Page:The Essays of George Eliot, ed. Sheppard, 1883.djvu/264

 with the mild warmth of morning sunlight on the commonest objects, at once disclosing every detail, and investing every detail with beauty! No object is too small to prompt his song—not the sooty film on the bars, or the spoutless teapot holding a bit of mignonette that serves to cheer the dingy town-lodging with a "hint that Nature lives;" and yet his song is never trivial, for he is alive to small objects, not because his mind is narrow, but because his glance is clear and his heart is large. Instead of trying to edify us by supercilious allusions to the "brutes" and the "stalls," he interests us in that tragedy of the hen-roost when the thief has wrenched the door,

in the patient cattle, that on the winter's morning

in the little squirrel, that, surprised by him in his woodland walk,

And then he passes into reflection, not with curt apothegm and snappish reproof, but with that melodious flow of utterance which belongs to thought when it is carried along in a stream of feeling:

His large and tender heart embraces the most every-day forms of human life—the carter driving his team through the wintry storm; the cottager's wife who, painfully nursing the embers on her hearth, while her infants "sit cowering o'er the sparks,"

or the villager, with her little ones, going out to pick