"[people of] primitive wants, and to whom a life of hard toil has never been illuminated by any enthusiastic religious faith. To them pain and mishap present a far wider range of possibilities than gladness and enjoyment: their imagination is almost barren of the images that feed desire and hope, but is all overgrown by recollections that are a perpetual pasture to fear." (Silas Marner, 14)

"What, looked at closely, was the end of all life, but to extract the utmost sum of pleasure? And was not his own blooming life a promise of incomparably more pleasure, not for himself only, but for others, than the withered wintry life of a man who was past the time of keen enjoyment, and whose ideas had stiffened into barren rigidity?" (Romola,167)

"'Low spirits!' I thought bitterly, as he rode away; 'that is the sort of phrase with which coarse, narrow natures like yours think to describe experience of which you can know no more than your horse knows. It is to such as you that the good of this world falls: ready dullness, healthy selfishness, good-tempered conceit- these are the keys to happiness." (The Lifted Veil, 37)

"What, looked at closely, was the end of all life, but to extract the utmost sum of pleasure? And was not his own blooming life a promise of incomparably more pleasure, not for himself only, but for others, than the withered wintry life of a man who was past the time of keen enjoyment, and whose ideas had stiffened into barren rigidity?" (Romola,167)

"While the heart beats, bruise it - it is your only opportunity; while the eye can still turn towards you with moist timid entreaty, freeze it with an icy unanswering gaze; while the ear, that delicate messenger to the inmost sanctuary of the soul, can still take in the tones of kindness, put it off with hard civility, or sneering compliment, or envious affectation of indifference; ...." (The Lifted Veil, 3)

"there was no Unseen Love that cared for him. Thought was arrested by utter bewilderment, now its old narrow pathway was closed, and affection seemed to have died under the bruise that had fallen on its keenest nerves." (Silas Marner, 15)

The glass, again, though elegant and quaint, and very varied in form, was somewhat bubbled and hornier in texture than the commercial articles of the nineteenth century. The furniture and general fittings of the hall were much of a piece with the table-gear, beautiful in form and highly ornamented, but without the commercial 'finish' of the joiners and cabinet-makers of our time. (News From Nowhere, 131)

[Death of Jenny Wren's father] "Force of police arriving, he recognized in them the conspirators, and laid about him hoarsely, fiercely, staringly, convulsively, foamingly. A humble machine, familiar to the conspirators and called by the expressive name of Stretcher, being unavoidably sent for, he was rendered a harmless bundle of torn rags by being strapped down upon it, with voice and consciousness gone out of him and life fast going." (Our Mutual Friend, 800)

"the three young women flitting to and fro. ... As to their dress, which of course I took note of, I should say that they were decently veiled with drapery, and not bundled up with millinery; that they were clothed like women, not upholstered like arm-chairs .... they were so kind and happy-looking in expression of face, so shapely and well-knit of body." (News From Nowhere, 53)

"If the conventional Cherub could ever grow up and be clothed, he might be photographed as a portrait of Wilfer. His chubby, smooth, innocent appearance was a reason for his being always treated with condescension when he was not put down." (Our Mutual Friend, 75)

"...such generosity and abundance of life that I was exhilarated to a pitch that I had never yet reached. I fairly chuckled for pleasure" (News From Nowhere, 63)

"her visitor's startled stare at the clustered spoils of Poynton" (Spoils of Poynton, 139)

"'Low spirits!' I thought bitterly, as he rode away; 'that is the sort of phrase with which coarse, narrow natures like yours think to describe experience of which you can know no more than your horse knows. It is to such as you that the good of this world falls: ready dullness, healthy selfishness, good-tempered conceit- these are the keys to happiness." (The Lifted Veil, 37)

"The brilliant illumination within seemed to press upon his eyes with palpable force after the pale scattered lights and broad shadows of the piazza ... and the uninterrupted chant from the choir was repose to the ear after the hellish hubbub of the crowd outside. .... The whole area of the great church was filled with peasant-women, some kneeling, some standing; the coarse bronzed skins, and the dingy clothing of the rougher dwellers on the mountains, contrasting with the softer-lined faces and the white or red head-drapery of the well-to-do dwellers in the valley ... And spreading high and far over the walls and ceiling there was another multitude, also pressing close against each other, that they might be nearer the potent Virgin. It was the crowd of votive waxen images .... It was a perfect resurrection-swarm of remote mortals and fragments of mortals, reflecting, in their varying degrees of freshness, the sombre dinginess and sprinkled brightness of the crowd below." (Romola, 200)

[Charley] "curious mixture" of "uncompleted savagery and uncompleted civilization. His voice was hoarse and coarse, and his face was coarse, and his stunted figure was coarse; but he was cleaner than other boys of this type; and his writing, though large and round, was good" (Our Mutual Friend, 60)

"And everything so vaunted the spoiling influences of water - discoloured copper, rotten wood, honey-combed stone, green dank deposit - that the after-consequences of being crushed, sucked under, and drawn down, looked as ugly to the imagination as the main event" (Our Mutual Friend, 219)

"You'd have cuddled into your warm corner, but you'd have been wounded and weeping and martyrised, and have taken every opportunity to tell people I'm a brute" (Spoils of Poynton, 80)

It was exceedingly pleasant in the dappled shadow, for the day was growing as hot as need be, and the coolness and shade soothed my excited mind into a condition of dreamy pleasure, so that I felt as if I should like to go on for ever through that balmy freshness. My companion seemed to share my feelings, and let the horse go slower and slower as he sat inhaling the green forest scents, chief amongst which was the smell of the trodden bracken near the wayside. (News From Nowhere, 64)

 "Pied Beauty"

[Sloppy] "shining and winking and gleaming and twinkling out of a hundred of those eyes of bright metal, at the dazzled spectators. The artistic taste of some unknown hatter had furnished him with a hatband of wholesale capacity which was fluted behind, from the crown of his hat to the brim, and terminated in a black bunch, from which the imagination shrunk discomfited and the reason revolted. Some special powers with which his legs were endowed, had already hitched up his glossy trousers at the ankles, and bagged them at the knees" (Our Mutual Friend, 391)

"As high bold diplomacy it dazzled her and carried her off her feet" (Spoils of Poynton, 146)

"A bow-shot from her bower-eaves,
He rode between the barley-sheaves,
The sun came dazzling through the leaves,
And flamed upon the brazen greaves
Of bold Sir Lancelot.
A red-cross knight for ever kneeled
To a lady in his shield,
That sparkled on the yellow field,
Beside remote Shalott.

"The gemmy bridle glittered free,
Like to some branch of stars we see
Hung in the golden Galaxy.
The Bridle bells rang merrily
As he rode down to Camelot:
And from his blazoned baldric slung
A might silver bugle hung,
And as he rode his armour rung,
Beside remote Shalott. (Tennyson, from "The Lady of Shalott")

In those pleasant little towns on Thames, you may hear the fall of the water over the weirs, or even, in still weather, the rustle of the rushes; and from the bridge you may see the young river, dimpled like a young child, playfully gliding away among the trees, unpolluted by the defilements that lie in wait for it on its course, and as yet our of hearing of the deep summons of the sea. It were too much to pretend that Betty Higden made out such thoughts; no; but she heard the tender river whispering to many like herself, 'come to me, come to me! .... My breast is softer than the pauper-nuse's; death in my arms is peacefuller than among the pauper-wards. (Our Mutual Friend, 567)

"A perfect traitor should have a face which vice can write no marks on - lips that will lie with a dimpled smile - eyes of such agate-like brightness and depth that no infamy can dull them - cheeks that will rise from a murder and not look haggard. ... he has a beautiful face, informed with rich young blood "(Romola, 87)

"A grey dusty withered evening in London city has not a hopeful aspect. The closed warehouses and offices have an air of death about them, and the national dread of colour has an air of mourning. the towers and steeples of the many house-encompassed churches, dark and dingy as the sky that seems descending on them, are no relief to the general gloom; ... melancholy waifs ... melancholy waifs ... melancholy waifs and strays explore them, searching and stooping and poking for anything to sell" (Our Mutual Friend, 450)

"The brilliant illumination within seemed to press upon his eyes with palpable force after the pale scattered lights and broad shadows of the piazza ... and the uninterrupted chant from the choir was repose to the ear after the hellish hubbub of the crowd outside. .... The whole area of the great church was filled with peasant-women, some kneeling, some standing; the coarse bronzed skins, and the dingy clothing of the rougher dwellers on the mountains, contrasting with the softer-lined faces and the white or red head-drapery of the well-to-do dwellers in the valley ... And spreading high and far over the walls and ceiling there was another multitude, also pressing close against each other, that they might be nearer the potent Virgin. It was the crowd of votive waxen images .... It was a perfect resurrection-swarm of remote mortals and fragments of mortals, reflecting, in their varying degrees of freshness, the sombre dinginess and sprinkled brightness of the crowd below." (Romola, 200)

"Then, the train rattled among the house-tops, and among the ragged sides of houses torn down to make way for it, and over the swarming streets, and under the fruitful earth, until it shot across the river: bursting over the quiet surface like a bomb-shell, and gone again as if it had exploded in the rush of smoke and steam and glare. A little more, and again it roared across the river, a great rocket: spurning the watery turnings and doublings with ineffable contempt, and going straight to its end, as Father Time goes top his. (Our Mutual Friend, 821-22)

"'Low spirits!' I thought bitterly, as he rode away; 'that is the sort of phrase with which coarse, narrow natures like yours think to describe experience of which you can know no more than your horse knows. It is to such as you that the good of this world falls: ready dullness, healthy selfishness, good-tempered conceit- these are the keys to happiness." (The Lifted Veil, 37)

"The subtle and varied pains springing from the higher sensibility that accompanies higher culture, are perhaps less pitiable than that dreary absence of impersonal enjoyment and consolation which leaves ruder minds to the perpetual urgent companionship of their own griefs and discontents. The lives of those rural forefathers, whom we are apt to think very prosaic figures- men whose only work was to ride round their land, getting heavier and heavier in their saddles, and who passed the rest of their days in the half-listless gratification of senses dulled by monotony..." (Silas Marner, 29)

"A dull mind, once arriving at an inference that flatters a desire, is rarely able to retain the impression that the notion from which the inference started was purely problematic" (Silas Marner, 37)

"This girl, one of two Vetches, had no beauty, but Mrs Gereth, scanning the dullness for a sign of life, had been straightway able to classify such a figure as for the moment the least of her afflictions. Fleda Vetch was dressed with an idea, though perhaps not with much else ... Mrs Gereth had long ago generalised the truth that the temperament of the frump may easily consort with a certain casual prettiness." (Spoils of Poynton, 2)

"I shuddered with horror as the scene recurred to me .... I trembled under her touch; I felt the witchery of her presence; I yearned to be assured of her love. The fear of poison is feeble against the sense of thirst." (The Lifted Veil, 30)

"Sitting on the banks in this way, Silas began to look for the once familiar herbs again; and as the leaves with their unchanged outline and markings lay on his palm, there was a sense of crowding remembrances from which he turned away timidly taking refuge in Eppie's little world, that lay lightly on his enfeebled spirit." (Silas Marner, 125)

[Bardo Bardi] "'For the sustained zeal and unconqerable patience demanded from those who would tread the unbeaten paths of knowledge are still less reconcilable with the wandering, vagrant propensity of the feminine mind than with the feeble powers of the feminine body.'" (Romola, 97)

"... the rational talk, the graceful attentions, the wittily-turned phrases, and the kindly deeds, which used to make the web of their characters, were seen as if thrust asunder by a microscopic vision, that showed all the intermediate frivolities, all the suppressed egoism, all the struggling chaos of puerilities, meanness, vague capricious memories, and indolent make-shift thoughts, from which human words and deeds emerge like leaflets covering a fermenting heap." (The Lifted Veil, 19-20)

"those foolish habits that were no pleasures, but only a feverish way of annulling vacancy" (Silas Marner, 30)

"A dull mind, once arriving at an inference that flatters a desire, is rarely able to retain the impression that the notion from which the inference started was purely problematic" (Silas Marner, 37)

[Fleda Vetch] "On that flushed and huddled Sunday a great matter occurred; her little life became aware of a singular quickening" (Spoils of Poynton, 6)

"There were men, women, and children in the groups, and there was no want of lively colour to flutter in the gentle evening wind. The mingling of various voices and the sound of laughter made a cheerful impression upon the ear, analogous to that of the fluttering colours upon the eye. Into the sheet of water reflecting the flushed sky in the foreground of the living picture, a knot of urchins were casting stones, and watching the expansion of the rippling circles. So, in the rosy evening, one might watch the ever-widening beauty of the landscape - beyond the newly-released workers wending home" (Our Mutual Friend, 756-57)

"Owen, inconsequent and even extravagant, unlike anything she had ever seen him before. He broke off, he came back, he repeated questions without heeding answers, he made vague and abrupt remarks about the resemblances of shop-girls and the uses of chiffon. ... If she had ever dreamed of Owen Gereth as finely fluttered..." (Spoils of Poynton, 42)

"He knelt down in our boat and she in hers, and the usual fumbling took place over hanging the rudder on its hooks, for, as you may imagine, no change had taken place in the arrangement of such an unimportant matter as the rudder of pleasure-boat." (News From Nowhere, 203)

[Sloppy] "shining and winking and gleaming and twinkling out of a hundred of those eyes of bright metal, at the dazzled spectators. The artistic taste of some unknown hatter had furnished him with a hatband of wholesale capacity which was fluted behind, from the crown of his hat to the brim, and terminated in a black bunch, from which the imagination shrunk discomfited and the reason revolted. Some special powers with which his legs were endowed, had already hitched up his glossy trousers at the ankles, and bagged them at the knees" (Our Mutual Friend, 391)

"'No one can get in without being let in... and we couldn't be more snug than here.' So he raked together the yet warm cinders in the rusty grate, and made a fire, and trimmed the candle on the little counter. As the fire cast its flickering gleams here and there upon the dark greasy walls; the Hindoo baby, the African baby, the articulated English baby, the assortment of skulls, and the rest of the collection, came starting to their various stations..." (Our Mutual Friend, 557)

"However, there was still the Thames sparkling under the sun, and near high water, as last night I had seen it gleaming under the moon." (News From Nowhere, 45)

"A fever of ingenuity had started to burn in her, though she was painfully conscious, on behalf of her success, that it was visible as fever. She could herself see the reflection of it gleam in her critic's sombre eyes." (Spoils of Poynton, 154)

"Ah, cool night-wind, tremulous stars!
Ah, glimmering water,
Fiful earth-murmur,
Dreaming woods!
Ah, golden-haird strangely smiling Goddess,
And though, proved, much enduring,
Wave-tossed Wanderer!
Who can stand still?
Ye fade, ye swim, ye waver before me-
The cup again!" (Matthew Arnold, "The Strayed Reveller")

"... I listened dreamily to the monologues of future experiment and discovery. I mingled them confusedly in my thought with glimpses of blue water and delicate floating cloud, with the notes of birds and the distant glitter of the glacier." (The Lifted Veil, 10)

"A bow-shot from her bower-eaves,
He rode between the barley-sheaves,
The sun came dazzling through the leaves,
And flamed upon the brazen greaves
Of bold Sir Lancelot.
A red-cross knight for ever kneeled
To a lady in his shield,
That sparkled on the yellow field,
Beside remote Shalott.

"The gemmy bridle glittered free,
Like to some branch of stars we see
Hung in the golden Galaxy.
The Bridle bells rang merrily
As he rode down to Camelot:
And from his blazoned baldric slung
A might silver bugle hung,
And as he rode his armour rung,
Beside remote Shalott. (Tennyson, from "The Lady of Shalott")

"A grey dusty withered evening in London city has not a hopeful aspect. The closed warehouses and offices have an air of death about them, and the national dread of colour has an air of mourning. the towers and steeples of the many house-encompassed churches, dark and dingy as the sky that seems descending on them, are no relief to the general gloom; ... melancholy waifs ... melancholy waifs ... melancholy waifs and strays explore them, searching and stooping and poking for anything to sell" (Our Mutual Friend, 450)

"And I cannot but regard the multiplication of these babbling, lawless productions, albeit countenanced by the patronage, and in some degree the example of Lorenzo himself, otherwise a friend to true learning, as a sign that the glorious hopes of this century are to be quenched in gloom; nay, that they have been the delusive prologue to an age worse than that of iron - the age of tinsel and gossamer, in which no thought has substance enough to be moulded in to consistent and lasting form." (Romola,109)

[Sloppy] "shining and winking and gleaming and twinkling out of a hundred of those eyes of bright metal, at the dazzled spectators. The artistic taste of some unknown hatter had furnished him with a hatband of wholesale capacity which was fluted behind, from the crown of his hat to the brim, and terminated in a black bunch, from which the imagination shrunk discomfited and the reason revolted. Some special powers with which his legs were endowed, had already hitched up his glossy trousers at the ankles, and bagged them at the knees" (Our Mutual Friend, 391)

"The wood forming the chimney-pieces, beams, partitions, floor and doors, of the Six Jolly Fellowship Porters, seemed in its old age fraught with confused memories of its youth. In many places it had become gnarled and riven, according to the manner of old trees; knots started out of it; and here and there it seemed to twist itself into some likeness of boughs" (Our Mutual Friend)

"It came from a very bright place; and the little one, rising on its legs, toddled through the snow, the old grimy shawl in which it was wrapped trailing behind it, and the queer little bonnet dangling at its back- toddled on to the open door of Silas Marner's cottage, and right up to the warm hearth, where there was a bright fire of logs and sticks, which had thoroughly warmed the old sack .... squatted down on the sack, and spread its tiny hands towards the blaze, in perfect contentment, gurgling and making many inarticulate communications to the cheerful fire, like a new-hatched gosling beginning to find itself comfortable" (Silas Marner, 107)

"It came from a very bright place; and the little one, rising on its legs, toddled through the snow, the old grimy shawl in which it was wrapped trailing behind it, and the queer little bonnet dangling at its back- toddled on to the open door of Silas Marner's cottage, and right up to the warm hearth, where there was a bright fire of logs and sticks, which had thoroughly warmed the old sack .... squatted down on the sack, and spread its tiny hands towards the blaze, in perfect contentment, gurgling and making many inarticulate communications to the cheerful fire, like a new-hatched gosling beginning to find itself comfortable" (Silas Marner, 107)

"He clasped her, and she gave herself- she poured out her tears on his breast. Something prisoned and pent throbbed and gushed; something deep and sweet surged up - something that came from far within and far off" (Spoils of Poynton, 129)

"... the rational talk, the graceful attentions, the wittily-turned phrases, and the kindly deeds, which used to make the web of their characters, were seen as if thrust asunder by a microscopic vision, that showed all the intermediate frivolities, all the suppressed egoism, all the struggling chaos of puerilities, meanness, vague capricious memories, and indolent make-shift thoughts, from which human words and deeds emerge like leaflets covering a fermenting heap." (The Lifted Veil, 19-20)

"The eye of the soul must be bent upon the finger-point, and the soul's force must fill all the invisible nerves that guide it, ten hours a day, that it may not err from its steely precision, and so soul and sight be worn away, and the whole human being be lost at last- a heap of sawdust, so far as its intellectual work in this world is concerned: saved only by its Heart, which cannot go into the form of cogs and compsses, but expands, after the ten hours are over, into fireside humanity." (Ruskin, "The Nature of Gothic")

[Six Jolly Fellowship Porters, a cosy pub] "long settled down into a state of hale infirmity. In its whole constitution it had not a straight floor, and hardly a straight line; but it had outlasted, and clearly would yet outlast, many a better-trimmed building, many a sprucer public-house. Externally it was a narrow lopsided wooden jumble of corpulent windows heaped one upon another as you might heap as many toppling oranges, with a crazy wooden verandah impending over the water..." (Our Mutual Friend, 102)

[Jenny Wren] "'And yet as I sit at work, I smell miles of flowers. I smell roses, till I think I see the rose-leaves lying in heaps, bushels, on the floor. I smell fallen leaves, till I put down my hand - so - and expect to make them rustle. I smell the white and the pink May in the hedges, and all sorts of flowers that I never was among.'" (Our Mutual Friend, 289)

"Mr Podsnap could tolerate taste in a mushroom man who stood in need of that sort of thing, but was far above it himself. Hideous solidity was the characteristic of the Podsnap plate. Everything was made to look as heavy as it could, and to take up as much room as possible. Everything said boastfully, 'Here you have as much of me in my ugliness as if I were only lead; but I am so many ounces of precious metal worth so much an ounce; wouldn't you like to melt me down?' A corpulent straddling epergne, blotched all over as if it had broken out in an eruption rather than been ornamented, delivered this address from an unsightly silver platform in the centre of the table. Four silver wine-coolers, each furnished with four staring heads, each head obtrusively carrying a big silver ring in each of its ears, conveyed the sentiment up and down the table." (Our Mutual Friend, 177)

"The brilliant illumination within seemed to press upon his eyes with palpable force after the pale scattered lights and broad shadows of the piazza ... and the uninterrupted chant from the choir was repose to the ear after the hellish hubbub of the crowd outside. .... The whole area of the great church was filled with peasant-women, some kneeling, some standing; the coarse bronzed skins, and the dingy clothing of the rougher dwellers on the mountains, contrasting with the softer-lined faces and the white or red head-drapery of the well-to-do dwellers in the valley ... And spreading high and far over the walls and ceiling there was another multitude, also pressing close against each other, that they might be nearer the potent Virgin. It was the crowd of votive waxen images .... It was a perfect resurrection-swarm of remote mortals and fragments of mortals, reflecting, in their varying degrees of freshness, the sombre dinginess and sprinkled brightness of the crowd below." (Romola, 200)

"They were all shivering, and everything about them seemed to be shivering; the river itself, craft, rigging, sails, such early smoke as there yet was on the shore. Black with wet, and altered to the eye by white patches of hail and sleet, the huddled buildings looked lower than usual, as if they were cowering, and had shrunk with the cold. Very little life was to be seen on either bank, windows and doors were shut..." (Our Mutual Friend, 219)

[Six Jolly Fellowship Porters, a cosy pub] "long settled down into a state of hale infirmity. In its whole constitution it had not a straight floor, and hardly a straight line; but it had outlasted, and clearly would yet outlast, many a better-trimmed building, many a sprucer public-house. Externally it was a narrow lopsided wooden jumble of corpulent windows heaped one upon another as you might heap as many toppling oranges, with a crazy wooden verandah impending over the water..." (Our Mutual Friend, 102)

"The wood forming the chimney-pieces, beams, partitions, floor and doors, of the Six Jolly Fellowship Porters, seemed in its old age fraught with confused memories of its youth. In many places it had become gnarled and riven, according to the manner of old trees; knots started out of it; and here and there it seemed to twist itself into some likeness of boughs" (Our Mutual Friend)

"this little stall of Silas Wegg's was the hardest little stall of all the sterile little stalls in London. It gave you the face-ache o look at his apples, the stomach-ache... the tooth-ache... Whether from too much east wind or no - it was an easterly corner - the stall, the stock and the keeper, were all as dry as the Desert. Wegg was a knotty man, and a close-grained, with a face carved out of very hard material that had just as much play of expression as a watchman's rattle sprung. Sooth to say, he was so wooden a man that he seemed to to have taken his wooden leg naturally..." (Our Mutual Friend, 89)

"There were men, women, and children in the groups, and there was no want of lively colour to flutter in the gentle evening wind. The mingling of various voices and the sound of laughter made a cheerful impression upon the ear, analogous to that of the fluttering colours upon the eye. Into the sheet of water reflecting the flushed sky in the foreground of the living picture, a knot of urchins were casting stones, and watching the expansion of the rippling circles. So, in the rosy evening, one might watch the ever-widening beauty of the landscape - beyond the newly-released workers wending home" (Our Mutual Friend, 756-57)

"A weaver who finds hard words in his hymn-book knows nothing of abstractions; as the little child knows nothing of parental love, but only knows one face and one lap towards which it stretches its arms for refuge and nurture" (Silas Marner, 14)

"Marner took her on his lap, trembling with an emotion mysterious to himself, at something unknown dawning on his life. Thought and feeling were so confused within him, that if he had tried to give them utterance, he could only have said that the child was come instead of the gold- that the gold had turned into the child" (Silas Marner, 120)

"Inarticulate as he was he had more to say; he lingered perhaps because vaguely aware of the want of sincerity in her encouragement to him to go." (Spoils of Poynton, 63)

"She paused a little, and I for my part could not help staring at her, and thinking that if she were a book, the pictures in it were most lovely. The colour mantled in her delicate sunburnt cheeks, her grey eyes, light amidst the tan of her face, kindly looked on us all as she spoke." (News From Nowhere, 175)