Sublime

There are so few men in Carlingford who can flirt," said Lucilla regretfully. Her eyes fell as she spoke upon young Osmond Brown, who was actually at that moment talking to Mr Bury's curate, with a disregard of his social duties painful to contemplate.

Lydgate thought that after all his wild mistakes and absurd credulity, he had found perfect womanhood – felt as if already breathed upon by exquisite wedded affection such as would be bestowed by an accomplished creature who venerated his high musings and momentous labours and would never interfere with them; who would create order in the home and

Mrs Cadwallader said, privately, ‘You will certainly go mad in that house alone, my dear. You will see visions. We have all got to exert ourselves a little to keep sane, and call things by the same names as other people call them by. To be sure, for younger sons and women who have no money, it is a sort of provision to go mad: they are taken care o

Those words of Lydgate’s were like a sad milestone marking how far he had travelled from his old dreamland, in which Rosamond Vincy appeared to be that perfect piece of womanhood who would reverence her husband’s mind after the fashion of an accomplished mermaid, using her comb and looking-glass and singing her song for the relaxation of his adored

It did not occur to him that Lydgate’s marriage was not delightful: he believed, as the rest did, that Rosamond was an amiable, docile creature, though he had always thought her rather uninteresting – a little too much the pattern-card of the finishing-school;

that pleasureless yielding to the small solicitations of circumstance, which is a commoner history of perdition than any single momentous bargain. We are on a perilous margin when we begin to look passively at our future selves, and see our own figures led with dull consent into insipid misdoing and shabby achievement. Poor Lydgate was inwardly gro

In Rosamond’s romance it was not necessary to imagine much about the inward life of the hero, or of his serious business in the world: of course, he had a profession and was clever, as well as sufficiently handsome; but the piquant fact about Lydgate was his good birth, which distinguished him from all Middlemarch admirers, and presented marriage a

‘Apropos of what you said about wearing harness,’ Lydgate began, after they had sat down, ‘I made up my mind some time ago to do with as little of it as possible. That was why I determined not to try anything in London, for a good many years at least. I didn’t like what I saw when I was studying there – so much empty bigwiggism, and obstructive tri

She was thoroughly charming to him, but of course he theorized a little about his attachment. He was made of excellent human dough, and had the rare merit of knowing that his talents, even if let loose, would not set the smallest stream in the country on fire: hence he liked the prospect of a wife to whom he could say, ‘What shall we do?’ about thi