together your whole being, past and present, in one unspeakable vibration; melting you in one moment with all the tenderness, all the love that has been scattered through the toilsome years, concentrating in one emotion of heroic courage or resignation all the hard-learned lessons of self-renouncing sympathy, blending your present joy with past sorrow, and your present sorrow with all your past joy?  If not, then neither is it a weakness to be so wrought upon by the exquisite curves of a woman’s cheek and neck and arms, by the liquid depths of her beseeching eyes, or the sweet childish pout of her lips.  For the beauty of a lovely woman is like music; what can one say more?  Beauty has an expression beyond and far above the one woman’s soul that it clothes, as the words of genius have a wider meaning than the thought that prompted them; it is more than a woman’s love that moves us in a woman’s eyes—­it seems to be a far-off, mighty love that has come near to us, and made speech for itself there; the rounded neck, the dimpled arm, move us by something more than their prettiness—­by their close kinship with all we have known of tenderness and peace. [Footnote:  Adam Bede, chapter XXXIII.]

Love, music and beautiful landscapes continually inspire the poetic side of her nature; and these themes, which are constantly recurring in her chapters, draw forth her imagination and give fervor and enthusiasm to her expression.  Her love of nature is deep and most appreciative of all its transformations and beauties.  This sensitiveness to the changes of the outward world is a large element in her mind, and indicates the reality of her poetic gifts.  This may be seen in a passage such as the following:—­

The ride to Stone Court, which Fred and Rosamond took the next morning, lay through a pretty bit of midland landscape, almost all meadows and pastures, with hedgerows still allowed to grow in bushy beauty, and to spread out coral fruit for the birds.  Little details gave each field a particular physiognomy, dear to the eyes that have looked on them from childhood; the pool in the corner where the grasses were dank and trees leaned whisperingly; the great oak shadowing a bare place in mid-pasture; the high bank where the ash-trees grew; the sudden slope of the old marl-pit making a red background for the burdock; the huddled roofs and ricks of the homestead without a traceable way of approach; the gray gate and fences against the depths of the bordering wood; and the stray hovel, its old, old thatch full of mossy hills and valleys, with wondrous modulations of light and shadow, such as we travel far to see in later life, and see larger, but not more beautiful.  These are the things that made the gamut of joy in landscape to midland-bred souls—­the things they toddled among, or perhaps learned by heart, standing between their father’s knees while he drove leisurely. [Footnote:  Middlemarch, chapter XII.]

It is nature as affecting man, and man as transformed