Sublime

But what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.

Such was Lydgate’s plan of his future: to do good small work for Middlemarch, and great work for the world. He was certainly a happy fellow at this time: to be seven-and-twenty, without any fixed vices, with a generous resolution that his action should be beneficent, and with ideas in his brain that made life interesting quite apart from the cultus

Eros, while passionately moving to another, always respects the boundary of the other. Eros is destroyed if it doesn’t keep this boundary. It becomes something other than love. It may maintain its surge of emotion, but it loses its connection to the resonance of loving encounter. This happens because to violate another’s closedness is to lose perso

He was not in the least jealous of the interest with which Dorothea had looked up at Mr Casaubon: it never occurred to him that a girl to whom he was meditating an offer of marriage could care for a dried bookworm towards fifty,

Brooke is a very good fellow, but pulpy; he will run into any mould, but he won’t keep shape.’

Nevertheless before the evening was at an end she was very happy. In an hour’s tête-à-tête with Mr Casaubon she talked to him with more freedom than she had ever felt before, even pouring out her joy at the thought of devoting herself to him, and of learning how she might best share and further all his great ends. Mr Casaubon was touched with an un

The whole affair was miserably small: his debts were small, even his expectations were not anything so very magnificent. Fred had known men to whom he would have been ashamed of confessing the smallness of his scrapes.

‘Love him,’ said Jacques, with vehemence, ‘love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters? And how long, at the best, can it last, since you are both men and still have everywhere to go? Only five minutes, I assure you, only five minutes, and most of that, helas! in the dark. And if you think of them as dirty,