r truest love is highest gain.
No art can make it: it must spring
Where elements are fostering.
So in heaven's spot and hour
Springs the little native flower,
Downward root and upward eye,
Shapen by the earth and sky.

It happened to be on a Saturday evening that Will Ladislaw had that
little discussion with Lydgate. Its effect when he went to his own
rooms was to make him sit up half the night, thinking over again, under
a new irritation, all that he had before thought of his having settled
in Middlemarch and harnessed himself with Mr. Brooke. Hesitations
before he had taken the step had since turned into susceptibility to
every hint that he would have been wiser not to take it; and hence came
his heat towards Lydgate--a heat which still kept him restless. Was he
not making a fool of himself?--and at a time when he was more than
ever conscious of being something better than a fool? And for what end?

Well, for no definite end. True, he had dreamy visions of
possibilities: there is no human being who having both passions and
thoughts does not think in consequence of his passions--does not find
images rising in his mind which soothe the passion with hope or sting
it with dread. But this, which happens to us all, happens to some with
a wide difference; and Will was not one of those whose wit "keeps the
roadway:" he had his bypaths where there were little joys of his own
choosing, such as gentlemen cantering on the highroad might have
thought rather idiotic. The way in which he made a sort of happiness
for himself out of his feeling for Dorothea was an example of this. It
may seem strange, but it is the fact, that the ordinary vulgar vision
of which Mr. Casaubon suspected him--namely, that Dorothea might become
a widow, and that the interest he had established in her mind might
turn into acceptance of him as a husband--had no tempting, arresting
power over him; he did not live in the scenery of such an event, and
follow it out, as we all do with that imagined "otherwise" which is our
practical heaven. It was not only that he was unwilling to entertain
thoughts which could be accused of baseness, and was already uneasy in
the sense that he had to justify himself from the charge of
ingratitude--the latent consciousness of many other barriers between
himself and Dorothea besides the existence of her husband, had helped
to turn away his imagination from speculating on what