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