MIDDLEMARCH (Completed)

Chapter 47

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