Page:Early Essays by George Eliot (1919).djvu/25

 indeed, to shrink from all organized existences. He was an ardent lover of Nature, but it was in her grand inorganic forms—the blue sky, the stars, the clouds, the sea, mountains, rocks, and rivers—in which she seems pregnant with some sublimer birth than the living races of this globe. He would lie on the grass gazing at the setting sun with a look of intense yearning which might have belonged to a banished Uriel. The roaring of the wind would produce in him an enthusiastic excitement, a spiritual intoxication. He felt a delight in the destructive power of the elements, which seemed to be in singular conflict with his angelic pity: had he been a witness of an earthquake, a city on fire, or the eruption of a volcano, I know not which would have predominated in him, bleeding compassion for the sufferers, or wild ecstacy at the triumphant fury of the forces of nature.

Such in part was Macarthy; and it is no wonder that before he had well attained manhood, he renounced all attempts at any profession, which must have made him one of the weary labourers in the treadmill of society. He thought the fetters of comparative poverty less heavy than those of wealth, and determined to content himself with his small hereditary property. This he considerably reduced by travelling in foreign countries, and by gifts which 19