Democratic Sentinel, Volume 6, Number 16, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 19 May 1882 — George Eliot’s Mental Vitality. [ARTICLE]

George Eliot’s Mental Vitality.

[Boston Post.] Nothing, indeed, was more remarkable in this last period of her life than her intense mental vitality, which failing health did not seem in the least to impair. She possessed in an eminent degree that power which has led to success in so many directions —which is ascribed both to Newton and Napoleon—of keeping his mind unceasingingly at the stretch without conscious fatigue. She would cease to read or to ponder when other duties called her, but never (as it seemed) because she herself felt tired. Even in so complex an effort as a visit to a picture gallery implies, she could continue for hours at the same pitch of earnest interest, and outweary strong men. Nor was this a mere habit of passive receptivity. In the intervals between her successive compositions her mind was always fusing and combining its fresh stores, and had her life been prolonged, it is probable she would have produced work at least equal in merit to anything which she had already achieved. I may perhaps be allowed to illustrate what has here been said by a few words as to the occupations of her last days on earth. On the Friday night before her death, Mrs. Cross witnessed a representation of the “Agamemnon,” in Greek, by Oxford undergraduates, and came back fired with the old words, thus heard anew, and planning to read through the Greek dramatists again with her husband. On Saturday she went as usual to the concert of classical music, and there, as it seems, she caught the fatal chill. That evening she played through on the piano much of the music which had been performed during the afternoon; for she was an adprirable executant, and rendered especially her favorite Schubert with rare delicacy of touch and feeling. And thus, as her malady deepened, her mind could still respond to the old trains of thought and emotion, till, all unexpectedly to herself and those that loved her, she passed into the state of unconsciousness from which she awoke on earth po more. Indians smoke the pipe of peace, while white men smoke the piece of a Pip*