be placed the
longing for love and sympathy, the strength of the affections. No such
deeply loving human heart has been pictured to the world in all the
realm of books. To those who have been accustomed to think of George
Eliot as the master-mind of her time, the greatest intellect of her
generation, the revelation of her heart will be a great surprise and
delight. A deep, strong, passionate, loving human soul, with heights and
depths of devotion and tenderness unthinkable even to the poorer natures
around her,--it was in this that both her strength and her weakness lay.
This affectionateness was shown in her youth in her devotion to her
father, whose home she kept for several years, and in lavish regard for
the few friends who were near her, all of whom she retained and loved
to her dying day. It was shown later on in the passionate and absorbing
love she gave to Mr. Lewes throughout a lifetime, and which seemed but
to deepen and widen with the years; and in the tenderness and
thoughtfulness of the mother-love she gave to his children, and which
seem to lack not one of the elements of real maternal feeling. This
strong, pitying, passionate love of hers--a love hardly to be conceived
of by cold and self-contained natures--is the key to the one action of
her life requiring apology and charitable construction. In the first
place, she pitied Mr. Lewes for the sorrows of his life and for the
unfaithfulness of the wife upon whom he had lavished his heart's
devotion, and whom he had forgiven for the first offence, only to be
deceived the second time. Next, the strong feeling for justice which
characterized her nature rebelled against that law which bound him to
this unfaithful wife simply because he had once forgiven her; and,
finally, the desire she felt to comfort his loneliness and redeem his
life overcame all the scruples which the integrity of her nature must
have confronted her with, and she defied the law which was odious to her
and the conventionalities which were dear to her, in the same act, and
assumed the tie which held her in such loyal allegiance until death
severed it. Here is the only allusion she made to it in all her
correspondence, as far as we know. This was written to one of her oldest
friends, Mrs. Bray.

"If there is any one action or relation of my life which is, and
always has been, profoundly serious, it is my relation to Mr.
Lewes. It is, however, natural enough that you should mista