Basil Gildersleeve, Hellas and Hesperia:

“Must everybody learn Greek? Such a conclusion would savor too much of that plea for Greek which I declined to make at the outset of these talks. And yet I should like to say a word in closing by way of reply to those who sneer at a smattering of this language and that. It is astonishing, I have said elsewhere, how much enjoyment one can get from a language one understands imperfectly; and Prince Kropotkin, a linguist as all Russians are, asks, ‘Is there a higher aesthetic delight than to read poetry in a language which one does not yet quite thoroughly understand?’ It is astonishing what a moral effect the sentences of a foreign tongue can exercise. It is astonishing what a feeling of fellowship is engendered by a stock quotation from Latin and Greek. Whether it is worth while to spend so much time on Latin and Greek in order to recall a musical line from Homer or Virgil, to say from the heart some of the untranslatables, such as Sunt lacrimae rerum, such as μετὰ καὶ τόδε τοῖσι γενέσθω, to put one’s self into sympathetic relation with the scholarly past, it is not for me to say, as my testimony may be suspect, and might reveal more of my life than would be fitting. All that the best of us reach in any range of study is a smattering, and I am only thankful for my own smatterings. In crises of life the words that come up to one are not always the words of the mother tongue, but those that had been acquired at school, the words of comfort and counsel that saved the lesson from being an unmitigated bore. Those nails fastened by the masters of assemblies are golden nails.”

George Eliot, Middlemarch:

“Certainly this affair of his marriage with Miss Brooke touched him more nearly than it did any one of the persons who have hitherto shown their disapproval of it, and in the present stage of things I feel more tenderly towards his experience of success than towards the disappointment of the amiable Sir James. For in truth, as the day fixed for his marriage came nearer, Mr. Casaubon did not find his spirits rising; nor did the contemplation of that matrimonial garden scene, where, as all experience showed, the path was to be bordered with flowers, prove persistently more enchanting to him than the accustomed vaults where he walked taper in hand. He did not confess to himself, still less could he have breathed to another, his surprise that though he had won a lovely and noble-hearted girl he had not won delight,—which he had also regarded as an object to be found by search. It is true that he knew all the classical passages implying the contrary; but knowing classical passages, we find, is a mode of motion, which explains why they leave so little extra force for their personal application.

Poor Mr. Casaubon had imagined that his long studious bachelorhood had stored up for him a compound interest of enjoyment, and that large drafts on his affections would not fail to be honored; for we all of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act fatally on the strength of them. And now he was in danger of being saddened by the very conviction that his circumstances were unusually happy: there was nothing external by which he could account for a certain blankness of sensibility which came over him just when his expectant gladness should have been most lively, just when he exchanged the accustomed dulness of his Lowick library for his visits to the Grange. Here was a weary experience in which he was as utterly condemned to loneliness as in the despair which sometimes threatened him while toiling in the morass of authorship without seeming nearer to the goal. And his was that worst loneliness which would shrink from sympathy. He could not but wish that Dorothea should think him not less happy than the world would expect her successful suitor to be; and in relation to his authorship he leaned on her young trust and veneration, he liked to draw forth her fresh interest in listening, as a means of encouragement to himself: in talking to her he presented all his performance and intention with the reflected confidence of the pedagogue, and rid himself for the time of that chilling ideal audience which crowded his laborious uncreative hours with the vaporous pressure of Tartarean shades.”