It comes when music stirs us, and the chords
   Moving on some grand climax shake our souls
   With influx new that makes new energies. 
   It comes in swellings of the heart and tears
   That rise at noble and at gentle deeds—­
   At labors of the master-artist’s hand
   Which, trembling, touches to a finer end,
   Trembling before an image seen within. 
   It comes in moments of heroic love,
   Unjealous joy in love not made for us—­
   In conscious triumph of the good within,
   Making us worship goodness that rebukes. 
   Even our failures are a prophecy,
   Even our yearnings and our bitter tears
   After that fair and true we cannot grasp;
   As patriots who seem to die in vain
   Make liberty more sacred by their pangs,
   Presentiment of better things on earth
   Sweeps in with every force that stirs our souls
   To admiration, self-renouncing love,
   Or thoughts, like light, that bind the world in one: 
   Sweeps like the sense of vastness, when at night
   We hear the roll and dash of waves that break
   Nearer and nearer with the rushing tide,
   Which rises to the level of the cliff
   Because the wide Atlantic roils behind,
   Throbbing respondent to the far-off orbs.

George Eliot did all that could be done to make the morality she taught commendable and inspiring.  In her own direct teachings, and in the development of her characters and her plots, she has done much to make it acceptable.  Her strong insistence on the social basis of morality is to be admired, and the truth presented is one of great importance.  Even more important is her teaching of the stern nature of retribution, that every thought, word and deed has its effect.  There is need of such teaching, and it can be appropriated into the thought and life of the time with great promise of good.  Yet the outcome of George Eliot’s morality was rather depressing than otherwise.  While she was no pessimist, yet she made her readers feel that life was pessimistic in its main tendencies.  She makes on the minds of very many of her readers the impression that life has not very much light in it.  This comes from the whole cast of her mind, and still more because the light of true ideal hopes was absent from her thought.  A stern, ascetic view of life appears throughout her pages, one of the results of the new morality and the humanitarian gospel of altruism.  Unbending, unpitiful, does the universe seem to be when the idea of law and Nemesis is so strongly presented, and with no relief from it in the theory of man’s free will.  Not less depressing to the moral nature is an unrelieved view of the universe under the omnipotent law of cause and effect, which is not lighted by any vision of God and a spiritual order interpenetrating the material.  Her teaching too often takes the tone of repression; it is hard and exacting.  She devotes many pages to showing the effects of the