GE to Richard James Cross, Venice, 6 June 1880
Title
GE to Richard James Cross, Venice, 6 June 1880
Title
GE to Richard James Cross, Venice, 6 June 1880
Sender
George Eliot
Recipient
Richard James Cross
Date(s)
- 1880-06-06
Place
Venice
Letter Content
GE to Richard James Cross, Venice, 6 June 1880
MS: Miss Emily Cross. Hitherto unpublished.
Venice, June 6. 1880.
My dear youngest Brother
I think I can trust to your imagination for having found many true reasons to excuse my long silence after receiving your affectionate letter. It was a very delicious letter to my feeling, not only because it completed the tender welcome given to me by all your family, but also because of what you say about Johnnie. 436 You can understand that his praises are the best music to my ears, the best poetry anybody's pen can send me, for affection and admiration are poetry without need of rhythm. You will believe that we have often talked about you, and the notion of your having learned the news of our marriage by the cable and public prints has always been a vexation to us. But I hope Johnnie has made you understand how very little time was left to him and me when a decision had once been come to. Assuredly, you would have been one of the last of whom he could fail to think in connection with any momentous change in his life.
I remember you most vividly as you were before you went to America, although my glimpse of you was so brief. But you will, you must renew and revise the image that is kept of you among us by coming again. Some time, surely, you will be able to take a good holiday and bring your Wife 437 to give her a sight of this Old World, groaning and travailing with sorrows but also rich with memories of which the New knows nothing except by report. I wish you could see Venice this morning; or any other morning like it, in the clear calm light of half past nine o'clock, and have a gondola waiting below to take you wherever you liked to be guided by a picturesque gondolier in blue and white. This is our luxurious lot, and Johnnie seems as happy and well as possible under this regimen. He is much thinner than he was, and his last year's clothes seem to have been made for a much more portly gentleman, but I think the reduction is an improvement in point of appearance, and I hope it will not turn out to be disadvantageous in any other way.
You are no doubt kept aware of what our sisters are doing, and are interested as we are in their choice of a new home. I am very anxious that the change should not rob them of any sort of good for which it will not bring them compensation -- most anxious that their Brother's marriage should bring them not diminished but added love. There is the great comfort that quite apart from my new nearer relation to them, I was fond of them with a peculiar fondness.
Please give my affectionate wishes to your Wife, whom with at least some of the children I have made an acquaintance with by photograph, and believe me always
Your affectionate Sister
Mary Ann Cross.
MS: Miss Emily Cross. Hitherto unpublished.
Venice, June 6. 1880.
My dear youngest Brother
I think I can trust to your imagination for having found many true reasons to excuse my long silence after receiving your affectionate letter. It was a very delicious letter to my feeling, not only because it completed the tender welcome given to me by all your family, but also because of what you say about Johnnie. 436 You can understand that his praises are the best music to my ears, the best poetry anybody's pen can send me, for affection and admiration are poetry without need of rhythm. You will believe that we have often talked about you, and the notion of your having learned the news of our marriage by the cable and public prints has always been a vexation to us. But I hope Johnnie has made you understand how very little time was left to him and me when a decision had once been come to. Assuredly, you would have been one of the last of whom he could fail to think in connection with any momentous change in his life.
I remember you most vividly as you were before you went to America, although my glimpse of you was so brief. But you will, you must renew and revise the image that is kept of you among us by coming again. Some time, surely, you will be able to take a good holiday and bring your Wife 437 to give her a sight of this Old World, groaning and travailing with sorrows but also rich with memories of which the New knows nothing except by report. I wish you could see Venice this morning; or any other morning like it, in the clear calm light of half past nine o'clock, and have a gondola waiting below to take you wherever you liked to be guided by a picturesque gondolier in blue and white. This is our luxurious lot, and Johnnie seems as happy and well as possible under this regimen. He is much thinner than he was, and his last year's clothes seem to have been made for a much more portly gentleman, but I think the reduction is an improvement in point of appearance, and I hope it will not turn out to be disadvantageous in any other way.
You are no doubt kept aware of what our sisters are doing, and are interested as we are in their choice of a new home. I am very anxious that the change should not rob them of any sort of good for which it will not bring them compensation -- most anxious that their Brother's marriage should bring them not diminished but added love. There is the great comfort that quite apart from my new nearer relation to them, I was fond of them with a peculiar fondness.
Please give my affectionate wishes to your Wife, whom with at least some of the children I have made an acquaintance with by photograph, and believe me always
Your affectionate Sister
Mary Ann Cross.
Signature
Mary Ann Cross.
Citation
George Eliot, GE to Richard James Cross, Venice, 6 June 1880, Complete George Eliot Letters(2026), George Eliot Archive, edited by Beverley Park Rilett. https://GeorgeEliotArchive.org, Accessed September 7, 2026. https://www.georgeeliotarchive.org/items/show/93773