‘I remember you say, that forlorn seasons often turn out the most profitable. Perhaps I shall find it so. I have been reading Plato all the week, because I could not write. I hoped to be tuned up thereby. I perceive, with gladness, a keener insight in myself, day by day; yet, after all, could not make a good statement this morning on the subject of beauty.’
She had, indeed, a rude strength, which, if it could
have been supported by an equal health, would have
given her the efficiency of the strongest men. As it
was, she had great power of work. The account of
her reading in Groton is at a rate like Gibbon’s, and,
later, that of her writing, considered with the fact that
writing was not grateful to her, is incredible. She often
proposed to her friends, in the progress of intimacy, to
write every day. ‘I think less than a daily offering of
thought and feeling would not content me, so much
seems to pass unspoken.’ In Italy, she tells Madame
Arconati, that she has ‘more than a hundred
correspondents;’ and it was her habit there to devote one
day of every week to those distant friends. The facility
with which she assumed stints of literary labor,
which veteran feeders of the press would shrink from,—
assumed and performed, — when her friends were to be
served, I have often observed with wonder, and with
fear, when I considered the near extremes of ill-health,
and the manner in which her life heaped itself in high
and happy moments which were avenged by lassitude
and pain.
‘As each task comes,’ she said, ‘I borrow a readiness from its aspect, as I always do brightness from the face of a friend. Yet, as soon as the hour is past, I sink.’
