"In those days, though, I never analysed, Not even myself, Analysis comes late. You catch a sight of nature, earliest; In full front sun-face, and your eye-lids wink And drop before the wonder of 't; you miss The form, through seeing the light. I lived those days, And wrote because I lived--unlicensed else; My heart beat in my brain. Life's violent flood Abolished bounds--and, which my neighbor's field, Which mine, what mattered? It is thus in youth! We play at leap-frog over the god Time; The love within us and the love without Are mixed, confounded; if we are loved or love We scarce distinguish.... In that first outrush of life's chariot wheels We know not if the forests move, or we."
And now as showing the extreme range of George Eliot's genius, in regions where perhaps Mrs. Browning never penetrated, let me recall Sister Glegg and Sister Pullet, as types of women contrasting with Maggie and Aurora Leigh. You will remember how Mrs. Tulliver has bidden her three sisters, Mrs. Glegg, Mrs. Pullet, and Mrs. Deane, with their respective husbands, to a great and typical Dodson dinner, in order to eat and drink upon the momentous changes impending in Tom's educational existence:
"The Dodsons were certainly a handsome family, and Mrs. Glegg was not the least handsome of the sisters. As she sat in Mrs. Tulliver's arm-chair, no impartial observer could have denied, for a woman of fifty, she had a very comely face and figure, though Tom and Maggie considered their aunt Glegg as the type of ugliness. It is true she despised the advantages of costume; for though, as she often observed, no woman had better clothes, it was not her way to wear her new things out before her old ones. Other women, if they liked, might have their best thread lace in every wash, but when Mrs. Glegg did it would be found that she had better lace laid by in the right-hand drawer of her wardrobe, in the Spotted Chamber, than ever Mrs. Wool of St. Ogg's had bought in her life, although Mrs. Wool wore her lace before it was paid for. So of her curled fronts. Mrs. Glegg had doubtless the glossiest and crispest brown curls in her drawers, as well as curls in various degrees of fuzzy laxness; but to look out on the week-day world from under a crisp and glossy front would be to introduce a most dream-like and unpleasant confusion between the sacred and the secular.