It is easy to gather from this letter that whilst the existence of Marian Evans was calm enough externally, her inner life was full of stirring events--of the most stirring events, in fact which can agitate the human soul for it is evident that she had passed along some quite opposite phases of religious belief. In 1851, after a visit to the continent, she goes--where all English writers seem to drift by some natural magic--to London, and fixes her residence there. It is curious enough that with all her clearness of judgment she works here for five years, apparently without having perceived the vocation for which her whole natural and acquired outfit had so remarkably prepared her. We find her translating Spinoza's _Ethics_; not only translating but publishing Feuerbach's _Essence of Christianity_ and Strauss's _Life of Jesus_. She contributes learned essays to the Westminster Review; it is not until the year 1856, when she is thirty-six years old that her first slight magazine story is sent to Blackwood's; and even after his first commendations her timidity and uncertainty as to whether she could succeed in story-writing are so great that she almost resolved to give it up. I should regard it as mournful, if I could think it religious to regard anything as mournful which has happened and is not revocable, that upon coming to London Marian Evans fell among a group of persons represented by George Henry Lewes. If one could have been her spiritual physician at this time one certainly would have prescribed for her some of those warm influences which dissipate doubt by exposing it to the fierce elemental heats of love, of active charity. One would have prescribed for her the very remedy she herself has so wisely commended in _Janet's Repentance_. "No wonder the sick room and the lazaretto have so often been a refuge from the tossings of intellectual doubt--a place of repose for the worn and wounded spirit. Here is a duty about which all creeds and philosophers are of one mind; here, at least, the conscience will not be dogged by adverse theory; here you may begin to act without settling one preliminary question. To moisten the sufferer's parched lips through the night-watches, to bear up the drooping head, to lift the helpless limbs, to divine the want that can find no utterance beyond the feeble motion of the hand or beseeching glance of the eye--these are offices that demand no self-questionings, no casuistry, no assent to propositions, no weighing of consequences. Within the four walls where the stare and glare of the world are shut out, and every voice is subdued--where a human being lies prostrate, thrown on the tender mercies of his fellow, the moral relation of man to man is reduced to its utmost clearness and simplicity; bigotry cannot confuse it, theory cannot pervert it, passion, awed into quiescence, can neither pollute nor perturb it."