come until a few days ago, and for a
full month after the publication; and I was so fearful of the probable
sentence that my hands shook as they broke the seal. But such a
pleasant letter! I have been overjoyed with it. She says that her
'predominant impression is of the _originality_'--very pleasant to
hear. I must not forget, however, to say that she complains of 'want
of variety' in the general effect of the drama, and that she 'likes
Lucifer less than anything in the two volumes.' You see how you have
high backers. Still she talks of 'immense advances,' which consoles me
again. In fact, there is scarcely a word to _require_ consolation
in her letter, and what did not please me least--nay, to do myself
justice, what put all the rest out of my head for some minutes with
joy--is the account she gives of herself. For she is better and likely
still to be better; she has recovered appetite and sleep, and lost the
most threatening symptoms of disease; she has been out for the first
time for four years and a half, lying on the grass flat, she says,
with my books open beside her day after day. (That _does_ sound vain
of me, but I cannot resist the temptation of writing it!) And
the means--the means! Such means you would never divine! It is
_mesmerism_. She is thrown into the magnetic trance twice a day; and
the progress is manifest; and the hope for the future clear. Now,
what do you both think? Consider what a case it is! No case of a
weak-minded woman and a nervous affection; but of the most manlike
woman in the three kingdoms--in the best sense of man--a woman gifted
with admirable fortitude, as well as exercised in high logic, a woman
of sensibility and of imagination certainly, but apt to carry her
reason unbent wherever she sets her foot; given to utilitarian
philosophy and the habit of logical analysis; and suffering under a
disease which has induced change of structure and yielded to no tried
remedy! Is it not wonderful, and past expectation? She suggests that
I should try the means--but I understand that in cases like mine the
remedy has done harm instead of good, by over-exciting the system. But
her experience will settle the question of the reality of magnetism
with a whole generation of infidels. For my own part, I have long been
a believer, _in spite of papa_. Then I have had very kind letters from
Mrs. Jameson, the 'Ennuyee'[113] and from Mr. Serjeant Talfourd and
some less famous persons. And a poet with a Wels