which in
all other persons whom I had known I had been only too happy to find
singly. In her, complete emancipation from every kind of superstition
(including that which attributes a pretended perfection to the order of
nature and the universe), and an earnest protest against many things
which are still part of the established constitution of society,
resulted not from the hard intellect, but from strength of noble and
elevated feeling, and co-existed with a highly reverential nature. In
general spiritual characteristics, as well as in temperament and
organisation, I have often compared her, as she was at this time, to
Shelley: but in thought and intellect, Shelley, so far as his powers
were developed in his short life, was but a child compared with what she
ultimately became. Alike in the highest regions of speculation and in
the smaller practical concerns of daily life, her mind was the same
perfect instrument, piercing to the very heart and marrow of the matter;
always seizing the essential idea or principle. The same exactness and
rapidity of operation, pervading as it did her sensitive as well as her
mental faculties, would, with her gifts of feeling and imagination, have
fitted her to be a consummate artist, as her fiery and tender soul and
her vigorous eloquence would certainly have made her a great orator, and
her profound knowledge of human nature and discernment and sagacity in
practical life, would, in the times when such a _carriere_ was open to
women, have made her eminent among the rulers of mankind. Her
intellectual gifts did but minister to a moral character at once the
noblest and the best balanced which I have ever met with in life. Her
unselfishness was not that of a taught system of duties, but of a heart
which thoroughly identified itself with the feelings of others, and
often went to excess in consideration for them by imaginatively
investing their feelings with the intensity of its own. The passion of
justice might have been thought to be her strongest feeling, but for her
boundless generosity, and a lovingness ever ready to pour itself forth
upon any or all human beings who were capable of giving the smallest
feeling in return. The rest of her moral characteristics were such as
naturally accompany these qualities of mind and heart: the most genuine
modesty combined with the loftiest pride; a simplicity and sincerity
which were absolute, towards all who were fit to receive them; the
utmost scorn o