Page:George Eliot and Judaism.djvu/39

 sentiment. George Eliot has taken care to draw her figures true; and no sympathetic reader can gainsay her there, that even this much-ridiculed longing after Palestine is well fitted to inform a human life with rapturous and noble impulses. This ardent desire for a national future on the part of the Israelites forms the intellectual centre and heart of her book. She has expressed herself on this point with all desirable clearness; and as it would be presumptuous to attempt to put in other words what she has so inimitably given utterance to herself, her ideas concerning the future of the Jewish nation may be quoted here as they stand in her work:—

"The life of a people grows, it is knit together and yet expanded, in joy and sorrow, in thought and action; it absorbs the thought of other nations into its own forms, and gives back the thought as new wealth to the world; it is a