Certainly this affair of his marriage with Miss Brooke touched him more

nearly than it did any one of the persons who have hitherto shown their

disapproval of it, and in the present stage of things I feel more

tenderly towards his experience of success than towards the

disappointment of the amiable Sir James. For in truth, as the day

fixed for his marriage came nearer, Mr. Casaubon did not find his

spirits rising; nor did the contemplation of that matrimonial garden

scene, where, as all experience showed, the path was to be bordered

with flowers, prove persistently more enchanting to him than the

accustomed vaults where he walked taper in hand. He did not confess to

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himself, still less could he have breathed to another, his surprise

that though he had won a lovely and noble-hearted girl he had not won

delight,--which he had also regarded as an object to be found by

search. It is true that he knew all the classical passages implying

the contrary; but knowing classical passages, we find, is a mode of

motion, which explains why they leave so little extra force for their

personal application.

Poor Mr. Casaubon had imagined that his long studious bachelorhood had

stored up for him a compound interest of enjoyment, and that large

drafts on his affections would not fail to be honored; for we all of

us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act

fatally on the strength of them. And now he was in danger of being

saddened by the very conviction that his circumstances were unusually

happy: there was nothing external by which he could account for a

certain blankness of sensibility which came over him just when his

expectant gladness should have been most lively, just when he exchanged

the accustomed dulness of his Lowick library for his visits to the

Grange. Here was a weary experience in which he was as utterly

condemned to loneliness as in the despair which sometimes threatened

him while toiling in the morass of authorship without seeming nearer to

the goal. And his was that worst loneliness which would shrink from

sympathy. He could not but wish that Dorothea should think him not

less happy than the world would expect her successful suitor to be; and

in relation to his authorship he leaned on her young trust and

veneration, he liked to draw forth her fresh interest in listening, as

a means of encouragement to himself: in talking to her he presented all

his performance and intention with the reflected confidence of the

pedagogue, and rid himself for the time of that chilling ideal audience

which crowded his laborious uncreative hours with the vaporous pressure

of Tartarean shades.




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