March 2011
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A Wife in London
December 1899 I She sits in the tawny vapour
That the Thames-side lanes have uprolled,
Behind whose webby fold-on-fold
Like a waning taper
The street-lamp glimmers cold. A messenger’s knock cracks smartly,
Flashed news in her hand
Of meaning it dazes to understand
Though shaped so shortly:
He— he has fallen— in the far South land… II ‘Tis the morrow; the...
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“There is a strength of self-possession which is the sign that the last hope has departed. Despair no more leans on others than perfect contentment, and in despair pride ceases to be counteracted by the sense of dependence.” — from Adam Bede by George Eliot
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God's Funeral
I
I saw a slowly-stepping train—
Lined on the brows, scoop-eyed and bent and hoar—
Following in lines across a twilit plain
A strange and mystic form the foremost bore. II
And by contagious throbs of thought
Or latent knowledge that within me lay
And had already stirred me, I was wrought
To consciousness of sorrow even as they. III
The fore-borne shape, to my blurred eyes,
...
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“But Adam could receive no amends; his suffering could not be cancelled; his respect and affection could not be recovered by any prompt deeds of atonement. He stood like an immovable obstacle against which no pressure could avail; an embodiment of what Arthur most shrank from believing in— the irrevocableness of his own wrong-doing. The words of scorn, the refusal to shake hands, the...
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“He had been awake an hour, and could rest in bed no longer. In bed our yesterdays are too oppressive: if a man can only get up, though it be but to whistle or to smoke, he has a present which offers some resistance to the past— sensations which assert themselves against tyrannous memories. And if there were such a thing as taking averages of feeling, it would certainly be found...
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“And so Adam went to bed comforted, having woven for himself an ingenious web of probabilities— the surest screen a wise man can place between himself and the truth.” — from Adam Bede by George Eliot
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“And Hetty must be one of them: it is too painful to think that she is a woman, with a woman’s destiny before her— a woman spinning in young ignorance a light web of folly and vain hopes which may one day close round her and press upon her, a rancorous poisoned garment, changing all at once her fluttering, trivial butterfly sensations into a life of deep human anguish.” ...
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