rothea has longings after a life of love
and service; she would live for high purposes and give herself for others'
good. Her hopes end in disaster almost; and she is cramped and baulked
on every side. Lydgate would devote himself to science, to patient
investigations for the sake of alleviating human misery and disease. His
social environment cripples him, and his life comes to nothing compared
with what he had aimed at, and what he was capable of attaining. Dorothea
is presented as capable of becoming a saint, being of an ardent, heroic
nature, a woman who yearned after some lofty conception of the world that
was to be made, not merely poetry, but an actual fact about her; who was
"enamoured of intensity and greatness," and "likely to seek martyrdom." The
difficulties which most beset such a nature are presented in the very first
chapter, where these saintly tendencies are considered as probable
obstacles to her making a good marriage.

A young lady of some birth and fortune, who knelt suddenly down on a
brick floor by the side of a sick laborer and prayed fervidly, as if
she thought herself living in the time of the Apostles--who had strange
whims of fasting like a Papist, and of sitting up at night to read old
theological books! Such a wife might awaken you some fine morning with
a new scheme for the application of her income which would interfere
with political economy, and the keeping of saddle-horses; a man would
naturally think twice before he risked himself in such fellowship.

The social life of Tipton really had no room for such a woman, could not
employ her rare gifts, knew not what to make of her yearnings and her
charity. And Tipton is the world and modern life, which spurns the heroic,
has no place for the poetry of existence, can make nothing of yearnings and
longings for high heroism. Because the social order into which she was born
could not use her gifts, because the vision of life in her soul was other
and higher than that which society had marked out for such as she, her life
was wasted in an unhappy marriage. In an earlier age she would have become
a St. Theresa, for society then had a place for such souls. Now she bows in
reverence to a man of learning, dreams great things of tender service to
him; but this proves not to be the place in which she belongs. In the last
paragraphs of the book the author gives her own account of Dorothea's
failure to reach the good she s