Page:Literary studies by Joseph Jacobs.djvu/20

 the time que fais-je donc dans cette galère? but she was obviously in the right. Others were present and the topics had to be general. We got upon songs for singing, and I was attempting to contend that the sweetest songs for vocal purposes were nowadays not those of the poets of the day. She pointed out that even Tennyson's in the Princess were unsuitable for that purpose, whereas the Elizabethans produced songs that were gems of literary art, yet trilled forth as naturally as a bird's carol.

I saw her but once more after Lewes's death. I had sent her something I had published in the Nineteenth Century, and she had written asking me to call. I did so, and found the house in gloom and herself in depression. On this occasion I was struck by the massiveness of the head as contrasted with the frailty of the body. When she was seated one thought her tall: such a head should have been propped up by a larger frame. The long thin sensitive hands were those of a musician. The exquisite modulations of the voice told of refinement in every well-chosen phrase. She had at least one of the qualifications one expects in an author; she did indeed 'talk like a book.' She spoke of one of her favourite themes, the appeal of the circle in which one is born even if one has in certain ways grown beyond or outside it. Before I left she asked me to find out for her the meaning