I do not
insist much on the uniform and constant tender consideration for
others, which was her habitual frame of mind, for I have known others
of whom the same might have been said. It is true that it is easy for
those in the enjoyment of that vigorous health, which renders mere
living a pleasure, to be kindly; and that George Eliot was never
betrayed by suffering, however protracted and severe, into the
smallest manifestation of impatience or unkindly feeling. But neither
is this trained excellence of charity matchless among women. What
was truly, in my experience, matchless, was simply the power of her
intelligence; the precision, the promptitude, the rapidity (though
her manner was by no means rapid), the largeness of the field of
knowledge, the compressed outcome of which she was at any moment ready
to bring to bear on the topic in hand; the sureness and lucidity
of her induction; the clearness of vision, to which muddle was as
impossible and abhorrent as a vacuum is supposed to be to nature; and
all this lighted up and gilded by an infinite sense of, and capacity
for, humour,--this was what rendered her to me a marvel, and an object
of inexhaustible study and admiration.
To me, though I never passed half an hour in conversation with her
without a renewed perception of the vastness of the distance which
separated her intelligence from mine, she was a companion each minute
of intercourse with whom was a delight.
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