Page 199 - middlemarch

CHAPTER XV

‘Black eyes you have left, you say,
Blue eyes fail to draw you;
Yet you seem more rapt to-day,
Than of old we saw you.

‘Oh, I track the fairest fair
Through new haunts of pleasure;
Footprints here and echoes there
Guide me to my treasure:

‘Lo! she turns—immortal youth
Wrought to mortal stature,
Fresh as starlight’s aged truth—
Many-named Nature!’

great historian, as he insisted on calling himself, who
h
A ad the happiness to be dead a hundred and twen-
ty years ago, and so to take his place among the colossi
whose huge legs our living pettiness is observed to walk un-
der, glories in his copious remarks and digressions as the
least imitable part of his work, and especially in those ini-
tial chapters to the successive books of his history, where
he seems to bring his armchair to the proscenium and chat

1 Middlemarch