Camden Nauroth’s Reviews > Middlemarch > Status Update

Certainly those determining acts of her life were not ideally beau-tiful. They were the mixed result of young and noble impulse strug. gling amidst the conditions of an imperfect social state, in which great feelings will often take the aspect of error, and great faith the aspect of illusion. For there is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it.

Where women love each other, men learn to smother their mutual dislike.

On inquiry it might possibly be found that Fred and Mary still inhabit Stone Court—that the creeping plants still cast the foam of their blossoms over the fine stone wall into the field where the walnut-trees stand in stately row—and that on sunny days the two lovers who were first engaged with the umbrella-ring may be seen in white-haired placidity at the open window from which Mary Garth,

deceived and that there was no need to praise anybody for writing a book, since it was always done by somebody else. WAIT THIS IS SO vindicating AND AMAZING BECAUSE SHE IS REFERENCING HERSELF. Because she had to write under a pen name.

Every limit isa beginning aswell asan ending. Who can quit young lives after being long in company with them and not desire to know what befell them in their afteryears?For the fragment of a life, however typical, is not the sample of an even web; promises may not be kept, and an ardent outset may be followed by declension; latent powers may find their long-waited opportunity; a past error may urge a grand retrieval.

The pitiable lot is that of the man who could not call himself a martyr even though he were to persuade himself that the men who stoned him were but ugly passions incarnate, who knows that he is stoned, not for professing the Right, but for not being the man he professed to be.

When immortal Bunyan makes his picture of the persecuting passions bringing in their verdict of guilty, who pities Faithful? That is a rare and blessed lot which some greatest men have not attained, to know ourselves guiltless before a condemning crowd, to be sure that what we are denounced for is solely the good in us.

"My dear fellow, we are rather apt to consider an act wrong be-cause it is unpleasant to us," said the rector quietly. Like many men who take life easily, he had the knack of saying a home truth occasionally to those who felt themselves virtuously out of temper.

What is a RUBICON?

My grief lies onward and my joy behind.
-SHAKESPEARE: Sonnets
Exiles notoriously feed much on hopes and are unlikely to stay in banishment unless they are obliged.