Leslie Stephen 
Hours in a Library [EPUB ebook] 
(Vol 3 of 3)

Excerpt from Hours in a Library, Vol. 3 of 3 
Everyday life. Except in the most melodramatic – which is also the weakest – part of Jane Eyre, ‘ we have lives almost as uneventful as those of Miss Austen, and yet charged to the utmost with latent power. A parson at the head ‘of a school-feast somehow shows himself as a Cromwell, guilt less of his country’s blood a professor lecturing a governess -ou composition is revealed as a potential Napoleon a mischievous schoolboy is obviously capable of developing into a Columbus or a Nelson even the most commonplace natural objects, such as a row of beds in a dormitory, are associated, and naturally associated, with the most intense emotions. Miss Austen makes you feel that a tea-party in a country parsonage may be as amusing as the most brilliant meeting of cosmopolitan celebrities and Miss Bronte that it may display characters capable of shaking empires and discovering new worlds. The whole machinery is in a state of the highest electric tension, though there is no display of thunder and lightning to amaze us.
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