 a-listening
 Hear the seed sprout in the spring,
 And for music to their dance
 Hear the hedgerows wake from trance,
 Sap that trembles into buds
 Sending little rhythmic floods
 Of fairy sound in fairy ears.
 Thus all beauty that appears
 Has birth as sound to finer sense
 And lighter-clad intelligence.
 
And Gwendolen? - She was thinking of Deronda much more than he was thinking of
her - often wondering what were his ideas »about things,« and how his life was
occupied. But a lap-dog would be necessarily at a loss in framing to itself the
motives and adventures of doghood at large; and it was as far from Gwendolen's
conception that Deronda's life could be determined by the historical destiny of
the Jews, as that he could rise into the air on a brazen horse, and so vanish
from her horizon in the form of a twinkling star.
    With all the sense of inferiority that had been forced upon her, it was
inevitable that she should imagine a larger place for herself in his thoughts
than she actually possessed. They must be rather old and wise persons who are
not apt to see their own anxiety or elation about themselves reflected in other
minds; and Gwendolen, with her youth and inward solitude, may be excused for
dwelling on signs of special interest in her shown by the one person who had
impressed her with the feeling of submission, and for mistaking the colour and
proportion of those signs in the mind of Deronda.
    Meanwhile, what would he tell her that she ought to do? »He said, I must get
more interest in others, and more knowledge, and that I must care about the best
things - but how am I to begin?« She wondered what books he would tell her to
take up to her own room, and recalled the famous writers that she had either not
looked into or had found the most unreadable, with a half-smiling wish that she
could mischievously ask Deronda if they were not the books called »medicine for
the mind.« Then she repented of her sauciness, and when she was safe from
observation carried up a miscellaneous selection - Descartes, Bacon, Locke,
Butler, Burke, Guizot - knowing, as a clever young lady of education, that these
authors were ornaments of mankind, feeling sure that Deronda had read them, and
hoping that by dipping into them all in succession, with her rapid understanding
she might get a point of view nearer to his level.
    But it was astonishing how little time she found for these vast mental
excursions. Constantly she had to be on the scene as
