d by their habits, or indeed
by the conditions of their health, to encounter much "roughing," and
a certain amount of that was assuredly inevitable--a good deal more
five-and-twenty years ago than would be the case now. But if the flesh
was weak, truly the spirit was willing! I have heard grumbling and
discontent from the young of either sex in the heyday of health and
strength in going over the same ground. But for my companions on the
present occasion, let the difficulties and discomforts be what they
might, the continually varied and continually suggestive interest they
found in everything around them, overrode and overbore all material
considerations.

Never, I think, have I met with so impressionable and so delicately
sensitive a mind as that of George Eliot! I use "sensitive" in the
sense in which a photographer uses the word in speaking of his plates.
Everything that passed within the ken of that wonderful organism,
whether a thing or combination of things seen, or an incident, or a
trait revealing or suggesting character, was instantly reproduced,
fixed, registered by it, the operating light being the wonderful
native force of her intellect. And the photographs so produced were by
no means evanescent. If ever the admirably epigrammatic phrase, "wax
to receive and marble to retain," was applicable to any human mind,
it was so to that of George Eliot. And not only were the enormous
accumulations of stored-up impressions safe beyond reach of oblivion
or confusion, but they were all and always miraculously ready for
co-ordination with those newly coming in at each passing moment! Think
of the delight of passing, in companionship with such a mind, through
scenes and circumstances entirely new to it!

Lewes, too, was a most delightful companion, the cheeriest of
philosophers! The old saying of "_Comes jucundus in via pro vehiculo
est_," was especially applicable to him. Though very exhaustible in
bodily force, he was inexhaustible in cheerfulness, and above all in
unwearied, incessant, and minute care for "Polly." In truth, if any
man could ever be said to have lived in another person, Lewes in those
days, and to the end of his life, lived in and for George Eliot. The
talk of worshipping the ground she trod on, and the like, are pretty
lovers phrases, sometimes signifying much, and sometimes very little.
But it is true accurately and literally of Lewes. That care for her,
at once comprehensive and minute, unsleeping