Laurence Oliphant’s First Wife.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 897, 10 May 1889, Page 4

Laurence Oliphant’s First Wife.

I find it difficult to give in words any fib descript'on of the fascinating and delightful woman who was Laureuce Oliphant’s wife. The dark and vivacious beauty of her youth could only, I think, have been enhanced, in expression at least, by all the experiences she had gone through. She was now at the full height of life, the mezzo del cammin, and a little worn with delicate health and many labours, but so sweet, so bright, so gay in her profound seriousness, so tender in her complete independence, that all the charms of paradox were added to those of nature. She had the gift (which is an inheritance and special endowment of some well-bred Englishwomen) of a certain soft eloquence and command of peifect words which was delightful to listen to —like music, but better than music to ears uninstructed in that art. Her husband was a brilliant conversationalist, but she was something more. Her beautiful sentences flowed like the easiest of chatter ; her sweet speech, in which the most keen critic could not have found an inapt ropriateor misplaced word, seemed simple as the utterances of a child. She had caught in America, with her fine musical ear, a slight accent, which was amusing and piquant in an Englishwoman, though perhaps m itself scarcely delightful to English ears ; and the extraordinary mixture in her of the finest culture in the Old World and the freedom and strange experiences of the Now the latter acquired not in sophisticated places where New York or Boston holds the mirror up to London and Paris, but m the bar West, and in the primitive country districts, where all is individual and strange—wan more fascinating, amusing, and carious, than

words can say. She was in all her belief s and sentiments a mystic of the mystics, out. stripping even her husband in devotion to the mysterious faith wnich had held them in such complete subjection, and perhaps with a greater instinct of progress, of pushing these principles into further development than he had at Laci as yet shown. -Airs Oliphanb, m Blackwood’s Magazine.