Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life, Volume 1

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Page 365 - 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 132 - 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 personae folded in her hand.
Page 80 - Smiled like yon knot of cowslips on the cliff, Not to be come at by the willing hand.
Page 592 - ... he's seen into the nature of business : to have the chance of getting a bit of the country into good fettle, as they say, and putting men into the right way with their farming, and getting a bit of good contriving and solid building done — that those who are living and those who come after will be the better for. I'd sooner have it than a fortune. I hold it the most honourable work that is.
Page 193 - Lydgate was something rather more uncommon than any general practitioner in Middlemarch. And this was true. He was but sevenand-twenty, an age at which many men are not quite common — at which they are hopeful of achievement, resolute in avoidance, thinking that Mammon shall never put a bit in their mouths and get astride their backs, but rather that Mammon, if they have anything to do with him, shall draw their chariot.
Page 373 - And so should I, father," said Mary, not looking up, but putting the back of her father's hand against her cheek. " I don't want to pry, my dear. But I was afraid there might be something between you and Fred, and I wanted to caution you. You see, Mary" —here Caleb's voice became more tender ; he had been pushing his hat about on the table and looking at it, but finally he turned his eyes on his daughter — "a woman, let her be as good as she may, has got to put up with the life her husband makes...
Page 270 - ... within ; and painting stares at you with an insistent imperfection. I feel that especially about representations of women. As if a woman were a mere coloured superficies ! You must wait for movement and tone. There is a difference in their very breathing : they change from moment to moment. — This woman whom you have just seen, for example : how would you paint her voice, pray ? But her voice is much diviner than anything you have seen of her.
Page 362 - But it would be difficult to convey to those who never heard him utter the word " business," the peculiar tone of fervid veneration, of religious regard, in which he wrapped it, as a consecrated symbol is wrapped in its gold-fringed linen. Caleb Garth often shook his head in meditation on the value, the indispensable might of that myriadheaded, myriad-handed labour by which the social body is fed, clothed, and housed. It had laid hold of his imagination in boyhood. The echoes of the great hammer...

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