Eliot, George (1819-1880)

The Mill on the Floss

Edinburgh and London

William Blackwood and Sons

1860

"I think there are stores laid up in our human nature that our understandings can make no complete inventory of."

'I have never had any doubt that you would be the same, whenever I might see you,' said Philip. 'I mean, the same in everything that made me like you better than any one else. I don't want to explain that: I don't think any of the strongest effects our natures are susceptible of can ever be explained. We can neither detect the process by which they are arrived at nor the mode in which they act on us. The greatest of painters only once painted a mysteriously divine child - he couldn't have told how he did it - and we can't tell why we feel it to be divine. I think there are stores laid up in our human nature that our understandings can make no complete inventory of. Certain strains of music affect me so strangely - I can never hear them without their changing my whole attitude of mind for a time, and if the effect would last I might be capable of heroisms.' (p. 317)

Container::Stores

Reading A.S. Byatt's edition for Penguin Classics and searching at <http://www.princeton.edu/~batke/eliot/mill/>

See The Mill on the Floss (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1860). <Vol. I in Google Books><Vol. II><Vol. III>

06/25/2007