rong with the acutest pain; and her lack of faith intensified all
her suffering. So did lack of hope; for she was almost as destitute of
this cheering friend of man as Carlyle himself, and was given to
despondency as the sparks fly upward. In her earlier writing the tears
and smiles are blended, her humor lighting up the dark places; but the
deepening years deepened her gloom, and her later writing is sombre
almost throughout. Yet she had great capacity for joy as well as for
sorrow, and enjoyed with the utmost intensity the brighter parts of
life, and retained this sense of the pleasure of life even to the end.
She speaks much of the intense happiness of her life with Mr. Lewes, and
they seem never to have been separated, taking all journeys and holidays
together, and never wearying of what she calls their "_solitude a
deux_." Such expressions as these are very frequent throughout the
book:--

"I never have anything to call out my ill-humor or
discontent,--which you know was always ready enough to come on
slight call,--and I have everything to call out love and gratitude.
I am very happy,--happy in the highest blessing life can give us,
the perfect love and sympathy of a nature that stimulates my own to
healthful activity. 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, than I remember
at any former period of my life. And my happiness has deepened,
too; the blessedness of a perfect love and union grows daily. Few
women, I fear, have had such reason as I have to think the long,
sad years of youth were worth living for the sake of middle age."

And this extract from the journal of Mr. Lewes leaves us his thought
about their life, which is so like her own:--

"I owe Spencer another and a deeper debt. 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!"

That her great books would ever have been written without this loving
sympathy and appreciation on the part of Mr. Lewes, seems extremely
doubtful. She needed encouragement at every step, being prone to despair
about her writings, and she had the utmost reliance upon the jud