ledge, as one who came to be a friend of her family after the completion of her principal literary work. I did not make her acquaintance until she was somewhat past middle age, being myself much her junior, and of her retired life in Berkshire and Buckinghamshire I saw nothing. But, during the comparatively short period of her life when we often met, I learned to know something of the rare gifts of imagination and poetic instinct which she joined to a peculiar refinement and nobility of spirit.
It is this last feature of her mind and work—this ideality and nobility of spirit—which is, I think, the special distinction of Louisa Shore. Of all the men and women with whom in my literary life I have been thrown, she, I think, lived the most continuously alone with her own creations of great tragedies and fine aspirations. All her mental and moral characteristics, her own set purpose and outer circumstances, combined to detach her life from the world around, to plant it in an island of fancy, where her spirit refreshed itself from the great sources of all tragedy—pity and horror.
In this world of her own she chose to live,
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