it a
true and exquisite work of high art.

Modern English (and I am one of those who hold that the best modern
English is as good as any in our literature) has few pieces of
description more gem-like in its crystalline facets than the opening
chapter that tells of the pale, uncanny weaver of Raveloe in his stone
cottage by the deserted pit. Some of us can remember such house
weavers in such lonesome cottages on the Northern moors, and have heard
the unfamiliar rattle of the loom in a half-ruinous homestead. How
perfect is that vignette of Raveloe--"a village where many of the old
echoes lingered, undrowned by new voices"--with its "strange lingering
echoes of the old demon-worship among the grey-haired peasantry"! The
entire picture of the village and its village life a hundred years ago,
is finished with the musical and reserved note of poetry, such as we
are taught to love in Wordsworth and Tennyson. And for quiet humour
modern literature has few happier scenes than the fireside at the
"Rainbow," with Macey and Winthrop, the butcher and the farrier, over
their pipes and their hot potations, and the quarrel about "seeing
ghos'es," about smelling them!

Within this most graceful and refined picture of rural life there is a
dominant ethical motive which she herself describes as its aim, "to set
in a strong light the remedial influences of pure, natural, human
relations." This aim is perfectly worked out: it is a right and
healthy conception, not too subtle, not too common:--to put it in
simpler words than hers, it is how a lonely, crabbed, ill-used old man
is humanised by the love of a faithful and affectionate child. The
form is poetic: the moral is both just and noble: the characters are
living, and the story is original, natural, and dramatic. The only
thing, indeed, which _Silas Marner_ wants to make it a really great
romance is more ease, more rapidity, more "go." The melody runs so
uniformly in minor keys, the sense of care, meditation, and
introspection is so apparent in every line, the amount of serious
thought lavished by the writer and required of the reader is so
continuous, that we are not carried away, we are not excited, inspired,
and thrilled as we are by _Jane Eyre_ or _Esmond_. We enjoy a
beautiful book with a fine moral, set in exquisite prose, with
consummate literary resources, full of fine thoughts, true, ennobling
thoughts, and with no weak side at all, unless it be the sense of being
ov