ompleteness, from the heaping of cat-mummies and the
expensive cult of enshrined putrefactions?

Something like this was the common under-current in Deronda's mind
while he was reading law or imperfectly attending to polite
conversation. Meanwhile he had not set about one function in particular
with zeal and steadiness. Not an admirable experience, to be proposed
as an ideal; but a form of struggle before break of day which some
young men since the patriarch have had to pass through, with more or
less of bruising if not laming.

I have said that under his calm exterior he had a fervor which made him
easily feel the presence of poetry in everyday events; and the forms of
the Juden-gasse, rousing the sense of union with what is remote, set
him musing on two elements of our historic life which that sense raises
into the same region of poetry;--the faint beginnings of faiths and
institutions, and their obscure lingering decay; the dust and withered
remnants with which they are apt to be covered, only enhancing for the
awakened perception the impressiveness either of a sublimely
penetrating life, as in the twin green leaves that will become the
sheltering tree, or of a pathetic inheritance in which all the grandeur
and the glory have become a sorrowing memory.

This imaginative stirring, as he turned out of the Juden-gasse, and
continued to saunter in the warm evening air, meaning to find his way
to the synagogue, neutralized the repellent effect of certain ugly
little incidents on his way. Turning into an old book-shop to ask the
exact time of service at the synagogue, he was affectionately directed
by a precocious Jewish youth, who entered cordially into his wanting,
not the fine new building of the Reformed but the old Rabbinical school
of the orthodox; and then cheated him like a pure Teuton, only with
more amenity, in his charge for a book quite out of request as one
"nicht so leicht zu bekommen." Meanwhile at the opposite counter a deaf
and grisly tradesman was casting a flinty look at certain cards,
apparently combining advantages of business with religion, and
shoutingly proposed to him in Jew-dialect by a dingy man in a tall coat
hanging from neck to heel, a bag in hand, and a broad low hat
surmounting his chosen nose--who had no sooner disappeared than another
dingy man of the same pattern issued from the background glooms of the
shop and also shouted in the same dialect. In fact, Deronda saw various
queer-looki