life, and retained this sense of the pleasure of life even to the end. She speaks much of the intense happiness of her life with Mr. Lewes, and they seem never to have been separated, taking all journeys and holidays together, and never wearying of what she calls their "_solitude à deux_." Such expressions as these are very frequent throughout the book:-- "I never have anything to call out my ill-humor or discontent,--which you know was always ready enough to come on slight call,--and I have everything to call out love and gratitude. I am very happy,--happy in the highest blessing life can give us, the perfect love and sympathy of a nature that stimulates my own to healthful activity. My life has deepened unspeakably during the last year. I feel a greater capacity for moral and intellectual enjoyment, a more acute sense of my deficiencies in the past, a more solemn desire to be faithful to coming duties, than I remember at any former period of my life. And my happiness has deepened, too; the blessedness of a perfect love and union grows daily. Few women, I fear, have had such reason as I have to think the long, sad years of youth were worth living for the sake of middle age." And this extract from the journal of Mr. Lewes leaves us his thought about their life, which is so like her own:-- "I owe Spencer another and a deeper debt. It was through him that I learned to know Marian,--to know her was to love her,--and since then my life has been a new birth. To her I owe all my prosperity and all my happiness. God bless her!" That her great books would ever have been written without this loving sympathy and appreciation on the part of Mr. Lewes, seems extremely doubtful. She needed encouragement at every step, being prone to despair about her writings, and she had the utmost reliance upon the judgment and taste of the companion of her life. And he seems to have been everything that heart could desire as loving critic and counsellor. Her sympathy with the lives and hopes of others is very charming, particularly with the love and marriage of their eldest boy, though it is shown constantly in a true womanly way; as, for instance:--