opinions, are we to remain aloof from our fellow-creatures on occasions when we may fully sympathise with the feelings exercised, although our own have been melted into another mould? Ought we not on every opportunity to seek to have our feelings in harmony, though not in union, with those who are often richer in the fruits of faith, though not in reason, than ourselves?'
One thing is clear and instructive. The transition, brought about in the main by the Hennells, took a grievous weight from off her spirits. Whereas before the change we find her saying, 'I am aweary, aweary—longing for rest,' and speaking of herself as 'alone in the world,' so soon as the change comes, 'I can rejoice,' she says, 'in all the joys of humanity'; and she soon speaks of the duty of finding happiness and of learning how to be happy in a most satisfactory way. She is speaking from experience when in 1847 she suggests as a subject she should like to work out, 'the superiority of the consolations of philosophy to those of (so-called) religion.' It is curious to contrast all this with the totally dissimilar behaviour of Carlyle, who became the more morose the more widely he departed from ancestral faith. And there is plenty of evidence in these volumes that George Eliot's bodily sufferings began as early and were
