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CHAPTER XLVII . Was never true love loved in vain , For truest love is highest gain . No art can make it : it must spring Where elements are fostering . So in heaven’s spot and hour Springs the little native flower , Downward root and upward eye , Shapen by the earth and sky . It happened to be on a Saturday evening that Will Ladislaw had that little discussion with Lydgate . Its effect when he went to his own rooms was to make him sit up half the night , thinking over again , under a new irritation , all that he had before thought of his having settled in Middlemarch and harnessed himself with Mr . Brooke . Hesitations before he had taken the step had since turned into susceptibility to every hint that he would have been wiser not to take it ; and hence came his heat towards Lydgate — a heat which still kept him restless . Was he not making a fool of himself ? — and at a time when he was more than ever conscious of being something better than a fool ? And for what end ? Well , for no definite end . True , he had dreamy visions of possibilities : there is no human being who having both passions and thoughts does not think in consequence of his passions — does not find images rising in his mind which soothe the passion with hope or sting it with dread . But this , which happens to us all , happens to some with a wide difference ; and Will was not one of those whose wit “ keeps the roadway : ” he had his bypaths where there were little joys of his own choosing , such as gentlemen cantering on the highroad might have thought rather idiotic . The way in which he made a sort of happiness for himself out of his feeling for Dorothea was an example of this . It may seem strange , but it is the fact , that the ordinary vulgar vision of which Mr . Casaubon suspected him — namely , that Dorothea might become a widow , and that the interest he had established in her mind might turn into acceptance of him as a husband — had no tempting , arresting power over him ; he did not live in the scenery of such an event , and follow it out , as we all do with that imagined “ otherwise ” which is our practical heaven . It was not only that he was unwilling to entertain thoughts which could be accused of baseness , and was already uneasy in the sense that he had to justify himself from the charge of ingratitude — the latent consciousness of many other barriers between himself and Dorothea besides the existence of her husband , had helped to turn away his imagination from speculating on what might befall Mr . Casaubon . And there were yet other reasons . Will , we know , could not bear the thought of any flaw appearing in his crystal : he was at once exasperated and delighted by the calm freedom with which Dorothea looked at him and spoke to him , and there was something so exquisite in thinking of her just as she was , that he could not long for a change which must somehow change her .
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