So you think that he[26] is looking ‘less young than formerly,’ and that ‘we should all learn to hear and make such remarks with equanimity.’  Now, once for all, let me tell you—­confess to you—­I never, if I live to be a hundred, should learn that learning.  Death has the luminous side when we know how to look; but the rust of time, the touch of age, is hideous and revolting to me, and I never see it, by even a line’s breadth, in the face of any I love, without pain and recoil of nature.  I have a worse than womanly weakness about that class of subjects.  Death is a face-to-face intimacy; age, a thickening of the mortal mask between souls.  So I hate it; put it far from me.  Why talk of age, when it’s just an appearance, an accident, when we are all young in soul and heart?  We don’t say, one to another, ‘You are freckled in the forehead to-day,’ or ‘There’s a yellow shade in your complexion.’  Leave those disagreeable trifles.  I, for my part, never felt younger.  Did you, I wonder?  To be sure not.  Also, I have a gift in my eyes, I think, for scarcely ever does it strike me that anybody is altered, except my child, for instance, who certainly is larger than when he was born.  When I went to England after five years’ absence, everybody (save one) appeared to me younger than I was used to conceive of them, and of course I took for granted that I appeared to them in the same light.  Be sure that it is highly moral to be young as long as possible.  Women who throw up the game early (or even late) and wear dresses ‘suitable to their years’ (that is, as hideous as possible), are a disgrace to their sex, aren’t they now?  And women and men with statistical memories, who are always quoting centuries and the years thereof (’Do you remember in ‘20?’ As if anybody could), are the pests of society.  And, in short, and for my part, whatever honours of authorship may ever befall me, I hope I may be safe from the epithet which distinguishes the Venerable Bede.

Now, if I had written this from Paris, you would have cried out upon the frivolity I had picked up.  Who would imagine that I had just finished a summer of mountain solitude, succeeding a winter’s meditation on Swedenborg’s philosophy, and that such fruit was of it all?  By the way, tell me how it was that Paris did harm to Moore?  Mentally, was it, and morally, or in the matter of the body?  I have not seen the biography yet.  Italy keeps us behind in new books.  But the extracts given in newspapers displease me through the ignoble tone of ’doing honour to the lord,’ which is anything but religious.  Also, the letters seem somewhat less brilliant than I expected from Moore; but it must be, after all, a most entertaining book.  Tell me if you have read Mrs. Gaskell’s ‘Ruth.’  That’s a novel which I much admire.  It is strong and healthy at once, teaching a moral frightfully wanted in English society.  Such an interesting letter I had from Mrs. Gaskell a few days ago simple, worthy of ‘Ruth.’  By the way, ‘Ruth’ is a great advance on ‘Mary Barton,’ don’t you think so?  ‘Villette,’ too (Jane Eyre’s), is very powerful.