Country life -- England -- Fiction; England -- Social conditions -- 19th century -- Fiction; Rural poor -- England -- Fiction
apparently the most unlike and insignificant; and daily she became a
more reverent listener, and gave herself up, half against her will
and conscience, to the guidance of a man whom she knew to be her
inferior in morals and in orthodoxy. She had worshipped intellect,
and now it had become her tyrant; and she was ready to give up every
belief which she once had prized, to flutter like a moth round its
fascinating brilliance.
Who can blame her, poor girl? For Lancelot's humility was even more
irresistible than his eloquence. He assumed no superiority. He
demanded her assent to truths, not because they were his opinions,
but simply for the truth's sake; and on all points which touched the
heart he looked up to her as infallible and inspired. In questions
of morality, of taste, of feeling, he listened not as a lover to his
mistress, but rather as a baby to its mother; and thus, half
unconsciously to himself, he taught her where her true kingdom lay,-
-that the heart, and not the brain, enshrines the priceless pearl of
womanhood, the oracular jewel, the 'Urim and Thummim,' before which
gross man can only inquire and adore.
And, in the meantime, a change was passing upon Lancelot. His
morbid vanity--that brawl-begotten child of struggling self-conceit
and self-disgust--was vanishing away; and as Mr. Tennyson says in
one of those priceless idyls of his, before which the shade of
Theocritus must hide his diminished head,--
'He was altered, and began
To move about the house with joy,
And with the certain step of man.'
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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