little ones included,
were consecrated for the youth as they had been for the boy--only with
a certain difference of light on the objects. The altarpiece was no
longer miraculously perfect, painted under infallible guidance, but the
human hand discerned in the work was appealing to a reverent tenderness
safer from the gusts of discovery. Certainly Deronda's ambition, even
in his spring-time, lay exceptionally aloof from conspicuous, vulgar
triumph, and from other ugly forms of boyish energy; perhaps because he
was early impassioned by ideas, and burned his fire on those heights.
One may spend a good deal of energy in disliking and resisting what
others pursue, and a boy who is fond of somebody else's pencil-case may
not be more energetic than another who is fond of giving his own
pencil-case away. Still it was not Deronda's disposition to escape from
ugly scenes; he was more inclined to sit through them and take care of
the fellow least able to take care of himself. It had helped to make
him popular that he was sometimes a little compromised by this apparent
comradeship. For a meditative interest in learning how human miseries
are wrought--as precocious in him as another sort of genius in the poet
who writes a Queen Mab at nineteen--was so infused with kindliness that
it easily passed for comradeship. Enough. In many of our neighbors'
lives there is much not only of error and lapse, but of a certain
exquisite goodness which can never be written or even spoken--only
divined by each of us, according to the inward instruction of our own
privacy.

The impression he made at Cambridge corresponded to his position at
Eton. Every one interested in him agreed that he might have taken a
high place if his motives had been of a more pushing sort, and if he
had not, instead of regarding studies as instruments of success,
hampered himself with the notion that they were to feed motive and
opinion--a notion which set him criticising methods and arguing against
his freight and harness when he should have been using all his might to
pull. In the beginning his work at the university had a new zest for
him: indifferent to the continuation of Eton classical drill, he
applied himself vigorously to mathematics, for which he had shown an
early aptitude under Mr. Fraser, and he had the delight of feeling his
strength in a comparatively fresh exercise of thought. That delight,
and the favorable opinion of his tutor, determined him to try for a