Page:The Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow, a Book for an Idle Holiday - Jerome (1886).djvu/31

 sweet mingling of pleasure and pity that we feel when old knight-hearted Colonel Newcome answers "adsum" to the great roll-call, or when Tom and Maggie Tulliver, clasping hands through the mists that have divided them, go down, locked in each other's arms, beneath the swollen waters of the Floss.

Talking of poor Tom and Maggie Tulliver brings to my mind a saying of George Eliot's in connection with this subject of melancholy. She speaks somewhere of the "sadness of a summer's evening." How wonderfully true—like everything that came from that wonderful pen—the observation is! Who has not felt the sorrowful enchantment of those lingering sunsets? The world belongs to Melancholy then, a thoughtful, deep-eyed maiden who loves not the glare of day. It is not till "light thickens, and the crow wings to the rocky wood," that she steals forth from her groves. Her palace is in twilight land. It is there she meets us. At her shadowy gate she takes our hand in hers, and walks besides us through her mystic realm. We see no form, but seem to hear the rustling of her wings.

Even in the toiling hum-drum city, her spirit comes to us. There is a sombre presence in each long, dull street; and the dark river creeps ghost-like, under the black arches, as if bearing some hidden secret beneath its muddy waves.

In the silent country, when the trees and hedges loom dim and blurred against the rising night, and the