It is
as good as a letter. "Daniel Deronda" has succeeded in awaking in my
somewhat worn-out mind an interest. So many stories are tramping over
one's mind in every modern magazine nowadays that one is macadamized,
so to speak. It takes something unusual to make a sensation. This does
excite and interest me, as I wait for each number with eagerness. I
wish I could endow you with our long winter weather,--not winter,
except such as you find in Sicily. We live here from November to June,
and my husband sits outdoors on the veranda and reads all day. We
emigrate in solid family: my two dear daughters, husband, self, and
servants come together to spend the winter here, and so together to
our Northern home in summer. My twin daughters relieve me from all
domestic care; they are lively, vivacious, with a real genius for
practical life. We have around us a little settlement of neighbors,
who like ourselves have a winter home here, and live an easy, undress,
picnic kind of life, far from the world and its cares. Mr. Stowe has
been busy on eight volumes of G?rres on the mysticism of the Middle
Ages. [Footnote: _Die Christliche Mystik_.] This G?rres was
Professor of Philosophy at Munich, and he reviews the whole ground of
the shadow-land between the natural and the supernatural,--ecstacy,
trance, prophecy, miracles, spiritualism, the stigmata, etc. He was a
devout Roman Catholic, and the so-called facts that he reasons on seem
to me quite amazing; and yet the possibilities that lie between inert
matter and man's living, all-powerful, immortal soul may make almost
anything credible.
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