Was never true love loved in vain,

For truest love is highest gain.

No art can make it: it must spring

Where elements are fostering.

So in heaven's spot and hour

Springs the little native flower,

Downward root and upward eye,

Shapen by the earth and sky.

It happened to be on a Saturday evening that Will Ladislaw had that

little discussion with Lydgate. Its effect when he went to his own

rooms was to make him sit up half the night, thinking over again, under

a new irritation, all that he had before thought of his having settled

in Middlemarch and harnessed himself with Mr. Brooke. Hesitations

before he had taken the step had since turned into susceptibility to

every hint that he would have been wiser not to take it; and hence came

his heat towards Lydgate--a heat which still kept him restless. Was he

not making a fool of himself?--and at a time when he was more than

ever conscious of being something better than a fool? And for what end?

Well, for no definite end. True, he had dreamy visions of

possibilities: there is no human being who having both passions and

thoughts does not think in consequence of his passions--does not find

images rising in his mind which soothe the passion with hope or sting

it with dread. But this, which happens to us all, happens to some with

a wide difference; and Will was not one of those whose wit "keeps the

roadway:" he had his bypaths where there were little joys of his own

choosing, such as gentlemen cantering on the highroad might have

thought rather idiotic. The way in which he made a sort of happiness

for himself out of his feeling for Dorothea was an example of this. It

may seem strange, but it is the fact, that the ordinary vulgar vision

of which Mr. Casaubon suspected him--namely, that Dorothea might become

a widow, and that the interest he had established in her mind might

turn into acceptance of him as a husband--had no tempting, arresting

power over him; he did not live in the scenery of such an event, and

follow it out, as we all do with that imagined "otherwise" which is our

practical heaven. It was not only that he was unwilling to entertain

thoughts which could be accused of baseness, and was already uneasy in

the sense that he had to justify himself from the charge of

ingratitude--the latent consciousness of many other barriers between

himself and Dorothea besides the existence of her husband, had helped

to turn away his imagination from speculating on what might befall Mr.

Casaubon. And there were yet other reasons. Will, we know, could not

bear the thought of any flaw appearing in his crystal: he was at once

exasperated and delighted by the calm freedom with which Dorothea

looked at him and spoke to him, and there was something so exquisite in

thinking of her just as she was, that he could not long for a change

which must somehow change her. Do we not shun the street version of a

fine melody?--or shrink from the news that the rarity--some bit of

chiselling or engraving perhaps--which we have dwelt on even with

exultation in the trouble it has cost us to snatch glimpses of it, is

really not an uncommon thing, and may be obtained as an every-day

possession? Our good depends on the quality and breadth of our

emotion; and to Will, a creature who cared little for what are called

the solid things of life and greatly for its subtler influences, to

have within him such a feeling as he had towards Dorothea, was like the

inheritance of a fortune. What others might have called the futility

of his passion, made an additional delight for his imagination: he was

conscious of a generous movement, and of verifying in his own

experience that higher love-poetry which had charmed his fancy.

Dorothea, he said to himself, was forever enthroned in his soul: no

other woman could sit higher than her footstool; and if he could have

written out in immortal syllables the effect she wrought within him, he

might have boasted after the example of old Drayton, that,--




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