G EORGE ELIOT'S interest in man as a creature in time has long been evident to her attentive readers. One can hardly read Adam Bede without feeling how the plot ripens in slow harmony with the lush crops in the Poysers' fields. Maggie Tulliver, torn between her present love for Stephen and her past heritage, finds a fatal rescue in the flooded river to which her life had always been linked. Silas Marner sees in Eppie's golden hair a replacement for his gold, and his love for her reknits his shattered personality. One novel, Adam Bede, has received close and very fruitful attention to its time relations, Dorothy Van Ghent identifying its organic tempo, which is the very heart of the novel, and W. J. Harvey showing its carefully detailed yet submerged time relations.' Both studies, particularly the first, have done much to illuminate the beauty of that novel. Except for these, however, I think critics have tended simply to agree with Virginia Woolf that the only romance George Eliot allowed herself was "the romance of the past," and to let it go at that.2