Middlemarch

by George Eliot

“It would be a great honor to any one to be his companion,” said Dorothea, energetically. “You like him, eh?” said Mr. Brooke, without showing any surprise, or other emotion. “Well, now, I’ve known Casaubon ten years, ever since he came to Lowick. But I never got anything out of him—any ideas, you know. However, he is a tiptop man and may be a bishop—that kind of thing, you know, if Peel stays in. And he has a very high opinion of you, my dear.”

From Jules Verne's "Journey to the Center of the Earth": "He [Professor Otto Lidenbrock] was an egotistical scholar, a deep well of scientific knowledge whose pulley screeched when you tried to draw something out of it. In a word, he was a miser." From JRR Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers": "There was a time when he [Saruman] was always walking about my woods. He was polite in those days, always asking my leave (at least when he met me); and always eager to listen. I told him many things that he would never have found out by himself; but he never repaid me in like kind."

have not these structures some common basis from which they have all started, as your sarsnet, gauze, net, satin, and velvet from the raw cocoon? Here would be another light, as of oxy-hydrogen, showing the very grain of things, and revising all former explanations. Of this sequence to Bichat’s work, already vibrating along many currents of the European mind, Lydgate was enamoured; he longed to demonstrate the more intimate relations of living structure, and help to define men’s thought more accurately after the true order. The work had not yet been done, but only prepared for those who knew how to use the preparation. What was the primitive tissue? In that way Lydgate put the question—not quite in the way required by the awaiting answer; but such missing of the right word befalls many seekers.

Like the Key To All Mythologies

Her finely touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

Compare this unvisited tomb with an unwept death in "Silas Marner" that also has unknown consequences: "There was a pauper's burial that week in Raveloe, and up Kench Yard at Batherley it was known that the dark-haired woman with the fair child, who had lately come to lodge there, was gone away again. That was all the express notetaken that Molly had disappeared from the eyes of men. But the unwept death which, to the general lot, seemed astrivial as the summer-shed leaf, was charged with the force of destiny to certain human lives that we know of, shaping their joys and sorrows even to the end."