I have taken special pleasure in the last sentence of this outburst, because it restates with a precise felicity at once poetic and scientific, but from a curiously different point of view, that peculiar function of George Eliot which I pointed out as appearing in the very first of her stories, namely, the function of elevating the plane of all commonplace life into the plane of the heroic by keeping every man well in mind of the awful _ego_ within him which includes all the possibilities of heroic action. Now this is what George Eliot does, in putting before us these humble forms of Tom and Maggie, and the like: she _says_ these common "yes" and "no" in terms of Tom and Maggie; and yet says them so that this particular Tom and Maggie burn you through with a special revelation--though one has known a hundred Maggies and Toms before. Thus we find the delight and triumph of the poetic and analytic novelist, George Eliot, precisely parallel to this delight and triumph of the more exclusively poetic Mrs. Browning, who says a man's mere "yes," a woman's common "no," so that it shakes the hearts of all the men and women in the world, etc. Aurora Leigh continues: "In those days, though, I never analysed, Not even myself, Analysis comes late. You catch a sight of nature, earliest; In full front sun-face, and your eye-lids wink And drop before the wonder of 't; you miss The form, through seeing the light. I lived those days, And wrote because I lived--unlicensed else; My heart beat in my brain. Life's violent flood Abolished bounds--and, which my neighbor's field, Which mine, what mattered? It is thus in youth! We play at leap-frog over the god Time; The love within us and the love without Are mixed, confounded; if we are loved or love We scarce distinguish.... In that first outrush of life's chariot wheels We know not if the forests move, or we." And now as showing the extreme range of George Eliot's genius, in regions where perhaps Mrs. Browning never penetrated, let me recall Sister Glegg and Sister Pullet, as types of women contrasting with Maggie and Aurora Leigh. You will remember how Mrs. Tulliver has bidden her three sisters, Mrs. Glegg, Mrs. Pullet, and Mrs. Deane, with their respective husbands, to a great and typical Dodson dinner, in order to eat and drink upon the momentous changes impending in Tom's educational existence: