The Project Gutenberg EBook of Daniel Deronda, by George Eliot

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Title: Daniel Deronda

Author: George Eliot

Release Date: February 5, 2010 [EBook #7469]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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DANIEL DERONDA

By George Eliot

Let thy chief terror be of thine own soul:
There, 'mid the throng of hurrying desires
That trample on the dead to seize their spoil,
Lurks vengeance, footless, irresistible
As exhalations laden with slow death,
And o'er the fairest troop of captured joys
Breathes pallid pestilence.

CONTENTS.

BOOK I. THE SPOILED CHILD
" II. MEETING STREAMS
" III. MAIDENS CHOOSING
" IV. GWENDOLEN GETS HER CHOICE
" V. MORDECAI
" VI. REVELATIONS
" VII. THE MOTHER AND THE SON
" VIII. FRUIT AND SEED

DANIEL DERONDA.

BOOK I.--THE SPOILED CHILD.

CHAPTER I.

Men can do nothing without the make-believe of a beginning. Even
science, the strict measurer, is obliged to start with a make-believe
unit, and must fix on a point in the stars' unceasing journey when his
sidereal clock shall pretend that time is at Nought. His less accurate
grandmother Poetry has always been understood to start in the middle;
but on reflection it appears that her proceeding is not very different
from his; since Science, too, reckons backward as well as forward,
divides his unit into billions, and with his clock-finger at Nought
really sets off _in medias res_. No retrospect will take us to
the true beginning; and whether our prologue be in heaven or on earth,
it is but a fraction of that all-presupposing fact with which our
story sets out.

Was she beautiful or not beautiful? and what was the secret of form or
expression which gave the dynamic quality to her glance? Was the good
or the evil genius dominant in those beams? Probably the evil; else why
was the effect that of unrest rather than of undisturbed charm? Why was
the wish to look again felt as coercion and n