Browning says, is much stirred about spiritualism. Really, I cannot help
wondering that so fine a spirit as hers should not reject the matter,
till, at least, it is forced upon her. I like her very much.
Mrs. Nightingale had been talking at first with Lord Lansdowne, who sat
next her, but by and by she turned to nee, and began to speak of London
smoke Then, there being a discussion about Lord Byron on the other side
of the table, she spoke to me about Lady Byron, whom she knows
intimately, characterizing her as a most excellent and exemplary person,
high-principled, unselfish, and now devoting herself to the care of her
two grandchildren,--their mother, Byron's daughter, being dead. Lady
Byron, she says, writes beautiful verses. Somehow or other, all this
praise, and more of the same kind, gave me an idea of an intolerably
irreproachable person; and I asked Mrs. Nightingale if Lady Byron were
warm-hearted. With some hesitation, or mental reservation,--at all
events, not quite outspokenly,--she answered that she was.
I was too much engaged with these personal talks to attend much to what
was going on elsewhere; but all through breakfast I had been more and
more impressed by the aspect of one of the guests, sitting next to
Milnes. He was a man of large presence,--a portly personage,
gray-haired, but scarcely as yet aged; and his face had a remarkable
intelligence, not vivid nor sparkling, but conjoined with great
quietude,--and if it gleamed or brightened at one time more than another,
it was like the sheen over a broad surface of sea.
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