Always after finishing a book I have a period of despair that I can ever again produce anything worth giving to the world. The responsibility of writing grows heavier and heavier--does it not?--as the world grows older and the voices of the dead more numerous. It is difficult to believe, until the germ of some new work grows into imperious activity within one, that it is possible to make a really needed contribution to the poetry of the world--I mean possible to one's self to do it. Owing probably somewhat to this tendency to take a despondent view concerning her own work, and to distrust of the leadings of her own genius, was her habit of never reading the criticisms made on her books. She adopted this rule, she tells one correspondent, "as a necessary preservative against influences that would have ended by nullifying her power of writing." To another, who had written her in appreciation of her books, she wrote this note, in which she alludes to the same habit of shunning criticism: MY DEAR MISS WELLINGTON,--The signs of your sympathy sent to me across the wide water have touched me with the more effect because you imply that you are young. I care supremely that my writing should be some help and stimulus to those who have probably a long life before them. Mr. Lewes does not let me read criticisms on my writings. He always reads them himself, and gives me occasional quotations, when be thinks that they show a spirit and mode of appreciation which will win my gratitude. He has carefully read through the articles which were accompanied by your kind letter, and he has a high opinion of the feeling and discernment exhibited in them. Some concluding passages which he read aloud to me are such as I register among the grounds of any encouragement in looking backward on what I have written, if not in looking forward to my future writing. Thank you, my dear young friend, whom I shall probably never know otherwise than in this spiritual way. And certainly, apart from those relations in life which bring daily duties and opportunities of lovingness, the most satisfactory of all ties is this effective invisible intercourse of an elder mind with a younger. The quotation in your letter from Hawthorne's book offers an excellent type both for men and women in the value it assigns to that order of work which is called subordinate but becomes ennobling by being finely done. [Footnote: A reference to Hilda's ceasing to consider herself an original artist in the presence of the great masters. "Beholding the miracles of beauty which the old masters had achieved, the world seemed already rich enough in original designs and nothing more was so desirable as to diffuse these selfsame beauties more widely among mankind.'--So Hilda became a copyist."] Yours, with sincere obligations, M.E. LEWES.