the shades of meaning in all these in the school of experience—a school which to her high, grand nature, her keen susceptibilities, has been a thousandfold more thorough in its teachings than we duller scholars have found it. Does she not herself confess as much when in “Felix Holt” she says: “The poets have told us of a dolorous enchanted forest in the under world. The thorn-bushes there, and the thick-barked stems, have human histories hidden in them; the power of unuttered cries dwells in the passionless-seeming branches, and the red, warm blood is darkly feeding the quivering nerves of a sleepless memory, that watches through all dreams. These things are a parable.”
The one romance in George Eliot’s life which she has found it impossible to keep from the inquisitive world is the romance which culminated in her marriage to a kindred spirit, Mr. George Henry Lewes, himself a power in the literary world. I say her marriage, although it is well known
