We would never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it, - if it were not the earth where the same flowers came up again every spring that we used to gather with our tiny fingers as we sat listening to ourselveson the grass - the same hips and haws on the autumn hedgerows - the same redbreasts.

George Eliots masterly tale of the childhood joys and woes and the adult trials of Maggie and Tom Tulliver.