d an inclination which comes only of
itself....

"... I have had another note from the editor--very flattering, and
praying for farther supplies. The 'Angels' were not ready, and I was
obliged to send something else."

A discussion arises in the family regarding the taking of a house in
Wimpole Street, and Elizabeth remarks that for her part she would rather
go on inhabiting castles in the air than to live in that particular house,
"whose walls look so much like Newgate's turned inside out." She
continues, however, that if it is decided upon, she has little doubt she
will wake and sleep very much as she would anywhere else. With a strong
will, and an intense, resistless kind of energy in holding any conviction,
and an independence of character only equalled by its preeminent justice
and generous magnanimity, she was singularly free from any tenacious
insistence upon the matters of external life. She had her preferences; but
she always accommodated herself to the decision or the necessity of the
hour, and there was an end of it. She had that rare power of instantaneous
mental adjustment; and if a given thing were right and best, or if it were
not best but was still inevitable, she accepted it and did not make life a
burden to every one concerned by endless discussion.

London itself did not captivate her fancy. "Did Dr. Johnson in his
paradise in Fleet Street love the pavements and the walls?" she
questioned. "I doubt that," she added; "the place, the privileges, don't
mix in one's love as is done by the hills and the seaside."

The privileges, however, became more and more interesting to her. One of
these was when she met Wordsworth, whom she describes as being "very
kind," and that he "let her hear his conversation."

This conversation she did not find "prominent," for she saw at the same
time Landor, "the brilliant Landor," she notes, and felt the difference
"between great genius and eminent talent." But there was a day on which
she went to Chiswick with Wordsworth and Miss Mitford, and all the way she
thought she must be dreaming. It was Landor, though, who captivated her
fancy at once, as he already had that of her future poet-lover and
husband, who was yet unrevealed to her. Landor, "in whose hands the ashes
of antiquity burn again," she writes, gave her two Greek epigrams he had
recently written. All this time she is reading everything,--Sheridan
Knowles's play of "The Wreckers," which Forres