the strong point, nor did her friend Emerson set her, in this respect, a controlling example. The habit of conversation was perhaps bad for her, in this way, and may have tended, as does all extemporaneous speaking, toward a desultory habit of mind. Journalism, which was her next resource, leads in the same way; that is, the single editorial demands concentration, but two successive editorials are rarely linked together, and still more rarely give room for what she calls “the third thought.” Accordingly her “Tribune” articles had more symmetry than her previous writings, but it was symmetry within the restricted field of the newspaper column, which often unfits the best journalist for a more sustained flight. How far the maturer experience of Italy may have remedied this, in her case, we never shall know, since her book was lost with her; and her record as a writer remains therefore unfinished. Still it is something to know that on the whole she tended more and more to completeness of form, and to the proper control of her own abundant thoughts.
The evidence of this is not to be found in her “Woman in the Nineteenth Century,” — which, while full of thoughts and suggestions, is yet discursive and unmethodical, — but in her “Papers on Literature and Art.” The most satisfactory of these is the essay on Sir James Mackintosh, which still seems to me, as it has seemed for many years,
