James Parton

“ Her works, skilfully planned and carefully wrought out in this noble spirit, fully establish her the noblest female poet of the world. Her genius, working in every effort of her mind, enabled her to infuse passion and enthusiasm into an otherwise cumbrous mass of knowledge. Her soul, refreshed by intercourse with the master minds of all ages, rose above even the intensest physical suffering and bodily weakness, to give new utterance to the grand truths of humanity, and to cheer her fellow-toilers and sufferers. ”

“ It is a tale of horror, violence and crime, relieved only by two brief love scenes at the end, brightly and delicately drawn and novel in conception. It is a book which, once taken up, it is not easy to lay down unfinished; which people sit up late at night to read, and which haunts them in their sleep, bringing them evil and fantastic dreams. It is a morbid book, real in its very unreality, but its power is incontestable. Emily has been blamed for choosing a subject so forbidding ”

“ They were reared amid surroundings the most gloomy and unhealthful, and cursed as they grew older with a brother who brought them shame and sorrow in return for the love they lavished upon him. Their very genius seemed a product of disease, and often their finest pages are marred by a bitter savor of its origin. Their stories deal with suffering, endurance, or rebellion against fate; with violence, with crime and its punishment. In treating such subjects, these three quiet, patient daughters of a country parson found themselves quite at home. ”

“ To this county, the birthplace of the greatest man who ever wrote, and of the greatest woman who ever wrote, we might well apply the words of Charlotte Brontë when she speaks of her heroine as having been reared in "the healthy heart of England." Warwickshire is a small county in the center of the island, hemmed in by such English shires as Oxford, Leicester, and Stafford; but whatever in England is most English, whether men, nature, towns, homes, traditions, relics, usages; whether we seek the England of romance, the England of history, or the England of industry, we find it in Warwickshire. ”

“ For years I have found this abstinence necessary to preserve me from that discouragement as an artist which ill-judged praise, no less than ill-judged blame, tends to produce in me. For far worse than any verdict as to the proportion of good and evil in our work, is the painful impression that we write for a public which has no discernment of good and evil. ”

“ I was late; it was bitter cold; people jostled me; I was mortally afraid I should be recognized; but there I stood, feasting my eyes on the fascinating pester, and saying proudly to myself, in the words of the great Vincent Crummles, 'This, this is fame!' That day my pupils had an indulgent teacher; for, while they struggled with their pot-hooks, I was writing immortal works; and, when they droned out the multiplication table, I was counting up the noble fortune my pen was to earn for me in the dim, delightful future. ”

“ It was long since England had had a queen regnant. Victoria did not desire, like her famous predecessor, Queen Elizabeth, to bear the splendid burden of royalty alone. A year before her accession her cousin, Prince Albert of SaxeCoburg Gotha, had visited her. From his infancy, for he was a few months younger than Victoria, it was the earnest wish of their fond mothers that these two should be united in marriage. ”

“ It is minutely inspected, for a strange check is a revelation. Every bank has its own style, and every great house adds its peculiar mark. What character in the signature! The filling up is in a clerkly hand, acquired at school; but the hand that put its magic scrawl at the bottom was, it may be, toughened in the rude school of the world, where it had many a fight before it proved the victor.
The check which Mrs. Stowe received in June, 1851, came from the editor of a newspaper published in the city of Washington, and tradition reports it to have been of the value of one hundred dollars. ”

“ Miss Alcott urges ladies who write for publication, not to submit to injustice of this kind, and to inform themselves as to their rights. She says:
"Now that women have made a place for themselves in journalism and literature, it is wise for them to cultivate, not only their intellectual faculties, but their practical ones also, and understand the business details of their craft. The ignorance and helplessness of women writers is amazing, and only disastrous experience teaches them what they should have learned before. ”

“ Their long-cherished scheme of the girls' boarding-school was destined never to be realized. Haworth was too remote in situation and too forbidding in aspect to attract scholars, and, in spite of the neatly printed circulars which they issued, and of the earnest efforts of their few friends, they did not succeed in securing a single pupil. This was a bitter disappointment, but it was as nothing compared with a household sorrow that had been slowly coming upon them for a long time. ”

“ In October, 1839, Prince Albert and his brother came to see their royal cousin. A week later, in spite of high resolves and royal duty and maidenly modesty, Love found his way into the palace and broke down the barriers which were keeping apart hearts destined to be one. The Queen has since told the story herself with touching simplicity. They were married on the 10th of February, 1840, a day which began with clouds and rain, but, after the ceremony, changed to what the loyal English people call the "Queen's weather."
All the world knows their married life to have been a happy one. ”

“ Her eyes, of a gray blue, constantly varying in color, striking some as intensely blue, others as of a pale, washed out gray, were small and not beautiful in themselves, but, when she grew animated in conversation, those eyes lit up the whole face, seeming in a manner to transfigure it. So much was this the case that a young lady, who had once enjoyed an hour's conversation with her, came away under its spell with the impression that she was beautiful, but afterward, on seeing George Eliot again when she was not talking, she could hardly believe her to be the same person. ”

“ In later life she wrote, "A worse school for a young girl—one more detrimental to all natural feelings and affections—cannot well be imagined than the position of a Queen at eighteen, without experience and without a husband to guide and support her. This the Queen can state from painful experience, and she thanks God that none of her own dear daughters are exposed to such danger." ”

“ QUEEN VICTORIA.
The Nineteenth Century has justly been called the Era of Woman. Whatever regard was formerly paid to her for moral merit or physical beauty, her mental powers were almost universally slighted and her higher education neglected. Now in every civilized country women of talent and genius, in both public and private station, are promoting the moral and material welfare and progress of the age. ”

“ Such admission of the public to the quiet joys and sorrows of the domestic life of the Queen of course disarms criticism, as it treats the reader as a privileged guest. We see in them, as in all that is recorded of her life and acts, a noble woman, who has in one of the most difficult stations in life grandly, yet quietly, discharged her duty as daughter, wife, mother and queen. The inspiration of her whole life is perfect faith in God and devotion to duty. ”

“ An ancient and originally well-meant provision of English law debars an injured husband from obtaining a divorce if he has once forgiven an erring wife and resumed cohabitation with her.
The discovery of this statute threw the parties concerned into painful embarrassment. They thought at first of marrying abroad, but no foreign marriage is valid in England against English law; nor indeed can a lawful marriage be contracted in the continent of Europe unless the authorities of the country are legally notified that no obstacle exists in the laws of the country to which the couple belong. ”

“ The capable Alcott daughters painted and papered the interior themselves. And gradually the artist daughter filled up all the nooks and corners with panels on which she had painted birds or flowers, and over the open fire-places she painted mottoes in ancient English characters. Owls blink at you and faces peep from the most unexpected places. ”

“ The next day, appeared George Eliot's reply:
"Sir,—The Rev. H. Anders has with questionable delicacy and unquestionable inaccuracy assured the world through your columns that the author of Scenes of Clerical Life' and 'Adam Bede' is Mr. Joseph Liggins, of Nuneaton. I beg distinctly to deny that statement. I declare on my honor that that gentleman never saw a line of those works until they were printed, nor had he any knowledge of them whatever. Allow me to ask whether the act of publishing a book deprives a man of all claim to the courtesies usual among gentlemen? ”

“ Lewes' mercurial disposition now assumed a stability greatly enhancing his brilliant talents, and for the first time facilitating that concentration of intellect so necessary for the production of really lasting philosophic work. On the other hand, George Eliot's still dormant faculties were roused and stimulated to the utmost by the man to whom this union with her formed the most memorable year of his life. By his enthusiastic belief in her he gave her the only thing she wanted—a thorough belief in herself. Indeed, he was more than a husband ”

“ Sometimes, on baking-day, she would light the fire in the big brick oven, and thinking to gain a few minutes for writing, would fly to her task and become so absorbed by it as to forget everything in the world except the scene she was describing. ”

“ Near one of the towns of this county, a railroad junction now, called Nuneaton, an obscure country place then, containing an ancient Gothic church, an ancient grammar-school, and the ruins of an abbey connecting it with the life and sentiment of the Middle Ages, was born the writer nearest akin to Shakespeare in the qualities of her mind, Mary Anne Evans, who gave herself the name of George Eliot. ”

“ Believe me, I should not have cared to devour even ardent praise if it had not come from one who showed the discriminating sensibility, the perfect response to the artist's intention, which must make the fullest, rarest joy to one who works from inward conviction and not in compliance with current fashions. ”

“ Fortunately she was a woman of sense and cheerful disposition, and had the invaluable assistance of her brother, Prince Leopold, whose wife, the Princess Charlotte, once the hope and joy of the English people, had died a few months after her marriage. Now he acted nobly a brother's part to his widowed sister, and Victoria long afterward declared that her visits to her uncle's residence; Claremont, were the happiest days of her childhood. With the exception of these visits, she lived a secluded and rather dull life. ”

“ In 1854 Prince Albert visited the Emperor, and in the next year visits were interchanged between the sovereigns. Victoria and Albert, lovers of peace, desired to establish amicable relations between the two great nations, so long hostile, and in great measure they succeeded, as the subsequent history of Europe has shown. When the French Emperor, after a brilliant but not prosperous career, was driven from his throne, he found refuge in England. There his widow still lives in seclusion, mourning her son, who fell in a distant land, fighting in English uniform for England's cause. ”

“ To teach the young personally has always seemed to me the most satisfactory supplement to teaching the world through books, and I have often wished that I had such a means of having fresh, living, spiritual children within sight.
"One can hardly turn one's thought toward Eastern Europe just now without a mingling of pain and dread; but we masş together distant scenes and events in an unreal way, and one would like to believe that the present troubles will not at any time press on you in Hungary with more external misfortune than on us in England. ”

“ Adam Bede was begun as soon as the "Scenes" were finished, and it was hailed by Mr. Blackwood with delight.
"Tell George Eliot," he wrote to Mr. Lewes, "that I think 'Adam Bede' all right—most lifelike and real. I shall read the MS. quietly over again before writing in detail about it. . . . For the first reading, it did not signify how many things I had to think of; I would have hurried through it with eager pleasure. I write this note to allay all anxiety on the part of George Eliot as to my appreciation of the merits of this most promising opening of a picture of life. ”

“ Most of the men were at first far too exhausted and sleepy to talk, and merely dozed wherever they chanced to drop down until the smell of food aroused them. But after receiving their rations many became quite communicative, and the new nurse, eager for news, received numerous graphic accounts of the battle, some fierce and brief, some spiced with genuine Yankee humor, as she passed from one bed to another, bathing, bandaging, and feeding her way down the long aisle.
The courage with which the wounded men endured their sufferings, Miss Alcott describes as something marvelous. ”