So much, at least, was made very plain in my first conversation with Mill, that the gain of this woman friend was the greatest boon of his life. Only in one of the passages that he has written about her has he succeeded in giving an exact idea of the peculiar nature of her character, and that is where he compares her to Shelley. A female Shelley--so she stood before him in his youth; later, even Shelley, who was so early snatched away, seemed to him a child in thought and intellectual maturity in comparison with what she became. He states many times, in very decided terms, what he owes to her: the perception of the region of ultimate aims, that is, the final consequences of theory; and of that of the nearest means, that is, of the immediately useful and practically attainable. The original endowment which he himself acknowledges, was now directed to the fusion of these extremes, to finding the medium course in political and moral truths. Nevertheless, it does not seem to me probable that Mrs. Mill inspired her husband with any direct new thought. The essential significance to him must, I think, be sought in two other points. In the first place, she strengthened his mental courage, and it is the boldness rather than the novelty of thought that gives its character to such classic works, as "On Liberty." Many times, even during our first conversation, he returned with regret to the lack of courage that everywhere withholds writers from supporting new ideas. He said, "There are writers of the first rank, such as George Sand, whose actual originality consists in courage. I leave out of consideration," he added, "her indescribably beautiful style, whose music can only be compared with the pleasing sounds of a symphony." The very confidence that a sense of harmony with the thought of another arouses, had enabled the wife of Stuart Mill to promote in him the courage he so extolled in George Sand. In the second place, through her female universality, Mrs. Mill prevented her husband from running into any prejudice whatsoever. She confirmed in his mind a certain scepticism that led him to keep open amid the ice of doctrine one spot that would never freeze; and in thus inclining him to be sceptical, she became the cause of his progress. While the majority of so-called freethinkers have almost always purchased relative free thought in one point with double obduracy in other respects, Mill was continually on his guard against conventional prejudice; indeed, until the day of his death he carried on a sharp warfare against it, ferreting it out in its stronghold with the utmost intrepidity, in order to denounce and annihilate it.