Soon a little girl comes into his life that opens up his heart and soul. Their love for each other as two "castaways" is truly heartwarming. Highly recommended classic.
Favorite passages:
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.
The yoke a man creates for himself by wrong-doing will breed hate in the kindliest nature; and the good-humoured, affectionate-hearted Godfrey Cass was fast becoming a bitter man, visited by cruel wishes, that seemed to enter, and depart, and enter again, like demons who had found in him a ready-garnished home.
Favourable Chance, I fancy, is the god of all men who follow their own devices instead of obeying a law they believe in...Let him forsake a decent craft that he may pursue the gentilities of a profession to which nature never called him, and his religion will infallibly be the worship of blessed Chance, which he will believe in as the mighty creator of success. The evil principle deprecated in that religion is the orderly sequence by which the seed brings forth a crop after its kind.
Formerly, his heart had been as a locked casket with its treasure inside; but now the casket was empty, and the lock was broken.
The fountains of human love and of faith in a divine love had not yet been unlocked, and his soul was still the shrunken rivulet, with only this difference, that its little groove of sand was blocked up, and it wandered confusedly against dark obstruction.
As the child's mind was growing into knowledge, his mind was growing into memory: as her life unfolded, his soul, long stupefied in a cold narrow prison, was unfolding too, and trembling gradually into full consciousness.
In old days there were angels who came and took men by the hand and led them away from the city of destruction. We see no white-winged angels now. But yet men are led away from threatening destruction: a hand is put into theirs, which leads them forth gently towards a calm and bright land, so that they look no more backward; and the hand may be a little child's.
1861, 151 pp.
Rating: 4.5/5
6 comments:
I LOVED this book too! I love the quotes you put into your review!!
Beautiful quotes. I started listening to this book on iPod, but I didn't download it correctly. Will need to check it out and try it again.
One of my ABSOLUTE favorites - I LOVE this one too!! Now it makes me want to re-read it!!
I've never read this! I shall put it on my To Be Read list! Thanks for the review!
Just finished this book and really enjoyed it, although I found a few chapters in the middle really hard going - glad I stuck with it though
No one has commented on the unlikely event in which an upper class man gets married to a very lower class woman. I would accept that Godfrey Cass would play around with Molly, but MARRY HER? Never in merry old England. Yet, I couldn't find anything in the novel about why, just that he had married her.
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