ing author, or providing for some poor friend of
early times who was proud to be remembered.

She and Mr. Cross began their reading for the day with the Bible, she
especially enjoying Isaiah, Jeremiah, and St. Paul's Epistles. Then
they read Max Muller's works, Shakespeare, Milton, Scott, and whatever
was best in English, French, and German literature. Milton she called
her demigod. Her husband says she had "a limitless persistency in
application." Her health was better, and she gave promise of doing
more great work. When urged to write her autobiography, she said, half
sighing and half smiling: "The only thing I should care much to dwell
on would be the absolute despair I suffered from, of ever being able
to achieve anything. No one could ever have felt greater despair, and
a knowledge of this might be a help to some other struggler."

Friday afternoon, Dec. 17, she went to see _Agamemnon_ performed in
Greek by Oxford students, and the next afternoon to a concert at St.
James Hall. She took cold, and on Monday was treated for sore throat.
On Wednesday evening the doctors came, and she whispered to her
husband, "Tell them I have great pain in the left side." This was
the last word. She died with every faculty bright, and her heart
responsive to all noble things.

She loved knowledge to the end. She said, "My constant groan is that
I must leave so much of the greatest writing which the centuries have
sifted for me, unread for want of time."

She had the broadest charity for those whose views differed from
hers. She said, "The best lesson of tolerance we have to learn, is to
tolerate intolerance." She hoped for and "looked forward to the time
when the impulse to help our fellows shall be as immediate and as
irresistible as that which I feel to grasp something firm if I am
falling."

One Sunday afternoon I went to her grave in Highgate Cemetery, London.
A gray granite shaft, about twenty-five feet high, stands above it,
with these beautiful words from her great poem:--

"O may I join the choir invisible,
Of those immortal dead who live again
In minds made better by their presence."

HERE LIES THE BODY
OF
GEORGE ELIOT,
MARY ANN CROSS.

BORN, 22d NOVEMBER, 1819;
DIED, 22d DECEMBER, 1880.

A stone coping is around this grave, and bouquets of yellow crocuses
and hyacinths lie upon it. Next to her grave is a horizontal slab,
with the name of George Henry Lewes upon the stone.

ELIZAB