into my pleasures and griefs, no one with whom I can pour out my soul.” Eight years after this, having lost her father, she went abroad for a few months’ residence, and her letters home were full of eager longing for their sympathy and restless fear lest they should forget her. No change in her life diminished this feeling. She became an editor of the _Westminster Review_, and while overwhelmed with manuscripts and proofs she wrote: “You must know that I am not a little desponding now and then, and think that old friends will die off, and I shall be left with no power to make new ones again.” Undoubtedly this feeling tended to make her morbid in her younger days, and consequently dwarf her power. It is an important study of her life to trace the gradual melting of this disposition, and the final growth into a healthy happiness. When quite past the heyday of her life, she wrote a friend of her girlhood: “I am one of those, perhaps, exceptional people whose early childish dreams were much less happy than the outcome of life,” and again, but four years before her death: “I have completely lost my _personal_ melancholy. I often, of course, have melancholy thoughts about the destinies of my fellow creatures, but I am never in the mood of sadness, which used to be my frequent visitant, even in the midst of external happiness; and this, notwithstanding a very vivid sense that life is declining, and death close at hand.” This release from morbidness had two causes. She had taught her strong, affectional nature to find satisfaction in that commonplace, but little understood duty, loving her neighbors, and she had learned to enjoy things on their own account. The first article in this creed of happiness became George Eliot’s religion. She had abandoned her belief in the Christian religion when twenty-one years of age. She could not believe fully, and she was too independent and too reliant upon her own mind to conform to a religion she did not believe. The steps she took did not destroy the religious sense in her life. The earnestness which led her to write at nineteen, “May the Lord give me such an insight into what is truly good, that I may not rest contented with making Christianity a mere addendum to my pursuits, or with tacking it as a fringe to my garments;” which induced her to consider the novel and even oratorio as dangerous to spiritual development still remained, though without form. She was intensely in earnest, but it was many years before her love for mankind became a religion to her. A less strong character would have become flippant or scornful under this loss; hers only became more serious. She seems never to have forgotten what she had abandoned.