 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.
    For to Dorothea, after that toy-box history of the world adapted to young
ladies which had made the chief part of her education, Mr. Casaubon's talk about
his great book was full of new vistas; and this sense of revelation, this
surprise of a nearer introduction to Stoics and Alexandrians, as people who had
ideas not totally unlike her own, kept in abeyance for the time her usual
eagerness for a binding theory which could bring her own life and doctrine into
strict connection with that amazing past, and give the remotest sources of
knowledge some bearing on her actions. That more complete teaching would come -
Mr. Casaubon would tell her all that: she was looking forward to higher
initiation in ideas, as she was looking forward to marriage, and blending her
dim conceptions of both. It would be a great mistake to suppose that Dorothea
would have cared about any share in Mr. Casaubon's learning as mere
accomplishment; for though opinion in the neighbourhood of Freshitt and Tipton
had pronounced her clever, that epithet would not have described her to circles
in whose more precise vocabulary cleverness implies mere aptitude for knowing
and doing, apart from character. All her eagerness for acquirement lay within
that full current of sympathetic motive in which her ideas and impulses were
habitually swept along. She did not want to deck herself with knowledge - to
wear it loose from the nerves and blood that fed her
