can bear with the melancholy
of the other, but prefers your preaching to another's playing!

Your thoughts come in, like the intervention of the Greek Chorus, as an
ornament and source of fresh delight. Like the songs of the Chorus, they
bid us pause a moment over the wider laws and actions of human fate and
human life, and we turn from your persons to yourself, and again from
yourself to your persons, as from the odes of Sophocles or Aristophanes
to the action of their characters on the stage. Nor, to my taste, does
the mere music and melancholy dignity of your style in these passages of
meditation fall far below the highest efforts of poetry. I remember
that scene where Clive, at Barnes Newcome's Lecture on the Poetry of the
Affections, sees Ethel who is lost to him. 'And the past and its dear
histories, and youth and its hopes and passions, and tones and looks for
ever echoing in the heart and present in the memory--these, no doubt,
poor Clive saw and heard as he looked across the great gulf of time, and
parting and grief, and beheld the wonmn he had loved for many years.'

_For ever echoing in the heart and present in the memory:_ who has not
heard these tones, who does not hear them as he turns over your books
that, for so many years, have been his companions and comforters? We
have been young and old, we have been sad and merry with you, we have
listened to the mid-night chimes with Pen and Warrington, have stood
with you beside the death-bed, have mourned at that yet more awful
funeral of lost love, and with you have prayed in the inmost chapel
sacred to our old and immortal affections, _a' leal souvenir!_ And
whenever you speak for yourself, and speak in earnest, how magical, how
rare, how lonely in our literature is the beauty of your sentences! 'I
can't express the charm of them' (so you write of George Sand; so we
may write of you): 'they seem to me like the sound of country bells,
provoking I don't know what vein of music and meditation, and falling
sweetly and sadly on the ear.' Surely that style, so fresh, so rich, so
full of surprises--that style which stamps as classical your fragments
of slang, and perpetually astonishes and delights--would alone give
immortality to an author, even had he little to say. But you, with your
whole wide world of fops and fools, of good women and brave men, of
honest absurdities and cheery adventurers: you who created the Steynes
and Newcomes, the Beckys and Blanches, Capta