most are her fine
descriptions of natural scenes, her keen analyses of character and her
many little moral sermons on life and conduct. With an abnormal
conscience and a keen sense of duty, life proved very hard for her.
This is reflected in the somberness of her stories and in the dread
atmosphere of fate that hangs over her characters. But over against
this must be placed her joy in depicting the rustic character and
humor and her delight in reproducing the scenes of her childhood in
one of the most beautiful counties of England.

Herbert Spencer, who was long associated with George Eliot, and for a
time contemplated the possibility of a union with that remarkable
woman, pays her a high tribute in _The Study of Sociology_. After
explaining the origin in women of the ability to distinguish quickly
the passing feelings of those around, he says: "Ordinarily, this
feminine faculty, showing itself in an aptitude for guessing the state
of mind through the external signs, ends simply in intuitions formed
without assignable reasons; but when, as happens in rare cases, there
is joined with it skill in psychological analysis, there results in
extremely remarkable ability to interpret the mental states of others.
Of this ability we have a living example (George Eliot) never hitherto
paralleled among women, and in but few, if any, cases exceeded among
men."

Perhaps the reader who does not know George Eliot would do well to
begin with _The Mill on the Floss_, her finest work, which is full of
humor, lovely pictures of English rural life and an analysis of soul
in Maggie Tolliver that has never been surpassed. Yet the end is cruel
and unnatural, as hard and as unsatisfying as the author's own
religious creed. Next read _Adam Bede_, one of the saddest books in
all literature, with comic relief in Mrs. Poyser, one of the most
humorous characters in English fiction.

George Eliot drew Dinah Morris from her favorite aunt, who was a
Methodist exhorter, and the power and spontaneity of this novel came
from the sharpness and clearness of her early impressions, joined to
her love of living over again her girlhood days, before doubt had
clouded her sky. Also read _Silas Marner_ with its perfect picture of
Raveloe, "an English village where many of the old echoes lingered,
undrowned by new voices." These descriptions are instinct with poetry,
and they affect one like Wordsworth's best poems or like Tennyson's
vignettes of rural life. T