that is why
it is difficult to feel unhappy in your company. I have never seen you
without wishing to be a better creature. Your presence is a consoling
idea . . . know all the elements in you that revive one's heart,
possibly without your being even aware of it."

A few years later she gives him an amusing account of the impression his
writings had already made on an eminent statesman.

"I owe you a small episode. Not long ago, when lunching with the
Emperor, I sat next our little Bismarck, and in a spirit of mischief I
began sounding him about you. But I had hardly uttered your name when he
went off at a gallop with the greatest enthusiasm, firing off the list
of your perfections left and right, and so long as he declaimed your
praises with gesticulations, cut and thrust, powder and shot, it was
all very well and quite in character; but seeing that I listened with
interest and attention my man took the bit in his teeth, and flung
himself into a psychic apotheosis. On reaching full pitch he began to
get muddled, and floundered so helplessly in his own phrases! all the
while chewing an excellent cutlet to the bone, that at last I realised
nothing but the tips of his ears--those two great ears of his. What a
pity I can't repeat it verbatim! but how? There was nothing left but a
jumble of confused sounds and broken words."

Tolstoy on his side is equally expansive, and in the early stages of the
correspondence falls occasionally into the vein of self-analysis which
in later days became habitual.

"As a child I believed with passion and without any thought. Then at the
age of fourteen I began to think about life and preoccupied myself with
religion, but it did not adjust itself to my theories and so I broke
with it. Without it I was able to live quite contentedly for ten years
. . . everything in my life was evenly distributed, and there was no
room for religion. Then came a time when everything grew intelligible;
there were no more secrets in life, but life itself had lost its
significance."

He goes on to tell of the two years that he spent in the Caucasus before
the Crimean War, when his mind, jaded by youthful excesses, gradually
regained its freshness, and he awoke to a sense of communion with Nature
which he retained to his life's end.

"I have my notes of that time, and now reading them over I am not able
to understand how a man could attain to the state of mental exaltation
which I arrived at. It was a tortu