It would seem that the heart which can utter feelings like these should be safely housed in the one true fold. There, and there only, can such hearts find room for expansion; for there alone can they find the food to fill them, the wherewith to satisfy their long yearnings, the light to guide the many wanderings of their spirits, the strength to lift up and sustain them after many a fall and many a cruel deceit. Outside that threshold, however near they may be to it, they will in the long run find their lives empty. With George Eliot, they will find life only a sad satire and hope a very vague thing. Like her heroine, Dorothea Brooke, the finer feelings and aspirations of their really spiritual and intensely religious natures will only end in petty collisions with the petty people
around them, and thankful they may be if all their life does not turn out to be an exasperating mistake, as it must be a failure, compared with that larger life that they only dimly discern. How truly Miss Rossetti discerns it may be seen in her sonnet on “The World”:
“By day she wooes me, soft, exceeding fair:
But all night as the moon so changeth she;
Loathsome and foul with hideous leprosy,
And subtle serpents gliding in her hair.
By day she wooes me to the outer air,
Ripe fruits, sweet flowers, and full satiety:
But through the night, a beast she grins at me,
A very monster void of love and prayer.