Sublime

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

Celia was present while the plans were being examined, and observed Sir James’s illusion. ‘He thinks that Dodo cares about him, and she only cares about her plans. Yet I am not certain that she would refuse him if she thought he would let her manage everything and carry out all her notions. And how very uncomfortable Sir James would be! I cannot be

Poor Dorothea before her marriage had never found much room in other minds for what she cared most to say; and she had not, as we know, enjoyed her husband’s superior instruction so much as she had expected.

it was not entirely out of devotion to her future husband that she wished to know Latin and Greek. Those provinces of masculine knowledge seemed to her a standing-ground from which all truth could be seen more truly. As it was, she constantly doubted her own conclusions, because she felt her own ignorance: how could she be confident that one-roomed

He showed the white object under his arm, which was a tiny Maltese puppy, one of nature’s most naive toys. ‘It is painful to me to see these creatures that are bred merely as pets,’ said Dorothea, whose opinion was forming itself that very moment (as opinions will) under the heat of irritation.

‘That would be good discipline, you know, for a young doctor who has to please his patients in Middlemarch. You must learn to be bored, remember.

The world would have a new dreariness for her, as a wilderness that a magician’s spells had turned for a little while into a garden.

It had once or twice crossed his mind that possibly there was some deficiency in Dorothea to account for the moderation of his abandonment; but he was unable to discern the deficiency, or to figure to himself a woman who would have pleased him better;