Page:Poetical works of Mathilde Blind.djvu/58

 32 Women Series," edited by her friend, Mr. J. H. Ingram, enabled her to gratify. For this she wrote the lives of George Eliot and Madame Roland, with abundant enthusiasm, but not without effort. The quest of biographical particulars was uncongenial to her, and she had no particular talent for their luminous arrangement when obtained. Aware, however, of the requisites of her self- sought task, she contended heroically against these disadvantages—a striking figure as she sat like a Sibyl amid the disarray of her scattered scrolls, snowed down at random upon carpet and furniture, all astray from their right places, and all interlined with correction and scored with obliteration. The victory was eventually hers: the biographies, compiled so sorely against her natural bent, came out the clearest and most workmanlike productions of any in the series. But the strain had been exhausting. She writes to Mrs. Wolfsohn on the completion of the George Eliot volume (1883): —

"I never knew before what it was to do work under pressure in an enfeebled physical condition with such daily, almost hourly, efforts of will, but neither did I before understand Wordsworth's sublime lines in his 'Ode to Duty ':—

and I shall never forget the feeling when I had finished the last line of the work, and laid down my pen and felt that I might go out and actually stay out as long as ever I liked. It was a lovely afternoon. I was too tired to walk, and sat down on a bench in a little garden in front of the house, drinking in the air, the hum of the insects, the colour of flowers and leaves, the glory of the sky, and it all seemed 'very good.'"