selfish will--to die at last by laying our bodies on the altar. My
daughter, you are a child of Florence; fulfil the duties of that great
inheritance. Live for Florence--for your own people, whom God is
preparing to bless the earth. Bear the anguish and the smart. The iron
is sharp--I know, I know--it rends the tender flesh. The draught is
bitterness on the lips. But there is rapture in the cup--there is the
vision which makes all life below it dross forever. Come, my daughter,
come back to your place!" [Footnote: Chapter XL.]

Again, when Dorothea goes to see Rosamond to intercede in Dr. Lydgate's
behalf with his wife, we have an expression of the sacredness of marriage,
and the renunciation it demands of all that is opposed to its trust and
helpfulness. Dorothea says,--

"Marriage is so unlike everything else. There is something even awful
in the nearness it brings. Even if we loved some one else better
than--than those we were married to, it would be of no use"--poor
Dorothea, in her palpitating anxiety, could only seize her language
brokenly--"I mean, marriage drinks up all our power of giving or
getting any blessedness in that sort of love. I know it may be very
dear--but it murders our marriage--and then the marriage stays with us
like a murder--and everything else is gone. And then our husband--if he
loved and trusted us, and we have not helped him, but made a curse in
his life--"

If Marian Evans rejected the sanctions which society has imposed on the
love of man and woman in the legal forms of marriage, it was not in a
wilful and passionate spirit. There are reasons for believing that she was
somewhat touched in her youth with the individualistic theories of the
time, which made so many men and women of genius reject the restraints