pths of the medium. G. H.
Lewes was absent for the time on an urgent errand; one of his sons, on a
visit at the house, had been suddenly taken with a violent attack of
pain, the heritage of a bad accident not long before in the West Indies,
a suffered onset from an angry bull, I seem to recall, who had tossed or
otherwise mauled him, and, though beaten off, left him considerably
compromised--these facts being promptly imparted to us, in no small
flutter, by our distinguished lady, who came in to us from another room,
where she had been with the hapless young man while his father appealed
to the nearest good chemist for some known specific. It infinitely moved
me to see so great a celebrity quite humanly and familiarly
agitated--even with something clear and noble in it too, to which, as
well as to the extraordinarily interesting dignity of her whole odd
personal conformation, I remember thinking her black silk dress and the
lace mantilla attached to her head and keeping company on either side
with the low-falling thickness of her dark hair effectively contributed.
I have found myself, my life long, attaching value to every noted thing
in respect to a great person--and George Eliot struck me on the spot as
somehow _illustratively_ great; never at any rate has the impression of
those troubled moments faded from me, nor that at once of a certain high
grace in her anxiety and a frank immediate appreciation of our presence,
modest embarrassed folk as we were. It took me no long time to thrill
with the sense, sublime in its unexpectedness, that we were perhaps, or
indeed quite clearly, helping her to pass the time till Mr. Lewes's
return--after which he would again post off for Mr. Paget the
pre-eminent surgeon; and I see involved with this the perfect amenity of
her assisting us, as it were, to assist her, through unrelinquished
proper talk, due responsible remark and report, in the last degree
suggestive to me, on a short holiday taken with Mr. Lewes in the south
of France, whence they had just returned. Yes indeed, the lightest words
of great persons are so little as any words of others are that I catch
myself again inordinately struck with her dropping it off-hand that the
mistral, scourge of their excursion, had blown them into Avignon, where
they had gone, I think, to see J. S. Mill, only to blow them straight
out again--the figure put it so before us; as well as with the moral
interest, the absence of the _banal_, in the