fessional humiliation (not personal
humility, you know), is quite kind of you.

Yours ever,
FANNY.

KING STREET, Friday, 28th.
MY DEAREST HAL,

You will be glad to hear that Mr. Maddox has at length come into my
terms.... For the next two months this is some anxiety off my mind, and
I trust will be off yours for me; and the last two days have shown me
that my chance of getting employment, either acting or reading, is
likely to last--at any rate till my sister returns, when I shall
probably stay with her till my departure for America.... I am most
thankful that the depression and discouragement under which I succumbed
for a while has been thus speedily relieved. It is a curious sensation
to have a certain consciousness of power (which I have, though perhaps
it is quite a mistaken notion), and at the same time of absolute
helplessness. It seems to me as if I had some sort of strength, and yet
I feel totally incapable of coping with the small difficulties of
circumstance under which it is oppressed; it's like a sort of wide-awake
nightmare. I suppose it's because I am a woman that I am so idiotic and
incompetent to help myself.

But when one thinks of it, what a piteous page in the history of human
experience is the baffling and defeat of real genius by the mere weight
of necessity, the bare exigencies of existence, the need to live from
day to day. Think of Beethoven dying, and saying to Hummel, with that
most wonderful assertion of his own great gifts, "Pourtant, Hummel,
j'avois du genie!"--such transcendent genius as it was too! such pure
and perfect and high and deep inspiration! which had, nevertheless, not
defended him from the tyranny of poverty, and the petty cares of living,
all his life.

Is it not well that people of great genius are always _proud as well as
humble_, and that the consciousness of their own nobility spreads, as it
were, the wings of an angel between them and all the baseness and
barrenness through which they are often compelled to wade up to the
lips? Whenever I think of Burns, my heart tightens itself, to use a
French expression, for a most painful _physical emotion_. Do you know
Schiller's exquisite poem of the "Division of the Earth"? I will send
you a translation, if you do not--a rough one I made of it when it was
one of my German lessons. My v