o her the entrance into
that satisfaction which she had so long been craving in vain. She had
not perceived--how could she until she had lived longer?--the inmost
truth of the old monk's outpourings, that renunciation remains sorrow,
though a sorrow borne willingly. Maggie was still panting for
happiness, and was in ecstasy because she had found the key to it.
She knew nothing of doctrines and systems--of mysticism or quietism;
but this voice out of the far-off middle ages was the direct
communication of a human soul's belief and experience, and came to
Maggie as an unquestioned message. I suppose that is the reason why the
small, old-fashioned book, for which you need only pay sixpence at a
book-stall, works miracles to this day, turning bitter waters into
sweetness, while expensive sermons and treatises, newly issued, leave
all things as they were before. It was written down by a hand that
waited for the heart's promptings; it is the chronicle of a solitary
hidden anguish, struggle, trust and triumph,--not written on velvet
cushions to teach endurance to those who are treading with bleeding
feet on the stones. And so it remains to all time a lasting record of
human needs and human consolations; the voice of a brother who, ages
ago, felt, and suffered, and renounced,--in the cloister, perhaps, with
serge gown and tonsured head, with much chanting and long fasts, and
with a fashion of speech different from ours,--but under the same
silent, far-off heavens, and with the same passionate desires, the same
strivings, the same failures, the same weariness. [Footnote: The Mill
on the Floss, Book IV., chapter III.]

Life now has a meaning for Maggie, its secret has been in some measure
opened. Only by bitter experiences does she at last learn the full meaning
of that word; but all her after-life is told for us in order that the depth
and breadth and height of that meaning may be unfolded. Very soon Maggie is
heard saying,

"Our life is determined for us--and it makes the mind very free when we
give up wishing, and only think of bearing what is laid upon us, and
doing what is given us to do."

It is George Eliot who really speaks these words; hers is the thought which
inspires them.

Yet Maggie has not learned to give up wishing; and the sorrow, the tragedy
of her life comes in consequence. She is pledged in love to Ph