into question--perhaps however little.

It was by George Eliot's name that I was to go on knowing, was never to
cease to know, a great treasure of beauty and humanity, of applied and
achieved art, a testimony, historic as well as aesthetic, to the deeper
interest of the intricate English aspects; and I now allow the
vibration, as I have called it, all its play--quite as if I had been
wronged even by my own hesitation as to whether to pick up my anecdote.
That scruple wholly fades with the sense of how I must at the very time
have foreseen that here was one of those associations that would
determine in the far future an exquisite inability to revise it.
Middlemarch had not then appeared--we of the faith were still to enjoy
that saturation, and Felix Holt the radical was upwards of three years
old; the impetus proceeding from this work, however, was still fresh
enough in my pulses to have quickened the palpitation of my finding
myself in presence. I had rejoiced without reserve in Felix Holt--the
illusion of reading which, outstretched on my then too frequently
inevitable bed at Swampscott during a couple of very hot days of the
summer of 1866, comes back to me, followed by that in sooth of sitting
up again, at no great ease, to indite with all promptness a review of
the delightful thing, the place of appearance of which nothing could now
induce me to name, shameless about the general fact as I may have been
at the hour itself: over such a feast of fine rich natural tone did I
feel myself earnestly bend. Quite unforgettable to me the art and truth
with which the note of this tone was struck in the beautiful prologue
and the bygone appearances, a hundred of the outward and visible signs
of the author's own young rural and midmost England, made to hold us by
their harmony. The book was not, if I rightly remember, altogether
genially greeted, but I was to hold fast to the charm I had thankfully
suffered it, I had been conscious of absolutely needing it, to work.

Exquisite the remembrance of how it wouldn't have "done" for me at all,
in relation to other inward matters, not to strain from the case the
last drop of its happiest sense. And I had even with the cooling of the
first glow so little gone back upon it, as we have nowadays learned to
say, had in fact so gone forward, floated by its wave of superlative
intended benignity, that, once in the cool quiet drawing-room at North
Bank I knew myself steeped in still deeper de