Page:Early Essays by George Eliot (1919).djvu/33

 It is to live, not for our friends, not for those hostages to fortune, wives and children; not for any individual, any specific form; but for something which, while it dwells in these, has an existence beyond them. It is to live for the good, the true, the beautiful, which outlive every generation and are all-pervading as the light which vibrates from the remotest nebula to our own sun. The spirit which has ascertained its true relation to these can never be an orphan: it has its home in the eternal mind, from which neither things present nor to come can separate it. You may infallibly discern the man who lives thus. His eye has not that restless, irresolute glance which tells of no purpose beyond the present hour: it looks as you might imagine the eye of Numa to have looked after an interview with Egeria; the earnest attention and veneration with which it gazed on the divine instructress still lingering in its expression.

Such a man is not like the parasitic plants which crawl ignobly or climb aspiringly, just as accident has disposed the objects around them. He has a course of his own, like our forest trees, a fixed form of growth which defies and hurls down the stones and mortar with which society attempts to bind him in. He loves individuals, he labours for specific objects, but only as transient forms of the 27