Thank you, my dear young friend, whom I shall probably never know otherwise than in this spiritual way.  And certainly, apart from those relations in life which bring daily duties and opportunities of lovingness, the most satisfactory of all ties is this effective invisible intercourse of an elder mind with a younger.

The quotation in your letter from Hawthorne’s book offers an excellent type both for men and women in the value it assigns to that order of work which is called subordinate but becomes ennobling by being finely done. [Footnote:  A reference to Hilda’s ceasing to consider herself an original artist in the presence of the great masters.  “Beholding the miracles of beauty which the old masters had achieved, the world seemed already rich enough in original designs and nothing more was so desirable as to diffuse these selfsame beauties more widely among mankind.’—­So Hilda became a copyist.”] Yours, with sincere obligations,

M.E.  LEWES.

By the way, Mr. Lewes tells me that you ascribe to me a hatred of blue eyes—­which is amusing, since my own eyes are blue-gray.  I am not in any sense one of the “good haters;” on the contrary, my weaknesses all verge toward an excessive tolerance and a tendency to melt off the outlines of things.

THE PRIORY,
21 North Bank, Regent’s Park, Jan. 16, ’73.

[Footnote:  From The Critic of December 31, 1881.  This letter was addressed to Miss Alice Wellington, now Mrs. Rollins.]

Her sensitiveness was great, and contact with an unappreciative and unsympathetic public depressing to a large degree.  It was a part of that shrinking away from the world which kept her out of society, and away from all but a select few whose tastes and sympathies were largely in accordance with her own.  Besides, she distrusted that common form of criticism which presumes to tell an author how he ought to have written, and assumes to itself an insight and knowledge greater than that possessed by genius itself.  Concerning the value of such criticism she wrote these pertinent words: 

I get confirmed in my impression that the criticism of any new writing is shifting and untrustworthy.  I hardly think that any critic can have so keen a sense of the shortcomings in my works as that I groan under in the course of writing them, and I cannot imagine any edification coming to an author from a sort of reviewing which consists in attributing to him or her unexpressed opinions, and in imagining circumstances which may be alleged as petty private motives for the treatment of subjects which ought to be of general human interest.

To the same correspondent she used even stronger words concerning her dislike of ordinary criticism.