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282 After losing her father and spending several months at Geneva she settled down to a literary career in London. At Geneva she is still remembered with affection. Her days were spent obscurely, in the hard work which was her refuge from loneliness, from despondency, from the absence of a woman's joys and cares. She kept the secret of her authorship, and avoided aggressive speech ; but those whom she trusted knew her as a pantheist and a stubborn disputant. She is described as talking well but showily, like one overfed on the French of the days when Quinet and Mickiewicz were eminent. France and the emotional philosophers had their time. She became, and to some extent remained, a devoted advocate of Jean Jacques and George Sand, and she startled Emerson by her taste for the Confessions.

Half of the books mentioned at this period are in verse. She knew how to distil working ideas from the obscurest poems ; and her decorated prose, artificial with the strain to avoid commonplace, charged with excessive meaning, and resembling the style of no other writer, was formed on the English poets. She preferred Milton, Shelley, Wordsworth, and the early dramatists, specially excluding Marlowe. No one was fitter by intellectual affinity to penetrate the secret of Shakespeare ; but the influence of Goethe was deeper, and perhaps near the end