12 Marine Terrace, Lowestoft,
March 15, [1877.

Dear Mrs. Kemble,

By this time you are, I suppose, at the Address you gave me, and which will now cover this Letter. You have seen Donne, and many Friends, perhaps—and perhaps you have not yet got to London at all. But you will in time. When you do, you will, I think, have your time more taken up than in America—with so many old Friends about you: so that I wish more and more you would not feel bound to answer my Letters, one by one; but I suppose you will.

What I liked so much in your February Atlantic [123] was all about Goethe and Portia: I think, fine writing, in the plain sense of the word, and partly so because not ‘fine’ in the other Sense. You can indeed spin out a long Sentence of complicated Thought very easily, and very clearly; a rare thing. As to Goethe, I made another Trial at Hayward’s Prose Translation this winter, but failed, as before, to get on with it. I suppose there is a Screw loose in me on that point, seeing what all thinking People think of it. I am sure I have honestly tried. As to Portia, I still think she ought not to have proved her ‘Superiority’ by withholding that simple Secret on which her Husband’s Peace and his Friend’s Life depended. Your final phrase about her ‘sinking into perfection’ is capital. Epigram—without Effort.

You wrote me that Portia was your beau-ideal of Womanhood [124a]—Query, of Lady-hood. For she had more than £500 a year, which Becky Sharp thinks enough to be very virtuous on, and had not been tried. Would she have done Jeanie Deans’ work? She might, I believe: but was not tried.

I doubt all this will be rather a Bore to you: coming back to England to find all the old topics of Shakespeare, etc., much as you left them. You will hear wonderful things about Browning and Co.—Wagner—and H. Irving. In a late Temple Bar magazine [124b] Lady Pollock says that her Idol Irving’s Reading of Hood’s Eugene Aram is such that any one among his Audience who had a guilty secret in his Bosom ‘must either tell it, or die.’ These are her words.

You see I still linger in this ugly place: having a very dear little Niece a little way off: a complete little ‘Pocket-Muse’ I call her. One of the first Things she remembers is—you, in white Satin, and very handsome, she says, reading Twelfth Night at this very place. And I am

Yours ever
E. F.G.

(I am now going to make out a Dictionary-list of the People in my dear SÉvignÉ, for my own use.) [125a]