Glenlair, Dalbeattie, 3d April 1873.

The roof of the Devonshire Laboratory is being put on, [386] and we hope to have some floors in by May, and    the contractors 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 entertained by Mr. Paley on Solar Myths, Odusseus as the   Setting Sun, etc. Your Trachiniæ 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  astronomical or meteorological.

     Rosamond 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    compounded 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 Rosa Munda of the dawn (see Vision of Sin) reappears as the Rosa 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, represents 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 [387] rays of the sun, or to the various clergymen and   doctors, who are all planets. The whole thing is, and is intended to be, a solar myth from beginning to end.