astronomer¹ threads the darkness with strict deduction², accounting³ so

    for every visible arc in the wanderer’s orbit; and the narrator of

    human actions, if he did his work with the same completeness, would

    have to thread the hidden pathways of feeling and thought which lead

    up to every moment of action, and to those moments of intense

    suffering which take the quality of action—like the cry of

    Prometheus, whose chained anguish⁴ seems a greater energy than the sea

    and sky he invokes⁵ and the deity⁶ he defies.

Deronda’s circumstances, indeed, had been exceptional. One moment had been burned into his life as its chief epoch⁷—a moment full of July sunshine and large pink roses shedding their last petals⁸ on a grassy⁹ court enclosed on three sides by a gothic cloister¹⁰. Imagine him in such a scene: a boy of thirteen, stretched prone¹¹ on the grass where it was in shadow, his curly head propped¹³ on his arms over a book, while his tutor, also reading, sat on a camp-stool under shelter. Deronda’s book was Sismondi’s History of the Italian Republics; the lad had a passion for history, eager to know how time had been filled up since the flood, and how things were carried on in the dull periods. Suddenly he let down his left arm and looked at his tutor, saying in purest boyish tones,

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