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George Eliot; a Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy by George Willis Cooke
page 101 of 513 (19%)
mind was always fusing and combining its fresh stores."

She had culture, moral power and earnestness in a high degree, warmth of
sympathy and sensitiveness to all beauty, but she had no saintliness.
Profound as was her reverence for moral purity, and lofty as was her moral
purpose, she was not a saint, and holiness was not a characteristic of her
nature. This clear and high sense of moral truth everywhere appears in her
life and thought. "For the lessons most imperatively needed by the mass of
men, the lessons of deliberate kindness, of careful truth, of unwavering
endeavor,--for these plain themes one could not ask a more convincing
teacher than she. Everything in her aspect and presence was in keeping with
the bent of her soul. The deeply lined face, the too marked and massive
features, were united with an air of delicate refinement, which in one way
was the more impressive because it seemed to proceed entirely from within.
Nay, the inward beauty would sometimes quite transform the external
harshness; there would be moments when the thin hands that entwined
themselves in their eagerness, the earnest figure that bowed forward to
speak and hear, the deep gaze moving from one face to another with a grave
appeal,--all these seemed the transparent symbols that showed the presence
of a wise, benignant soul. But it was the voice which best revealed her, a
voice whose subdued intensity and tremulous richness seemed to environ her
uttered words with the mystery of a world that must remain untold. And then
again, when in moments of more intimate converse some current of emotion
would set strongly through her soul, when she would raise her head in
unconscious absorption and look out into the unseen, her expression was not
one to be soon forgotten. It has not, indeed, the serene felicity of souls
to whose childlike confidence all heaven and earth are fair. Rather it was
the look of a strenuous Demiurge, of a soul on which high tasks are laid,
and which finds in their accomplishment its only imagination of joy."

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