MIDDLEMARCH (Completed)

BOOK 4- THREE LOVE PROBLEMS- Chapter 34

1st Gent. Such men as this are feathers, chips, and straws.

Carry no weight, no force.

2d Gent. But levity

Is causal too, and makes the sum of weight.

For power finds its place in lack of power;

Advance is cession, and the driven ship

May run aground because the helmsman's thought

Lacked force to balance opposites."

It was on a morning of May that Peter Featherstone was buried.

In the prosaic neighborhood of Middlemarch, May was not always warm

and sunny, and on this particular morning a chill wind was blowing

the blossoms from the surrounding gardens on to the green mounds

of Lowick churchyard. Swiftly moving clouds only now and then

allowed a gleam to light up any object, whether ugly or beautiful,

that happened to stand within its golden shower. In the churchyard

the objects were remarkably various, for there was a little country

crowd waiting to see the funeral. The news had spread that it

was to be a "big burying;" the old gentleman had left written

directions about everything and meant to have a funeral "beyond

his betters." This was true; for old Featherstone had not been

a Harpagon whose passions had all been devoured by the ever-lean

and ever-hungry passion of saving, and who would drive a bargain

with his undertaker beforehand. He loved money, but he also

loved to spend it in gratifying his peculiar tastes, and perhaps

he loved it best of all as a means of making others feel his

power more or less uncomfortably. If any one will here contend

that there must have been traits of goodness in old Featherstone,

I will not presume to deny this; but I must observe that goodness

is of a modest nature, easily discouraged, and when much privacy,

elbowed in early life by unabashed vices, is apt to retire into

extreme privacy, so that it is more easily believed in by those who

construct a selfish old gentleman theoretically, than by those who

form the narrower judgments based on his personal acquaintance.

In any case, he had been bent on having a handsome funeral, and on

having persons "bid" to it who would rather have stayed at home.

He had even desired that female relatives should follow him to

the grave, and poor sister Martha had taken a difficult journey

for this purpose from the Chalky Flats. She and Jane would have

been altogether cheered (in a tearful manner) by this sign that

a brother who disliked seeing them while he was living had been