ord during her
declining days.

* * * * *

_To Mr. Ruskin_

Paris, 102 Rue de Grenelle, Faubourg St. Germain:
November 5, [1855].

My dear Mr. Ruskin,--I thank you from my heart for your more than
interesting letter. You have helped me to see that dear friend of ours,
as without you I could not have seen her, in those last affecting days
of illness, by the window not only of the house in Berkshire, but of the
house of the body and of the material world--an open window through
which the light shone, thank God. It would be a comfort to me now if I
had had the privilege of giving her a very very little of the great
pleasure you certainly gave her (for I know how she enjoyed your
visit--she wrote and told me), but I must be satisfied with the thought
left to me, that now _she_ regrets nothing, not even great pleasures.

I agree with you in much if not in everything you have written of her.
It was a great, warm, outflowing heart, and the head was worthy of the
heart. People have observed that she resembled Coleridge in her granite
forehead--something, too, in the lower part of the face--however unlike
Coleridge in mental characteristics, in his tendency to abstract
speculation, or indeed his ideality. There might have been, as you
suggest, a somewhat different development elsewhere than in
Berkshire--not very different, though--souls don't grow out of the
ground.

I agree quite with you that she was stronger and wider in her
conversation and letters than in her books. Oh, I have said so a hundred
times. The heat of human sympathy seemed to bring out her powerful
vitality, rustling all over with laces and flowers. She seemed to think
and speak stronger holding a hand--not that she required help or
borrowed a word, but that the human magnetism acted on her nature, as it
does upon men born to speak. Perhaps if she had been a man with a man's
opportunities, she would have spoken rather than written a reputation.
Who can say? She hated the act of composition. Did you hear that from
her ever?

Her letters were always admirable, but I do most deeply regret that what
made one of their greatest charms unfits them for the public--I mean
their personal details. Mr. Harness sends to me for letters, and when I
bring them up, and with the greatest pain force myself to examine them
(all those letters she wrote to me in her warm goodness and
affectionateness), I find with wonder and sorrow how only