as uplifted by their
aspirations, and gloried in their successes. Their greatness never
disheartened her; on the contrary, she was at home with them in all
their experiences, and at her ease as she never was with the petty
people about her. It delighted her when she found in them some small
trait or habit which she herself had already developed or contracted,
such as she found in the early part of George Sand's _Histoire de ma
Vie_, and in the lives of the Brontes. Under the influence of
nourishing books, her mind, sustained and stimulated, became nervously
active. It had a trick of flashing off from the subject she was
studying to something wholly irrelevant. She would begin Emerson's
essay on _Fate_ or _Beauty_ with enthusiasm, and presently, with her
eyes still following the lines, her thoughts would be busy forming a
code of literary principles for herself. In those days her mind was
continually under the influence of any author she cared about,
particularly if his style were mannered. Involuntarily, while she was
reading Macaulay, for instance, her own thoughts took a dogmatic turn,
and jerked along in short, sharp sentences. She caught the
peculiarities of De Quincey too, of Carlyle, and also some of the
simple dignity of Ruskin, which was not so easy; and she had written
things after the manner of each of these authors before she perceived
the effect they were having upon her. But it was unfortunate for her
that her attention had been turned from the matter which she had to
express to the manner in which she should express it. From the time
she began to think of the style and diction of prose as something to
be separately acquired, the spontaneous flow of her thoughts was
checked and hampered, and she expended herself in fashioning her
tools, as it were, instead of using her tools to fashion her work.
When, in her reading, she came under the influence of academic minds,
she lost all natural freshness, and succeeded in being artificial. Her
English became turgid with Latinities. She took phrases which had
flowed from her pen, and were telling in their simple eloquence, and
toiled at them, turning and twisting them until she had laboured all
the life out of them; and then, mistaking effort for power, and having
wearied herself, she was satisfied. Being too diffident to suspect
that she had any natural faculty, she conceived that the more trouble
she gave herself the better must be the result; and consequently she
d