Page:Poetical works of Mathilde Blind.djvu/45

Rh was not from want of talent, or of desire to excel; within the range of her own acquaintances she had seen numbers of lives intellectually wrecked by parents' obstinate adherence to conventional schemes of education and of life. She felt and wrote admirably upon the subject; and it is probable that the design by which Newnham College was eventually to benefit was formed at this time, when there seemed slight prospect of her ever being in a position to realise it.

It was natural that with these feelings she should be especially attracted by those female writers who have shown that in certain fields woman can rival man. George Eliot she admired enthusiastically, George Sand more temperately, but few books of the age impressed her so powerfully as Mrs. Browning's "Aurora Leigh." She there found the confirmation of her own thoughts on "soulless, unspiritual education, where everything is nipped in the bud and crushed to nothingness," and "the first revelation of the world through poetry." This remarkable poem, overestimated in its own day, has been so unduly disparaged since, that it is a pleasure to find how capable it has been—and why should it not continue to be?—of inspiring young and ardent minds with thoughts remote from the convent and the catacomb:—

"At the same time," adds Mathilde, "it is not merely a series of beautiful passages, but it is really a whole, springing from the depths of thought, and the reflections, descriptions of nature, the wonderful atmosphere are, tome, like the delicate blossoms of a tree, not there for themselves alone."

Not even George Eliot or Elizabeth Barrett Browning, however, produced so much effect upon Mathilde Blind as Carlyle; the greater, perhaps, because Carlyle was in a manner antagonistic to her. "My spirit rebels," she says, but she had to go on reading. "The French