386 JAMES CLERK MAXWELL. [CHAP. XII. 



and we hope to have some floors in by May, and the con- 

 tractors cleared out by October. We are busy electing 

 School Boards here. The religious difficulty is unknown 

 here. The chief party is that which insists on keeping down 

 the rates ; no other platform will do. All candidates must 

 show the retrenchment ticket. 



The Cambridge Philosophical Society have been enter- 

 tained by Mr. Paley on Solar Myths, Odusseus as the Setting 

 Sun, etc. Your Trachiniae is rather in that style, but I 

 think Middlemarch is not a ' mere unconscious myth, as 

 the Odyssey was to its author, but an elaborately conscious 

 one, in which all the characters are intended to be astro- 

 nomical or meteorological. 



Eosamond is evidently the Dawn. By her fascinations 

 she draws up into her embrace the rising sun, represented 

 as the Healer from one point of view, and the Opener of 

 Mysteries from another; his name, Lyd Gate, being com- 

 pounded of two nouns, both of which signify something 

 which opens, as the eye -lids of the morn, and the gates 

 of day. But as the sun-god ascends, the same clouds which 

 emblazoned his rising, absorb all his beams, and put a stop 

 to the early promise of enlightenment, so that he, the 

 ascending sun, disappears from the heavens. But the Eosa 

 Munda of the dawn (see Vision of Sin) reappears as 

 the Eosa Mundi in the evening, along with her daughters ? 

 and $ , in the chariot of the setting sun, who is also a healer, 

 but not an enlightener. 



Dorothea, on the other hand, the goddess of gifts, repre- 

 sents the other half of the revolution. She is at first 

 attracted by and united to the fading glories of the days that 

 are no more, but after passing, as the title of the last book 

 expressly tells us, "from sunset to sunrise," we find her 

 in union with the pioneer of the coming age, the editor. 



Her sister Celia, the Hollow One, represents the vault of 

 the midnight sky, and the nothingness of things. 



There is no need to refer to Nicolas Bulstrode, who 

 evidently represents the Mithraic mystery, or to the kindly 

 family of Garth, representing the work of nature under the 



