Even people whose lives have been made various by learning, sometimes find it hard to keep a fast hold on their habitual¹ views of life, on their faith in the Invisible, nay², on the sense that their past joys and sorrows are a real experience, when they are suddenly transported to a new land, where the beings around them know nothing of their history, and share none of their ideas—where their mother earth shows another lap, and human life has other forms than those on which their souls have been nourished. Minds that have been unhinged from their old faith and love, have perhaps sought this Lethean influence of exile, in which the past becomes dreamy because its symbols have all vanished, and the present too is dreamy because it is linked with no memories. But even their experience may hardly enable them thoroughly³ to imagine what was the effect on a simple weaver⁴ like Silas Marner, when he left his own country and people and came to settle in Raveloe. Nothing could be more unlike his native town, set within sight of the widespread hillsides, than this low, wooded region, where he felt hidden even from the heavens by the screening trees and hedgerows. There was nothing here, when he rose in the deep morning quiet and looked out on the dewy brambles and rank tufted grass, that seemed to have any relation with that life centring in Lantern Yard, which had once been to him the altar-place of high dispensations. The whitewashed⁵ walls; the little pews where well-known figures entered with a subdued⁶ rustling⁷, and where first one well-known voice and then another, pitched in a peculiar⁸ key of petition, uttered phrases at once occult and familiar, like the amulet⁹ worn on the heart; the pulpit where the minister delivered unquestioned

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