very easily in the same room with the
microscope and even in railway carriages: what banishes them is the vacuum in
gentlemen and lady passengers. How should all the apparatus of heaven and earth,
from the farthest firmament to the tender bosom of the mother who nourished us,
make poetry for a mind that has no movements of awe and tenderness, no sense of
fellowship which thrills from the near to the distant, and back again from the
distant to the near?
    To Deronda this event of finding Mirah was as heart-stirring as anything
that befell Orestes or Rinaldo. He sat up half the night, living again through
the moments since he had first discerned Mirah on the river-brink, with the
fresh and fresh vividness which belongs to emotive memory. When he took up a
book to try and dull this urgency of inward vision, the printed words were no
more than a network through which he saw and heard everything as clearly as
before - saw not only the actual events of two hours, but possibilities of what
had been and what might be which those events were enough to feed with the warm
blood of passionate hope and fear. Something in his own experience caused
Mirah's search after her mother to lay hold with peculiar force on his
imagination. The first prompting of sympathy was to aid her in the search: if
given persons were extant in London there were ways of finding them, as subtle
as scientific experiment, the right machinery being set at work. But here the
mixed feelings which belonged to Deronda's kindred experience naturally
transfused themselves into his anxiety on behalf of Mirah.
    The desire to know his own mother, or to know about her, was constantly
haunted with dread; and in imagining what might befall Mirah it quickly occurred
to him that finding the mother and brother from whom she had been parted when
she was a little one might turn out to be a calamity. When she was in the boat
she said that her mother and brother were good; but the goodness might have been
chiefly in her own ignorant innocence and yearning memory, and the ten or twelve
years since the parting had been time enough for much worsening. Spite of his
strong tendency to side with the objects of prejudice, and in general with those
who got the worst of it, his interest had never been practically drawn towards
existing Jews, and the facts he knew about them, whether they walked conspicuous
in fine apparel or lurked in by-streets, were chiefly of the sort most repugnant
to him. Of learned and accomplished Jews he took it for granted that they had
dropped their religion, and