Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 1, 2025
Of course, I knew that she was digesting the acquisitions of each day with a view to writing; but I had not the slightest idea of the period to which her inquiries were specially directed, or of the nature of the work intended. But when I read Romola, I was struck by the wonderful power of absorption manifested in every page of it.
Tessa, who had hitherto been occupied in coaxing Ninna out of her waking peevishness, now sat down in her low chair, near Romola's knee, arranging Ninna's tiny person to advantage, jealous that the strange lady too seemed to notice the boy most, as Naldo did. "Lillo was going to be angry with me, because I sat in Babbo's chair," said Romola, as she bent forward to kiss Ninna's little foot.
He never wished you to live for worldly ambitions and fleshly lusts; he wished you to live as he himself has done, according to the purest maxims of philosophy, in which he brought you up." Romola spoke partly by rote, as all ardent and sympathetic young creatures do; but she spoke with intense belief. The pink flush was in her face, and she quivered from head to foot.
Romola, fully assured during the day of the Frate's safety, was feeling the reaction of some penitence for the access of distrust and indignation which had impelled her to address her husband publicly on a matter that she knew he wished to be private. She told herself that she had probably been wrong.
There is sex in "Pride and Prejudice"; "Jane Eyre" and "Aurora Leigh" are full of sex; "Romola", "Daniel Deronda", and "Adam Bede" are sexless, and therefore lifeless. There is very little sex in George Sand's works, and they, too, have gone the way of sexless things.
Just as Kingsley, who had far greater poetic faculty than George Eliot, mistook in making the Saint's Tragedy a drama, when he might have made it a grand historical romance, so George Eliot made a cruel mistake in writing the Spanish Gypsy as a poem, when she might have written it as an historical romance a romance, it may be, much superior to Romola, as the subject and the conception were on grander lines.
The parting must come at last, but as Romola turned continually before she passed out of sight, she saw the little flock lingering to catch the last waving of her hand. On the fourteenth of April Romola was once more within the walls of Florence.
It was a brief and simple plea; but it was the condensed story of Romola's self-repressing colourless young life, which had thrown all its passion into sympathy with aged sorrows, aged ambition, aged pride and indignation. It had never occurred to Romola that she should not speak as directly and emphatically of her love for Tito as of any other subject.
Romola made no visible movement, uttered not even a suppressed sound: she stood more firmly, caring for his firmness. She saw him pause, saw the white head kept erect, while he said, in a voice distinctly audible "It is but a short space of life that my fellow-citizens have taken from me." She perceived that he was gazing slowly round him as he spoke.
Romola paused no longer. That evening she was in Florence, sitting in agitated silence under the exclamations of joy and wailing, mingled with exuberant narrative, which were poured into her ears by Monna Brigida, who had backslided into false hair in Romola's absence, but now drew it off again and declared she would not mind being grey, if her dear child would stay with her.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking