The story can be told without many words.
Rosamond being one of those women who live much in the idea that each man they meet would have preferred them if the preference had not been hopeless.
To think with pleasure of his niece’s husband having a large ecclesiastical income was one thing – to make a Liberal speech was another thing; and it is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view.
It’s like the night and the morning, and the sleeping and the waking, and the rain and the harvest – one goes and the other comes, and we know nothing how nor where. We may strive and scrat and fend, but it’s little we can do arter all – the big things come and go wi’ no striving o’ our’n – they do, that they do...
The cubic feet of oxygen yearly swallowed by a full-grown man – what a shudder they might have created in some Middlemarch circles! ‘Oxygen! nobody knows what that may be – is it any wonder the cholera has got to Dantzic?
We read, indeed, that the walls of Jericho fell down before the sound of trumpets,39 but we nowhere hear that those trumpets were hoarse and feeble. Doubtless they were trumpets that gave forth clear ringing tones, and sent a mighty vibration through brick and mortar. But the oratory of the Rev. Amos resembled rather a Belgian railway-horn, which shows praiseworthy intentions inadequately fulfilled.
Proceeding by loops and zig-zags, we now and then arrive just where we ought to be.
For in general mortals have a great power of being astonished at the presence of an effect toward which they have done everything, and at the absence of an effect toward which they had done nothing but desire it.
Tom’s mind was set to the expectation of the worst that could happen – not death, but disgrace.
The betrothed bride must see her future home, and dictate any changes that she would like to have made there. A woman dictates before marriage in order that she may have an appetite for submission afterwards.
That is the way with you political writers, Ladislaw–crying up a measure as if it were a universal cure, and crying up men who are a part of the very disease that wants curing.
Away from her sister, Celia talked quite easily, and Sir James said to himself that the second Miss Brooke was certainly very agreeable as well as pretty, though not, as some people pretended, more clever and sensible than the elder sister. He felt that he had chosen the one who was in all respects the superior; and a man naturally likes to look forward to having the best. He would be the very Mawworm of bachelors who pretended not to expect it.
Observing these people narrowly, even when the iron hand of misfortune has shaken them from their unquestioning hold on the world, one sees little trace of religion, still less of a distinctively Christian creed. Their belief in the unseen, so far as it manifests itself at all, seems to be rather of a pagan kind; their moral notions, though held with strong tenacity, seem to have no standard beyond hereditary custom.
I at least have so much to do in unraveling certain human lots, and seeing how they were woven and interwoven, that all the light I can command must be concentrated on this particular web, and not dispersed over that tempting range of relevancies called the universe. At present I have to make the new settler Lydgate better known to any one interested in him than he could possibly be even to those who had seen the most of him since his arrival in Middlemarch.
On the other hand, she was disproportionately indulgent towards the failings of men, and was often heard to say that these were natural.
But something she yearned for by which her life might be filled with action at once rational and ardent; and since the time was gone by for guiding visions and spiritual directors, since prayer heightened yearning but not instruction, what lamp was there but knowledge? Surely learned men kept-the only oil; and who more learned than Mr. Casaubon? Thus.
There, now, father, you won’t work in it till it’s all easy,” said Eppie, “and you and me can mark out the beds, and make holes and plant the roots. It’ll be a deal livelier at the Stone-pits when we’ve got some flowers, for I always think the flowers can see us and know what we’re talking about. And I’ll have a bit o’ rosemary, and bergamot, and thyme, because they’re so sweet-smelling; but there’s no lavender only in the gentlefolks’ gardens, I think.
But many of these misdeeds were like the subtle muscular movements which are not taken account of in the consciousness, though they bring about the end that we fix our mind on and desire.
And yet the hope of this paradise had not been enough to save him from a course which shut him out of it forever. Instead of keeping fast hold of the strong silken rope by which Nancy would have drawn him safe to the green banks where it was easy to step firmly, he had let himself be dragged back into the mud and slime, in which it was useless to struggle. He had made his ties for himself which robbed him of all wholesome motive and were a constant exasperation.
Mr. Bates was sober, with that manly, British, churchman-like sobriety which can carry a few glasses of grog without any perceptible clarification of ideas.