MIDDLEMARCH (Completed)

Chapter 15

"Black eyes you have left, you say,

Blue eyes fail to draw you;

Yet you seem more rapt to-day,

Than of old we saw you.

"Oh, I track the fairest fair

Through new haunts of pleasure;

Footprints here and echoes there

Guide me to my treasure:

"Lo! she turns--immortal youth

Wrought to mortal stature,

Fresh as starlight's aged truth--

Many-named Nature!"

A great historian, as he insisted on calling himself, who had the

happiness to be dead a hundred and twenty years ago, and so to take

his place among the colossi whose huge legs our living pettiness

is observed to walk under, glories in his copious remarks and

digressions as the least imitable part of his work, and especially

in those initial chapters to the successive books of his history,

where he seems to bring his armchair to the proscenium and chat with

us in all the lusty ease of his fine English. But Fielding lived

when the days were longer (for time, like money, is measured by our

needs), when summer afternoons were spacious, and the clock ticked

slowly in the winter evenings. We belated historians must not linger

after his example; and if we did so, it is probable that our chat would

be thin and eager, as if delivered from a campstool in a parrot-house.

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.

For surely all must admit that a man may be puffed and belauded,

envied, ridiculed, counted upon as a tool and fallen in love with, or at

least selected as a future husband, and yet remain virtually unknown--

known merely as a cluster of signs for his neighbors' false suppositions.

There was a general impression, however, that Lydgate was not altogether

a common country doctor, and in Middlemarch at that time such an

impression was significant of great things being expected from him.

For everybody's family doctor was remarkably clever, and was understood

to have immeasurable skill in the management and training of the