f
contemplative emotion? But the fervor of sympathy with which we
contemplate a grandiose martyrdom is feeble compared with the
enthusiasm that keeps unslacked where there is no danger, no
challenge--nothing but impartial midday falling on commonplace, perhaps
half-repulsive, objects which are really the beloved ideas made flesh.
Here undoubtedly lies the chief poetic energy:--in the force of
imagination that pierces or exalts the solid fact, instead of floating
among cloud-pictures. To glory in a prophetic vision of knowledge
covering the earth, is an easier exercise of believing imagination than
to see its beginning in newspaper placards, staring at you from the
bridge beyond the corn-fields; and it might well happen to most of us
dainty people that we were in the thick of the battle of Armageddon
without being aware of anything more than the annoyance of a little
explosive smoke and struggling on the ground immediately about us.

It lay in Deronda's nature usually to contemn the feeble, fastidious
sympathy which shrinks from the broad life of mankind; but now, with
Mirah before him as a living reality, whose experience he had to care
for, he saw every common Jew and Jewess in the light of a comparison
with her, and had a presentiment of the collision between her idea of
the unknown mother and brother and the discovered fact--a presentiment
all the keener in him because of a suppressed consciousness that a not
unlike possibility of collision might lie hidden in his own lot. Not
that he would have looked with more complacency of expectation at
wealthy Jews, outdoing the lords of the Philistines in their sports;
but since there was no likelihood of Mirah's friends being found among
that class, their habits did not immediately affect him. In this mood
he rambled, without expectation of a more pregnant result than a little
preparation of his own mind, perhaps for future theorizing as well as
practice--very much as if, Mirah being related to Welsh miners, he had
gone to look more closely at the ways of those people, not without
wishing at the same time to get a little light of detail on the history
of Strikes.

He really did not long to find anybody in particular; and when, as his
habit was, he looked at the name over a shop door, he was well content
that it was not Ezra Cohen. I confess, he particularly desired that
Ezra Cohen should not keep a shop. Wishes are held to be ominous;
according to which belief the order of