f
form with sublimity of expression. Such at least I have gathered to be
the opinion of cognoscenti."

This kind of answer given in a measured official tone, as of a
clergyman reading according to the rubric, did not help to justify the
glories of the Eternal City, or to give her the hope that if she knew
more about them the world would be joyously illuminated for her. There
is hardly any contact more depressing to a young ardent creature than
that of a mind in which years full of knowledge seem to have issued in
a blank absence of interest or sympathy.

On other subjects indeed Mr. Casaubon showed a tenacity of occupation
and an eagerness which are usually regarded as the effect of
enthusiasm, and Dorothea was anxious to follow this spontaneous
direction of his thoughts, instead of being made to feel that she
dragged him away from it. But she was gradually ceasing to expect with
her former delightful confidence that she should see any wide opening
where she followed him. Poor Mr. Casaubon himself was lost among small
closets and winding stairs, and in an agitated dimness about the
Cabeiri, or in an exposure of other mythologists' ill-considered
parallels, easily lost sight of any purpose which had prompted him to
these labors. With his taper stuck before him he forgot the absence of
windows, and in bitter manuscript remarks on other men's notions about
the solar deities, he had become indifferent to the sunlight.

These characteristics, fixed and unchangeable as bone in Mr. Casaubon,
might have remained longer unfelt by Dorothea if she had been
encouraged to pour forth her girlish and womanly feeling--if he would
have held her hands between his and listened with the delight of
tenderness and understanding to all the little histories which made up
her experience, and would have given her the same sort of intimacy in
return, so that the past life of each could be included in their mutual
knowledge and affection--or if she could have fed her affection with
those childlike caresses which are the bent of every sweet woman, who
has begun by showering kisses on the hard pate of her bald doll,
creating a happy soul within that woodenness from the wealth of her own
love. That was Dorothea's bent. With all her yearning to know what
was afar from her and to be widely benignant, she had ardor enough for
what was near, to have kissed Mr. Casaubon's coat-sleeve, or to have
caressed his shoe-latchet, if he would have made a