"No dust has settled on one's mind then [at breakfast-time], and it presents a clear mirror to the rays of things."
— Eliot, George (1819-1880)
Author
Work Title
Place of Publication
Edinburgh and London
Publisher
William Blackwood and Sons
Date
1859
Metaphor
"No dust has settled on one's mind then [at breakfast-time], and it presents a clear mirror to the rays of things."
Metaphor in Context
"I like breakfast-time better than any other moment in the day," said Mr Irwine. "No dust has settled on one's mind then, and it presents a clear mirror to the rays of things. I always have a favourite book by me at breakfast, and I enjoy the bits I pick up then so much, that regularly every morning it seems to me as if I should certainly become studious again. But presently Dent brings up a poor fellow who has killed a hare, and when I've got through my 'justicing,' as Carroll calls it, I'm inclined for a ride round the glebe, and on my way back I meet with the master of the workhouse, who has got a long story of a mutinous pauper to tell me; and so the day goes on, and I'm always the same lazy fellow before evening sets in. Besides, one wants the stimulus of sympathy, and I have [Page 316 ] never had that since poor D'Oyley left Treddleston. If you had stuck to your books well, you rascal, I should have had a pleasanter prospect before me. But scholarship doesn't run in your family blood."
(pp. 315-6)
Categories
Provenance
Searching "mirror" in HDIS (Prose)
Citation
Eliot, George. Adam Bede. 3 vols. Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1859. Chadwyck-Healey: Nineteenth-Century Fiction Full-Text Database, 1999.
Theme
Mirror
Date of Entry
11/06/2009
