Daniel Deronda, Volume 2

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Harper & Brothers, 1876 - England - 427 pages
Deronda, a high-minded young man searching for his path in life, finds himself drawn by a series of dramatic encounters into two contrasting worlds: the English country-house life of Gwendolen Harleth, a high-spirited beauty trapped in an oppressive marriage, and the very different lives of a poor Jewish girl, Mirah, and her family. As Deronda uncovers the long-hidden secret of his own parentage, Eliot's moving and suspenseful narrative opens up a world of Jewish experience previously unknown to the Victorian novel.
 

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Page 409 - All thoughts, all passions, all delights, Whatever stirs this mortal frame, All are but ministers of Love, And feed his sacred flame. Oft in my waking dreams do I Live o'er again that happy hour, When midway on the mount I lay, Beside the ruined tower.
Page 104 - Within the soul a faculty abides, That with interpositions, which would hide And darken, so can deal, that they become Contingencies of pomp ; and serve to exalt Her native brightness. As the ample moon, In the deep stillness of a summer even Rising behind a thick and lofty grove, Burns, like an unconsuming fire of light, In the green trees ; and, kindling on all sides Their leafy umbrage, turns the dusky veil Into a substance glorious as her own, Yea, with her own incorporated, by power Capacious...
Page 132 - IF there are ranks in suffering, Israel takes precedence of all the nations — if the duration of sorrows and the patience with which they are borne ennoble, the Jews are among the aristocracy of every land — if a literature is called rich in the possession of a few classic tragedies, what shall we say to a National Tragedy lasting for fifteen hundred years, in which the poets and the actors were also the heroes...
Page 288 - Ask me not what I think ; the unwilling brain Feigns often what it would not ; and we trust Imagination with such phantasies As the tongue dares not fashion into words, Which have no words, their horror makes them dim To the mind's eye.
Page 65 - The refuge you are needing from personal trouble is the higher, the religious life, which holds an enthusiasm for something more than our own appetites and vanities. The few may find themselves in it simply by an elevation of feeling ; but for us who have to struggle for our wisdom, the higher life must be a region in which the affections are clad with knowledge.
Page 251 - You are not a woman. You may try - but you can never imagine what it is to have a man's force of genius in you, and yet to suffer the slavery of being a girl.
Page 249 - the Jewish woman ' under pain of his curse. I was to feel everything I did not feel, and believe everything I did not believe. I was to feel awe for the bit of parchment in the mezuza over the door ; to dread lest a bit of butter should touch a bit of meat...
Page 248 - Every woman is supposed to have the same set of motives, or else to be a monster. I am not a monster, but I have not felt exactly what other women feel — or say they feel, for fear of being thought unlike others. When you reproach me in your heart for sending you away from me, you mean that I ought to say I felt about you as other women say they feel about their children. I did not feel that. I was glad to be freed from you.
Page 147 - Let their history be known and examined; let the seed be sifted, let its beginning be traced to the weed of the wilderness — the more glorious will be the energy that transformed it. Where else is there a nation of whom it may be as truly said that their religion and law and moral life mingled as the stream of blood in the heart and made one growth...
Page 106 - Mordecai lifted his cap and waved it — feeling in that moment that his inward prophecy was fulfilled. Obstacles, incongruities, all melted into the sense of completion with which his soul was flooded by this outward satisfaction of his longing. His exultation was not widely different from that of the experimenter, bending over the first stirrings of change that correspond to what in the fervor of concentrated prevision his thought has foreshadowed.

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