Page:George Eliot and Judaism.djvu/100

 rated themselves from their people of their own free will, and in those who have been stolen from their race by their parents. The thoughts which lie slumbering in Deronda are brought to consciousness by Mordecai, and the explanations which he receives from his mother fix them firmly in his mind as realities. His own words express this most clearly when he says to Mordecai: "It is you who have given shape to what, I believe, was an inherited yearning—the effect of brooding, passionate thoughts in many ancestors—thoughts that seem to have been intensely present in my grandfather. Suppose the stolen offspring of some mountain tribe brought up in a city of the plain, or one with an inherited genius for painting and born blind—the ancestral life would be within them as a dim longing for unknown objects and sensations, and the spell-bound habit of their inherited frames would be like