come. There were no lips in Raveloe from which a word could fall
that would stir Silas Marner's benumbed faith to a sense of pain.
In the early ages of the world, we know, it was believed that each
territory was inhabited and ruled by its own divinities, so that a
man could cross the bordering heights and be out of the reach of his
native gods, whose presence was confined to the streams and the
groves and the hills among which he had lived from his birth. And
poor Silas was vaguely conscious of something not unlike the feeling
of primitive men, when they fled thus, in fear or in sullenness,
from the face of an unpropitious deity. It seemed to him that the
Power he had vainly trusted in among the streets and at the
prayer-meetings, was very far away from this land in which he had
taken refuge, where men lived in careless abundance, knowing and
needing nothing of that trust, which, for him, had been turned to
bitterness. The little light he possessed spread its beams so
narrowly, that frustrated belief was a curtain broad enough to
create for him the blackness of night.

His first movement after the shock had been to work in his loom; and
he went on with this unremittingly, never asking himself why, now he
was come to Raveloe, he worked far on into the night to finish the
tale of Mrs. Osgood's table-linen sooner than she expected--
without contemplating beforehand the money she would put into his
hand for the work. He seemed to weave, like the spider, from pure
impulse, without reflection. Every man's work, pursued steadily,
tends in this way to become an end in itself, and so to bridge over
the loveless chasms of his life. Silas's hand satisfied itself with
throwing the shuttle, and his eye with seeing the little squares in
the cloth complete themselves under his effort. Then there were the
calls of hunger; and Silas, in his solitude, had to provide his own