One Sunday afternoon I went to her grave in Highgate Cemetery, London.  A gray granite shaft, about twenty-five feet high, stands above it, with these beautiful words from her great poem:—­

  “O may I join the choir invisible,
   Of those immortal dead who live again
   In minds made better by their presence.”

  HERE LIES THE BODY
  OF
  GEORGE ELIOT,
  MARY ANN CROSS.

  BORN, 22d NOVEMBER, 1819;
  DIED, 22d DECEMBER, 1880.

A stone coping is around this grave, and bouquets of yellow crocuses and hyacinths lie upon it.  Next to her grave is a horizontal slab, with the name of George Henry Lewes upon the stone.

ELIZABETH FRY.

[Illustration:  My attached and obliged friend Elizabeth Fry]

When a woman of beauty, great wealth, and the highest social position, devotes her life to the lifting of the lowly and the criminal, and preaches the Gospel from the north of Scotland to the south of France, it is not strange that the world admires, and that books are written in praise of her.  Unselfishness makes a rare and radiant life, and this was the crowning beauty of the life of Elizabeth Fry.

Born in Norwich, England, May 21, 1780, Elizabeth was the third daughter of Mr. John Gurney, a wealthy London merchant.  Mrs. Gurney, the mother, a descendant of the Barclays of Ury, was a woman of much personal beauty, singularly intellectual for those times, making her home a place where literary and scientific people loved to gather.

Elizabeth wellnigh idolized her mother, and used often to cry after going to bed, lest death should take away the precious parent.  In the daytime, when the mother, not very robust, would sometimes lie down to rest, the child would creep to the bedside and watch tenderly and anxiously, to see if she were breathing.  Well might Mrs. Gurney say,

    “My dove-like Betsy scarcely ever offends, and is, in every
    sense of the word, truly engaging.”

Mrs. Fry wrote years afterward:  “My mother was most dear to me, and the walks she took with me in the old-fashioned garden are as fresh with me as if only just passed, and her telling me about Adam and Eve being driven out of Paradise.  I always considered it must be just like our garden....  I remember with pleasure my mother’s beds of wild flowers, which, with delight, I used as a child to attend with her; it gave me that pleasure in observing their beauties and varieties that, though I never have had time to become a botanist, few can imagine, in my many journeys, how I have been pleased and refreshed by observing and enjoying the wild flowers on my way.”

The home, Earlham Hall, was one of much beauty and elegance, a seat of the Bacon family.  The large house stood in the centre of a well-wooded park, the river Wensum flowing through it.  On the south front of the house was a large lawn, flanked by great trees, underneath which wild flowers grew in profusion.  The views about the house were so artistic that artists often came there to sketch.