ghts--real
thoughts--are born. Not that I hope to win the secret. Here is the
beginning of one (but we poor women can never put together even two of
the three ideas which you say go to form a thought): 'When a wise man
makes a false step, will he not go farther than a fool?' It has just
flitted through me.

"I cannot get on with Gibbon, so wait your return to recommence the
readings. I dislike the sneering essence of his writings. I keep
referring to his face, until the dislike seems to become personal.
How different is it with Wordsworth! And yet I cannot escape from
the thought that he is always solemnly thinking of himself (but I do
reverence him). But this is curious; Byron was a greater egoist, and yet
I do not feel the same with him. He reminds me of a beast of the
desert, savage and beautiful; and the former is what one would imagine
a superior donkey reclaimed from the heathen to be--a very superior
donkey, I mean, with great power of speech and great natural
complacency, and whose stubbornness you must admire as part of his
mission. The worst is that no one will imagine anything sublime in a
superior donkey, so my simile is unfair and false. Is it not strange? I
love Wordsworth best, and yet Byron has the greater power over me. How
is that?"

("Because," Sir Austin wrote beside the query in pencil, "women are
cowards, and succumb to Irony and Passion, rather than yield their
hearts to Excellence and Nature's Inspiration.")

The letter pursued:

"I have finished Boiardo and have taken up Berni. The latter offends
me. I suppose we women do not really care for humour. You are right in
saying we have none ourselves, and 'cackle' instead of laugh. It is true
(of me, at least) that 'Falstaff is only to us an incorrigible fat man.'
I want to know what he illustrates. And Don Quixote--what end can be
served in making a noble mind ridiculous?--I hear you say--practical. So
it is. We are very narrow, I know. But we like wit--practical again!
Or in your words (when I really think they generally come to my
aid--perhaps it is that it is often all your thought); we 'prefer the
rapier thrust, to the broad embrace, of Intelligence.'"

He trifled with the letter for some time, re-reading chosen passages as
he walked about the room, and considering he scarce knew what. There are
ideas language is too gross for, and shape too arbitrary, which come to
us and have a definite influence upon us, and yet we cannot fasten on
the