grief and was not too confident
about his own career; speculative enough to understand every moral difficulty,
yet socially susceptible, as he himself was, and having every outward sign of
equality either in bodily or spiritual wrestling; - for he had found it
impossible to reciprocate confidences with one who looked up to him. But he had
no expectation of meeting the friend he imagined. Deronda's was not one of those
quiveringly-poised natures that lend themselves to second-sight.
 

                                Chapter XXXVIII

            There be who hold that the deeper tragedy were a Prometheus Bound
            not after but before he had well got the celestial fire into the
            narthx whereby it might be conveyed to mortals: thrust by the Kratos
            and Bia of instituted methods into a solitude of despised ideas,
            fastened in throbbing helplessness by the fatal pressure of poverty
            and disease - a solitude where many pass by, but none regard.
 
Second-sight is a flag over disputed ground. But it is matter of knowledge that
there are persons whose yearnings, conceptions - nay, travelled conclusions -
continually take the form of images which have a foreshadowing power: the deed
they would do starts up before them in complete shape, making a coercive type;
the event they hunger for or dread rises into vision with a seed-like growth,
feeding itself fast on unnumbered impressions. They are not always the less
capable of the argumentative process, nor less sane than the commonplace
calculators of the market: sometimes it may be that their natures have manifold
openings, like the hundred-gated Thebes, where there may naturally be a greater
and more miscellaneous inrush than through a narrow beadle-watched portal. No
doubt there are abject specimens of the visionary, as there is a minim mammal
which you might imprison in the finger of your glove. That small relative of the
elephant has no harm in him; but what great mental or social type is free from
specimens whose insignificance is both ugly and noxious? One is afraid to think
of all that the genus patriot embraces; or of the elbowing there might be at the
day of judgment for those who ranked as authors, and brought volumes either in
their hands or on trucks.
    This apology for inevitable kinship is meant to usher in some facts about
Mordecai, whose figure had bitten itself into Deronda's mind as a new question
which he felt an interest in getting answered. But the interest was no more than
a vaguely-expectant suspense: the consumptive-looking Jew, apparently a fervid
student of some kind, getting his crust by a quiet handicraft, like Spinoza,
fitted into none of Deronda's anticipations.
    It