rom which all other
knowledge is hewn, it must be admitted that many well-proved facts are
dark to the average man, even concerning the action of his own heart
and the structure of his own retina. A century ago he and all his
forefathers had not had the slightest notion of that electric discharge
by means of which they had all wagged their tongues mistakenly; any
more than they were awake to the secluded anguish of exceptional
sensitiveness into which many a carelessly-begotten child of man is
born.

Perhaps the ferment was all the stronger in Deronda's mind because he
had never had a confidant to whom he could open himself on these
delicate subjects. He had always been leaned on instead of being
invited to lean. Sometimes he had longed for the sort of friend to whom
he might possibly unfold his experience: a young man like himself who
sustained a private grief and was not too confident about his own
career; speculative enough to understand every moral difficulty, yet
socially susceptible, as he himself was, and having every outward sign
of equality either in bodily or spiritual wrestling;--for he had found
it impossible to reciprocate confidences with one who looked up to him.
But he had no expectation of meeting the friend he imagined. Deronda's
was not one of those quiveringly-poised natures that lend themselves to
second-sight.

CHAPTER XXXVIII.

There be who hold that the deeper tragedy were a Prometheus Bound not
_after_ but _before_ he had well got the celestial fire into
the _narthex_ whereby it might be conveyed to mortals: thrust by
the Kratos and Bia of instituted methods into a solitude of despised
ideas, fastened in throbbing helplessness by the fatal pressure of
poverty and disease--a solitude where many pass by, but none regard.

"Second-sight" is a flag over disputed ground. But it is matter of
knowledge that there are persons whose yearnings, conceptions--nay,
traveled conclusions--continually take the form of images which have a
foreshadowing power; the deed they would do starts up before them in
complete shape, making a coercive type; the event they hunger for or
dread rises into vision with a seed-like growth, feeding itself fast on
unnumbered impressions. They are not always the less capable of the
argumentative process, nor less sane than the commonplace calculators
of the market: sometimes it may be that their natures have manifold
openings, like the hundred-ga