Page:Poetical works of Mathilde Blind.djvu/63

Rh was Mathilde's work. She further adorned it by a thoughtful and sympathetic introduction, and the book was published in 1890.

Madame Bashkirtseff's acquaintance had been made at Nice, whither, and to other parts of the Riviera, Mathilde's health now necessitated frequent visits. She there contracted a friendship with Sir Charles Gavan Duffy; it was about this period, too, that she found the most faithful friends she possessed in these latter years in a man of genius in a sphere totally dissimilar to her own. Dr. Ludwig Mond and his rarely gifted wife, and her highly intellectual friend, Miss Heine Herz. Captivated at first, as a man of science well might be, by the apotheosis of science in "The Ascent of Man," Dr. Mond, with his family, became a stay for her failing strength and spirits, and seemed raised to fill the place of a friend no less true. Ford Madox Brown, who died in 1893. Much of her time, when in England, had latterly been spent at Mr. and Mrs. Madox Brown's last residence in St. Edmund's Terrace, Regent's Park. The continued decline of her health, however, drove her more and more abroad. Travel was now facilitated, and the harassing struggle with narrow means, which had counted for much in her adversities, was terminated by her becoming, in 1892, sole heir to the fortune of her step-brother, Max Cohen. She now spent a considerable time at Rome, visited Egypt twice, penetrating as far as Assouan, and taking great interest in the movement for the preservation of the temples at Philae. Some of the most beautiful of her more recent descriptive lyrics date from that time. The impressions of these later years were recorded in "Dramas m Miniature" (1891), "Songs and Sonnets" (1893), including the majestic sonnet to the Dead, and the almost equally