the waters, observing, comparing, reflecting, above all, reading
of the struggles at home, the things done and attempted, her soul of
generosity made her, though not less Irish, a daughter of Britain. It
is at a distance that striving countries should be seen if we would have
them in the pure idea; and this young woman of fervid mind, a reader
of public speeches and speculator on the tides of politics (desirous,
further, to feel herself rather more in the pure idea), began to yearn
for England long before her term of holiday exile had ended. She had
been flattered by her friend, her 'wedded martyr at the stake,' as
she named him, to believe that she could exercise a judgement in
politics--could think, even speak acutely, on public affairs. The
reports of speeches delivered by the men she knew or knew of, set her
thrilling; and she fancied the sensibility to be as independent of her
sympathy with the orators as her political notions were sovereignty
above a sex devoted to trifles, and the feelings of a woman who had gone
through fire. She fancied it confidently, notwithstanding a peculiar
intuition that the plunge into the nobler business of the world would be
a haven of safety for a woman with blood and imagination, when writing
to Emma: 'Mr. Redworth's great success in Parliament is good in itself,
whatever his views of present questions; and I do not heed them when I
look to what may be done by a man of such power in striking at unjust
laws, which keep the really numerically better-half of the population
in a state of slavery. If he had been a lawyer! It must be a lawyer's
initiative--a lawyer's Bill. Mr. Percy Dacier also spoke well, as might
have been expected, and his uncle's compliment to him was merited.
Should you meet him sound him. He has read for the Bar, and is younger
than Mr. Redworth. The very young men and the old are our hope. The
middleaged are hard and fast for existing facts. We pick our leaders on
the slopes, the incline and decline of the mountain--not on the upper
table-land midway, where all appears to men so solid, so tolerably
smooth, save for a few excrescences, roughnesses, gradually to be
levelled at their leisure; which induces one to protest that the
middle-age of men is their time of delusion. It is no paradox. They may
be publicly useful in a small way. I do not deny it at all. They must be
near the gates of life--the opening or the closing--for their minds to
be accessible to the urgency