Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life, Volume 14

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Estes and Lauriat, 1894
 

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Page 126 - But deeds and language such as men do use, And persons such as Comedy would choose, When she would show an image of the times. And sport with human follies, not with crimes; Except we make 'em such, by loving still Our popular errors, when we know they're ill.
Page 290 - We are all of us born in moral stupidity, taking the world as an udder to feed our supreme selves: Dorothea had early begun to emerge from that stupidity, but yet it had been easier to her to imagine how she would devote herself to Mr. Casaubon, and become wise and strong in his strength and wisdom, than to conceive with that distinctness which is no longer reflection but feeling an idea wrought back to the directness of sense, like the solidity of objects - that he had an equivalent centre of self,...
Page 192 - I at least have so much to do in unravelling certain human lots, and seeing how they were woven and interwoven, that all the light I can command must be concentrated on this particular web, and not dispersed over that tempting range of relevancies called the universe.
Page 195 - ... so that for anything he knew his brains lay in small bags at his temples, and he had no more thought of representing to himself how his blood circulated than how paper served instead of gold. But the moment of vocation had come, and before he got down from his chair, the world was made new to him by a presentiment of endless processes filling the vast spaces planked out of his sight by that wordy ignorance which he had supposed to be knowledge. From that hour Lydgate felt the growth of an intellectual...
Page 345 - Love seeketh not Itself to please, Nor for itself hath any care, But for another gives its ease, And builds a Heaven in Hell's despair." So sung a little Clod of Clay Trodden with the cattle's feet, But a Pebble of the brook Warbled out these metres meet: "Love seeketh only Self to please, To bind another to Its delight, Joys in another's loss of ease, And builds a Hell in Heaven's despite.
Page 112 - Mr Brooke's failure to elicit a companion's ideas, or from Celia's criticism of a middle-aged scholar's personal appearance. I am not sure that the greatest man of his age, if ever that solitary superlative existed, could escape these unfavourable reflections of himself in various small mirrors ; and even Milton, looking for his portrait in a spoon, must submit to have the facial angle of a bumpkin.
Page 134 - There is correct English: that is not slang/' "I beg your pardon: correct English is the slang of prigs who write history and essays. And the strongest slang of all is the slang of poets/' "You will say anything, Fred, to gain your point.
Page 140 - ... gate and fences against the depths of the bordering wood ; and the stray hovel, its old, old thatch full of mossy hills and valleys with wondrous modulations of light and shadow such as we travel far to see in later life, and see larger, but not more beautiful. These are the things that make the gamut of joy in landscape to midland-bred souls — the things they toddled among, or perhaps learned by heart standing between their father's knees while he drove leisurely.
Page 227 - Rosamond, who had neither any reason 388 for throwing her marriage into distant perspective, nor any pathological studies to divert her mind from that ruminating habit, that inward repetition of looks, words, and phrases, which makes a large part in the lives of most girls. He had not meant...
Page 127 - But any one watching keenly the stealthy convergence of human lots, sees a slow preparation of effects from one life on another, which tells like a calculated irony on the indifference or the frozen stare with which we look at our unintroduced neighbour. Destiny stands by sarcastic with our dramatis persona folded in her hand.

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