As to her personal habits I have gleaned that her manuscript was wonderfully beautiful and perfect, a delight to the printers, without blot or erasure, every letter carefully formed; that she read the Bible every day and that one of her favorite books was Thomas à Kempis on _The Imitation of Christ_; that she took no knowledge at secondhand; that she had a great grasp of business, that she worked slowly and with infinite pains, meditating long over her subject before beginning; that she was intensely sensitive to criticism; that she believed herself a poet in opposition to the almost unanimous verdict of criticism which had pronounced _The Spanish Gypsy_, _Agatha_ and _The Legend of Jubal_ as failing in the gift of song, though highly poetic; that the very best society in London--that is to say in the world--was to be found at her Sunday afternoon receptions at the Priory, Regent's Park, where she and Mr. Lewes lived so long; and that she rarely left her own home except when tempted by a fine painting or some unusually good performance of music.
I have given here a list of complete works, with dates of publication, as far as I have been able to gather. I believe this is nearly complete.
Translation of Strauss' _Leben Jesu_, 1846; contributions to Westminster Review, from about 1850, during several years; translation of Feuerbach's _Essence of Christianity_, 1854; _Scenes of Clerical Life_, Blackwood's Magazine, 1857,--book-form 1858; _Adam Bede_, 1859; _The Mill on the Floss_, 1860; _The Lifted Veil_, Blackwood's Magazine, 1860; _Silas Marner_, 1861; _Romola_, Cornhill Magazine, book-form, 1863; _Felix Holt_, 1866; _The Spanish Gypsy_, 1868: _Address to Workmen_, Blackwood's Magazine, 1868; _Agatha_, 1869; _How Lisa loved the king_, Blackwood's Magazine, 1869; _Middlemarch_, 1871; _The Legend of Jubal_, 1874; _Daniel Deronda_, 1876; The _Impressions of Theophrastus Such_, 1879; and said to have left a translation of _Spinoza's Ethics_, not yet published.
As the mind runs along these brief phrases in which I have with a purposed brevity endeavored to flash the whole woman before you, and as you supplement that view with this rapid summary of her literary product,--the details of fact seem to bring out the extraordinary nature of this woman's endowment in such a way that to add any general eulogium would be necessarily to weaken the picture. There is but one fact remaining so strong and high as not to be liable to this objection, which seems to me so characteristic that I cannot do better than close this study with it. During all her later life the central and organic idea which gave unity to her existence was a burning love for her fellow-men. I have somewhere seen that in conversation she once said to a friend: "What I look to is a time when the impulse to help our fellows shall be as immediate and as irresistible as that which I feel to grasp something firm if I am falling," and the narrator of this speech adds that at the end of it she grasped the mantel-piece as if actually saving herself from a fall, with an intensity which made the gesture most eloquent.