Sublime

Besides, he was a likeable man: sweet-tempered, ready-witted, frank, without grins of suppressed bitterness or other conversational flavours which make half of us an affliction to our friends.

Plainness has its peculiar temptations and vices quite as much as beauty; it is apt either to feign amiability, or, not feigning it, to show all the repulsiveness of discontent: at any rate, to be called an ugly thing in contrast with that lovely creature your companion, is apt to produce some effect beyond a sense of fine veracity and fitness in t

he certainly liked him the better, as Rosamond did, for being a stranger in Middlemarch. One can begin so many things with a new person! – even begin to be a better man.

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

If Dorothea, after her night’s anguish, had not taken that walk to Rosamond – why, she perhaps would have been a woman who gained a higher character for discretion, but it would certainly not have been as well for those three who were on one hearth in Lydgate’s house at half-past seven that evening.

‘You are a poem – and that is to be the best part of a poet – what makes up the poet’s consciousness in his best moods,’ said Will, showing such originality as we all share with the morning and the spring-time and other endless renewals.