Strange contrast,

Strange contrast, you may have thought, between the effect produced on us by these dismal remnants of commonplace houses, which in their best days were but the sign of a sordid life, belonging in all its details to our own vulgar era, and the effect produced by those ruins on the castled Rhine, which have crumbled and mellowed into such harmony with the green and rocky steeps that they seem to have a natural fitness, like the mountain-pine; nay, even in the day when they were built they must have had this fitness, as if they had been raised by an earth-born race, who had inherited from their mighty parent a sublime instinct of form.

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Green

Published by the George Eliot Archive, edited by Beverley Park Rilett, 2025. https://GeorgeEliotArchive.org

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Heelam, Monique