“[T]here was light piercing into the room. She opened her curtains, and looked out towards the bit of road that lay in view, with fields beyond, outside the entrance-gates. On the road there was a man with a bundle on his back and a woman carrying her baby; in the field she could see figures moving—perhaps the shepherd with his dog. Far off in the bending sky was the pearly light; and she felt the largess of the world and the manifold wakings of men to labour and endurance. She was a part of that involuntary, palpitating life. . . .”

—George Eliot, Middlemarch, 1871-72.