, and brilliant white,--worn by the weather into fantastic fretwork, the deep blue sky above, and the glorious sea below." Who of us has not felt this same delight in looking upon this picture, painted by nature? Now Ralph Waldo Emerson, as well as other famous people, visited the Bray family. Miss Evans writes: "I have seen Emerson,--the first man I have ever seen." High praise indeed from our "great, calm soul," as he called Miss Evans. "I am grateful for the Carlyle eulogium (on Emerson). I have shed some quite delicious tears over it. This is a world worth abiding in while one man can thus venerate and love another." Each evening she played on the piano to her admiring father, and finally, through months of illness, carried him down tenderly to the grave. He died May 31, 1849. Worn with care, Miss Evans went upon the Continent with the Brays, visiting Paris, Milan, the Italian lakes, and finally resting for some months at Geneva'. As her means were limited, she tried to sell her Encyclopaedia Britannica at half-price, so that she could have money for music lessons, and to attend a course of lectures on experimental physics, by the renowned Professor de la Rive. She was also carefully reading socialistic themes, Proudhon, Rousseau, and others. She wrote to friends: "The days are really only two hours long, and I have so many things to do that I go to bed every night miserable because I have left out something I meant to do.... I take a dose of mathematics every day to prevent my brain from becoming quite soft." On her return to England, she visited the Brays, and met Mr. Chapman, the editor of the Westminster Review, and Mr. Mackay, upon whose Progress of the Intellect she had just written a review. Mr. Chapman must have been deeply impressed with the learning and ability of Miss Evans, for he offered her the position of assistant editor of the magazine,--a most unusual position for a woman, since its contributors were Froude, Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, and other able men. Miss Evans accepted, and went to board with Mr. Chapman's family in London. How different this from the quiet life at Foleshill! The best society, that is, the greatest in mind, opened wide its doors to her. Herbert Spencer, who had just published Social Statics, became one of her best friends. Harriet Martineau came often to see her. Grote was very friendly. The woman-editor was now thirty-two; her massive head covered with brown curls, blue-gray eyes, mobile, sympathetic mouth, strong chin, pale face, and soft, low voice, like Dorothea's in Middlemarch,--"the voice of a soul that has once lived in an Aeolian harp." Mr. Bray thought that Miss Evans' head, after that of Napoleon, showed the largest development from brow to ear of any person's recorded. She had extraordinary power of expression, and extraordinary psychological powers, but her chief attraction was her universal sympathy. "She essentially resembled Socrates," says Mathilde Blind, "in her manner of eliciting whatsoever capacity for thought might be latent in the people she came in contact with; were it only a shoemaker or day-laborer, she would never rest till she had found out in what points that particular man differed from other men of his class. She always rather educed what was in others than impressed herself on them; showing much kindliness of heart in drawing out people who were shy. Sympathy was the keynote of her nature, the source of her iridescent humor, of her subtle knowledge of character, of her dramatic genius." No person attains to permanent fame without sympathy. Miss Evans now found her heart and hands full of work. Her first article was a review of Carlyle's Life of John Sterling. She was fond of biography. She said: "We have often wished that genius would incline itself more frequently to the task of the biographer, that when some great or good person dies, instead of the dreary three-or-five volume compilation of letter and diary and detail, little to the purpose, which two-thirds of the public have not the chance, nor the other third the inclination, to read, we could have a real 'life,' setting forth briefly and vividly the man's inward and outward struggles, aims, and achievements, so as to make clear the meaning which his experience has for his fellows. "A few such lives (chiefly autobiographies) the world possesses, and they have, perhaps, been more influential on the formation of character than any other kind of reading.... It is a help to read such a life as Margaret Fuller's. How inexpressibly touching that passage from her journal, 'I shall always reign through the intellect, but the life! the life! O my God! shall that never be sweet?' I am thankful, as if for myself, that it was sweet at last." The great minds which Miss Evans met made life a constant joy, though she was frail in health. Now Herbert Spencer took her to hear William Tell or the Creation. She wrote of him: "We have agreed that we are not in love with each other, and that there is no reason why we should not have as much of each other's society as we like. He is a good, delightful creature, and I always feel better for being with him.... My brightest spot, next to my love of old friends, is the deliciously calm, new friendship that Herbert Spencer gives me. We see each other every day, and have a delightful camaraderie in everything. But for him my life would be desolate enough." There is no telling what this happy friendship might have resulted in, if Mr. Spencer had not introduced to Miss Evans, George Henry Lewes, a man of brilliant conversational powers, who had written a History of Philosophy, two novels, Ranthorpe, and Rose, Blanche, and Violet, and was a contributor to several reviews. Mr. Lewes was a witty and versatile man, a dramatic critic, an actor for a short time, unsuccessful as an editor of a newspaper, and unsuccessful in his domestic relations. That he loved Miss Evans is not strange; that she admired him, while she pitied him and his three sons in their broken home-life, is perhaps not strange. At first she did not like him, nor did Margaret Fuller, but Miss Evans says: "Mr. Lewes is kind and attentive, and has quite won my regard, after having had a good deal of my vituperation. Like a few other people in the world, he is much better than he seems. A man of heart and conscience wearing a mask of flippancy." Miss Evans tired of her hard work, as who does not in this working world? "I am bothered to death," she writes, "with article-reading and scrap-work of all sorts; it is clear my poor head will never produce anything under these circumstances; but I am patient.... I had a long call from George Combe yesterday. He says he thinks the Westminster under my management the most important means of enlightenment of a literary nature in existence; the Edinburgh, under Jeffrey, nothing to it, etc. I wish I thought so too." Sick with continued headaches, she went up to the English lakes to visit Miss Martineau. The coach, at half-past six in the evening, stopped at "The Knoll," and a beaming face came to welcome her. During the evening, she says, "Miss Martineau came behind me, put her hands round me, and kissed me in the prettiest way, telling me she was so glad she had got me here." Meantime Miss Evans was writing learned and valuable articles on Taxation, Woman in France, Evangelical Teaching, etc. She received five hundred dollars yearly from her father's estate, but she lived simply, that she might spend much of this for poor relations. In 1854 she resigned her position on the Westminster, and went with Mr. Lewes to Germany, forming a union which thousands who love her must regard as the great mistake of a very great life. Mr. Lewes was collecting materials for his Life of Goethe. This took them to Goethe's home at Weimar. "By the side of the bed," she says, "stands a stuffed chair where he used to sit and read while he drank his coffee in the morning. It was not until very late in his life that he adopted the luxury of an armchair. From the other side of the study one enters the library, which is fitted up in a very make-shift fashion, with rough deal shelves, and bits of paper, with Philosophy, History, etc., written on them, to mark the classification of the books. Among such memorials one breathes deeply, and the tears rush to one's eyes." George Eliot met Liszt, and "for the first time in her life beheld real inspiration,--for the first time heard the true tones of the piano." Rauch, the great sculptor, called upon them, and "won our hearts by his beautiful person and the benignant and intelligent charm of his conversation." Both writers were hard at work. George Eliot was writing an article on Weimar for Fraser, on Cumming for Westminster, and translating Spinoza's Ethics. No name was signed to these productions, as it would not do to have it known that a woman wrote them. The education of most women was so meagre that the articles would have been considered of little value. Happily Girton and Newnham colleges are changing this estimate of the sex. Women do not like to be regarded as inferior; then they must educate themselves as thoroughly as the best men are educated. Mr. Lewes was not well. "This is a terrible trial to us poor scribblers," she writes, "to whom health is money, as well as all other things worth having." They had but one sitting-room between them, and the scratching of another pen so affected her nerves, as to drive her nearly wild. Pecuniarily, life was a harder struggle than ever, for there were four more mouths to be fed,--Mr. Lewes' three sons and their mother. "Our life is intensely occupied, and the days are far too short," she writes. They were reading in every spare moment, twelve plays of Shakespeare, Goethe's works, Wilhelm Meister, Götz von Berlichingen, Hermann and Dorothea, Iphigenia, Wanderjahre, Italianische Reise, and others; Heine's poems; Lessing's Laocoön and Nathan the Wise; Macaulay's History of England; Moore's Life of Sheridan; Brougham's Lives of Men of Letters; White's History of Selborne; Whewell's History of Inductive Sciences; Boswell; Carpenter's Comparative Physiology; Jones' Animal Kingdom; Alison's History of Europe; Kahnis' History of German Protestantism; Schrader's German Mythology; Kingsley's Greek Heroes; and the Iliad and Odyssey in the original. She says, "If you want delightful reading, get Lowell's My Study Windows, and read the essays called My Garden Acquaintances and Winter." No wonder they were busy. On their return from Germany they went to the sea-shore, that Mr. Lewes might perfect his Sea-side Studies. George Eliot entered heartily into the work. "We were immensely excited," she says, "by the discovery of this little red mesembryanthemum. It was a crescendo of delight when we found a 'strawberry,' and a fortissimo when I, for the first time, saw the pale, fawn-colored tentacles of an Anthea cereus viciously waving like little serpents in a low-tide pool." They read here Gosse's Rambles on the Devonshire Coast, Edward's Zoology, Harvey's sea-side book, and other scientific works. And now at thirty-seven George Eliot was to begin her creative work. Mr. Lewes had often said to her, "You have wit, description, and philosophy--those go a good way towards the production of a novel." "It had always been a vague dream of mine," she says, "that sometime or other I might write a novel ... but I never went further toward the actual writing than an introductory chapter, describing a Staffordshire village, and the life of the neighboring farm-houses; and as the years passed on I lost any hope that. I should ever be able to write a novel, just as I desponded about everything else in my future life. I always thought I was deficient in dramatic power, both of construction and dialogue, but I felt I should be at my ease in the descriptive parts." After she had written a portion of Amos Barton in her Scenes of Clerical Life, she read it to Mr. Lewes, who told her that now he was sure she could write good dialogue, but not as yet sure about her pathos. One evening, in his absence, she wrote the scene describing Milly's death, and read it to Mr. Lewes, on his return. "We both cried over it," she says, "and then he came up to me and kissed me, saying, 'I think your pathos is better than your fun!'" Mr. Lewes sent the story to Blackwood, with the signature of "George Eliot,"--the first name chosen because it was his own name, and the last because it pleased her fancy. Mr. Lewes wrote that this story by a friend of his, showed, according to his judgment, "such humor, pathos, vivid presentation, and nice observation as have not been exhibited, in this style, since the Vicar of Wakefield." Mr. John Blackwood accepted the story, but made some comments which discouraged the author from trying another. Mr. Lewes wrote him the effects of his words, which he hastened to withdraw, as there was so much to be said in praise that he really desired more stories from the same pen, and sent her a check for two hundred and fifty dollars. This was evidently soothing, as Mr. Gilfil's Love Story and Janet's Repentance were at once written. Much interest began to be expressed about the author. Some said Bulwer wrote the sketches. Thackeray praised them, and Arthur Helps said, "He is a great writer." Copies of the stories bound together, with the title Scenes of Clerical Life, were sent to Froude, Dickens, Thackeray, Tennyson, Ruskin, and Faraday. Dickens praised the humor and the pathos, and thought the author was a woman. Jane Welch Carlyle thought it "a human book, written out of the heart of a live man, not merely out of the brain of an author, full of tenderness and pathos, without a scrap of sentimentality, of sense without dogmatism, of earnestness without twaddle--a book that makes one feel friends at once and for always with the man or woman who wrote it." She guessed the author was "a man of middle age, with a wife, from whom he has got those beautiful feminine touches in his book, a good many children, and a dog that he has as much fondness for as I have for my little Nero." Mr. Lewes was delighted, and said, "Her fame is beginning." George Eliot was growing happier, for her nature had been somewhat despondent. She used to say, "Expecting disappointments is the only form of hope with which I am familiar." She said, "I feel a deep satisfaction in having done a bit of faithful work that will perhaps remain, like a primrose-root in the hedgerow, and gladden and chasten human hearts in years to come." "'Conscience goes to the hammering in of nails' is my gospel," she would say. "Writing is part of my religion, and I can write no word that is not prompted from within. At the same time I believe that almost all the best books in the world have been written with the hope of getting money for them." "My life has deepened unspeakably during the last year: I feel a greater capacity for moral and intellectual enjoyment, a more acute sense of my deficiencies in the past, a more solemn desire to be faithful to coming duties." For Scenes of Clerical Life she received six hundred dollars for the first edition, and much more after her other books appeared. And now another work, a longer one, was growing in her mind, Adam Bede, the germ of which, she says, was an anecdote told her by her aunt, Elizabeth Evans, the Dinah Morris of the book. A very ignorant girl had murdered her child, and refused to confess it. Mrs. Evans, who was a Methodist preacher, stayed with her all night, praying with her, and at last she burst into tears and confessed her crime. Mrs. Evans went with her in the cart to the place of execution, and ministered to the unhappy girl till death came. When the first pages of Adam Bede were shown to Mr. Blackwood, he said, "That will do." George Eliot and Mr. Lewes went to Munich, Dresden, and Vienna for rest and change, and she prepared much of the book in this time. When it was finished, she wrote on the manuscript, Jubilate. "To my dear husband, George Henry Lewes, I give the Ms. of a work which would never have been written but for the happiness which his love has conferred on my life." For this novel she received four thousand dollars for the copyright for four years. Fame had actually come. All the literary world were talking about it. John Murray said there had never been such a book. Charles Reade said, putting his finger on Lisbeth's account of her coming home with her husband from their marriage, "the finest thing since Shakespeare." A workingman wrote: "Forgive me, dear sir, my boldness in asking you to give us a cheap edition. You would confer on us a great boon. I can get plenty of trash for a few pence, but I am sick of it." Mr. Charles Buxton said, in the House of Commons: "As the farmer's wife says in Adam Bede, 'It wants to be hatched over again and hatched different.'" This of course greatly helped to popularize the book. To George Eliot all this was cause for the deepest gratitude. They were able now to rent a home at Wandworth, and move to it at once. The poverty and the drudgery of life seemed over. She said: "I sing my magnificat in a quiet way, and have a great deal of deep, silent joy; but few authors, I suppose, who have had a real success, have known less of the flush and the sensations of triumph that are talked of as the accompaniments of success. I often think of my dreams when I was four or five and twenty. I thought then how happy fame would make me.... I am assured now that Adam Bede was worth writing,--worth living through those long years to write. But now it seems impossible that I shall ever write anything so good and true again." Up to this time the world did not know who George Eliot was; but as a man by the name of Liggins laid claim to the authorship, and tried to borrow money for his needs because Blackwood would not pay him, the real name of the author had to be divulged. Five thousand copies of Adam Bede were sold the first two weeks, and sixteen thousand the first year. So excellent was the sale that Mr. Blackwood sent her four thousand dollars in addition to the first four. The work was soon translated into French, German, and Hungarian. Mr. Lewes' Physiology of Common Life was now published, but it brought little pecuniary return. The reading was carried on as usual by the two students. The Life of George Stephenson; the Electra of Sophocles; the Agamemnon of Aeschylus, Harriet Martineau's British Empire in India; and History of the Thirty Years' Peace; Béranger, Modern Painters, containing some of the finest writing of the age; Overbech on Greek art; Anna Mary Howitt's book on Munich; Carlyle's Life of Frederick the Great; Darwin's Origin of Species; Emerson's Man the Reformer, "which comes to me with fresh beauty and meaning"; Buckle's History of Civilization; Plato and Aristotle. An American publisher now offered her six thousand dollars for a book, but she was obliged to decline, for she was writing the Mill on the Floss, in 1860, for which Blackwood gave her ten thousand dollars for the first edition of four thousand copies, and Harper & Brothers fifteen hundred dollars for using it also. Tauchnitz paid her five hundred for the German reprint. She said: "I am grateful and yet rather sad to have finished; sad that I shall live with my people on the banks of the Floss no longer. But it is time that I should go, and absorb some new life and gather fresh ideas." They went at once to Italy, where they spent several months in Florence, Venice, and Rome. In the former city she made her studies for her great novel, Romola. She read Sismondi's History of the Italian Republics, Tenneman's History of Philosophy, T.A. Trollope's Beata, Hallam on the Study of Roman Law in the Middle Ages, Gibbon on the Revival of Greek Learning, Burlamachi's Life of Savonarola; also Villari's life of the great preacher, Mrs. Jameson's Sacred and Legendary Art, Machiavelli's works, Petrarch's Letters, Casa Guidi Windows, Buhle's History of Modern Philosophy, Story's Roba di Roma, Liddell's Rome, Gibbon, Mosheim, and one might almost say the whole range of Italian literature in the original. Of Mommsen's History of Rome she said, "It is so fine that I count all minds graceless who read it without the deepest stirrings." The study necessary to make one familiar with fifteenth century times was almost limitless. No wonder she told Mr. Cross, years afterward, "I began Romola a young woman, I finished it an old woman"; but that, with Adam Bede and Middlemarch, will be her monument. "What courage and patience," she says, "are wanted for every life that aims to produce anything!" "In authorship I hold carelessness to be a mortal sin." "I took unspeakable pains in preparing to write Romola." For this one book, on which she spent a year and a half, Cornhill Magazine paid her the small fortune of thirty-five thousand dollars. She purchased a pleasant home, "The Priory," Regent's Park, where she made her friends welcome, though she never made calls upon any, for lack of time. She had found, like Victor Hugo, that time is a very precious thing for those who wish to succeed in life. Browning, Huxley, and Herbert Spencer often came to dine. Says Mr. Cross, in his admirable life: "The entertainment was frequently varied by music when any good performer happened to be present. I think, however, that the majority of visitors delighted chiefly to come for the chance of a few words with George Eliot alone. When the drawing-room door of the Priory opened, a first glance revealed her always in the same low arm-chair on the left-hand side of the fire. On entering, a visitor's eye was at once arrested by the massive head. The abundant hair, streaked with gray now, was draped with lace, arranged mantilla fashion, coming to a point at the top of the forehead. If she were engaged in conversation, her body was usually bent forward with eager, anxious desire to get as close as possible to the person with whom she talked. She had a great dislike to raising her voice, and often became so wholly absorbed in conversation that the announcement of an in-coming visitor failed to attract her attention; but the moment the eyes were lifted up, and recognized a friend, they smiled a rare welcome--sincere, cordial, grave--a welcome that was felt to come straight from the heart, not graduated according to any social distinction." After much reading of Fawcett, Mill, and other writers on political economy, Felix Holt was written, in 1866, and for this she received from Blackwood twenty-five thousand dollars. Very much worn with her work, though Mr. Lewes relieved her in every way possible, by writing letters and looking over all criticisms of her books, which she never read, she was obliged to go to Germany for rest. In 1868 she published her long poem, The Spanish Gypsy, reading Spanish literature carefully, and finally passing some time in Spain, that she might be the better able to make a lasting work. Had she given her life to poetry, doubtless she would have been a great poet. Silas Marner, written before Romola, in 1861, had been well received, and Middlemarch, in 1872, made a great sensation. It was translated into several languages. George Bancroft wrote her from Berlin that everybody was reading it. For this she received a much larger sum than the thirty-five thousand which she was paid for Romola. A home was now purchased in Surrey, with eight or nine acres of pleasure grounds, for George Eliot had always longed for trees and flowers about her house. "Sunlight and sweet air," she said, "make a new creature of me." Daniel Deronda followed in 1876, for which, it is said, she read nearly a thousand volumes. Whether this be true or not, the list of books given in her life, of her reading in these later years, is as astonishing as it is helpful for any who desire real knowledge. At Witley, in Surrey, they lived a quiet life, seeing only a few friends like the Tennysons, the Du Mauriers, and Sir Henry and Lady Holland. Both were growing older, and Mr. Lewes was in very poor health. Finally, after a ten days' illness, he died, Nov. 28, 1878. To George Eliot this loss was immeasurable. She needed his help and his affection. She said, "I like not only to be loved, but also to be told that I am loved," and he had idolized her. He said: "I owe Spencer a debt of gratitude. It was through him that I learned to know Marian,--to know her was to love her, and since then, my life has been a new birth. To her I owe all my prosperity and all my happiness. God bless her!" Mr. John Walter Cross, for some time a wealthy banker in New York, had long been a friend of the family, and though many years younger than George Eliot, became her helper in these days of need. A George Henry Lewes studentship, of the value of one thousand dollars yearly, was to be given to Cambridge for some worthy student of either sex, in memory of the man she had loved. "I want to live a little time that I may do certain things for his sake," she said. She grew despondent, and the Cross family used every means to win her away from her sorrow. Mr. Cross' mother, to whom he was devotedly attached, had also died, and the loneliness of both made their companionship more comforting. They read Dante together in the original, and gradually the younger man found that his heart was deeply interested. It was the higher kind of love, the honor of mind for mind and soul for soul. "I shall be," she said, "a better, more loving creature than I could have been in solitude. To be constantly, lovingly grateful for this gift of a perfect love is the best illumination of one's mind to all the possible good there may be in store for man on this troublous little planet." Mr. Cross and George Eliot were married, May 6, 1880, a year and a half after Mr. Lewes' death, his son Charles giving her away, and went at once to Italy. She wrote: "Marriage has seemed to restore me to my old self.... To feel daily the loveliness of a nature close to me, and to feel grateful for it, is the fountain of tenderness and strength to endure." Having passed through a severe illness, she wrote to a friend: "I have been cared for by something much better than angelic tenderness.... If it is any good for me that my life has been prolonged till now, I believe it is owing to this miraculous affection that has chosen to watch over me." She did not forget Mr. Lewes. In looking upon the Grande Chartreuse, she said, "I would still give up my own life willingly, if he could have the happiness instead of me." On their return to London, they made their winter home at 4 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, a plain brick house. The days were gliding by happily. George Eliot was interested as ever in all great subjects, giving five hundred dollars for woman's higher education at Girton College, and helping many a struggling author, or providing for some poor friend of early times who was proud to be remembered. She and Mr. Cross began their reading for the day with the Bible, she especially enjoying Isaiah, Jeremiah, and St. Paul's Epistles. Then they read Max Muller's works, Shakespeare, Milton, Scott, and whatever was best in English, French, and German literature. Milton she called her demigod. Her husband says she had "a limitless persistency in application." Her health was better, and she gave promise of doing more great work. When urged to write her autobiography, she said, half sighing and half smiling: "The only thing I should care much to dwell on would be the absolute despair I suffered from, of ever being able to achieve anything. No one could ever have felt greater despair, and a knowledge of this might be a help to some other struggler." Friday afternoon, Dec. 17, she went to see Agamemnon performed in Greek by Oxford students, and the next afternoon to a concert at St. James Hall. She took cold, and on Monday was treated for sore throat. On Wednesday evening the doctors came, and she whispered to her husband, "Tell them I have great pain in the left side." This was the last word. She died with every faculty bright, and her heart responsive to all noble things. She loved knowledge to the end. She said, "My constant groan is that I must leave so much of the greatest writing which the centuries have sifted for me, unread for want of time." She had the broadest charity for those whose views differed from hers. She said, "The best lesson of tolerance we have to learn, is to tolerate intolerance." She hoped for and "looked forward to the time when the impulse to help our fellows shall be as immediate and as irresistible as that which I feel to grasp something firm if I am falling." One Sunday afternoon I went to her grave in Highgate Cemetery, London. A gray granite shaft, about twenty-five feet high, stands above it, with these beautiful words from her great poem:-- <div class="poetry"> "O may I join the choir invisible, Of those immortal dead who live again In minds made better by their presence."</div> HERE LIES THE BODY OF GEORGE ELIOT, MARY ANN CROSS. BORN, 22d NOVEMBER, 1819; DIED, 22d DECEMBER, 1880. A stone coping is around this grave, and bouquets of yellow crocuses and hyacinths lie upon it. Next to her grave is a horizontal slab, with the name of George Henry Lewes upon the stone. <hr /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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