triumphant delight in connections

"As he threw down his book, stretched his legs towards the embers in the grate, and clasped his hands at the back of his head, in that agreeable after-glow of excitement when thought lapses from examination of a specific object into a suffusive sense of its connections with all the rest of our existence--seems, as it were, to throw itself on its back after vigorous swimming and float with the repose of unexhausted strength--Lydgate felt a triumphant delight in his studies, and something like pity for those less lucky men who were not of his profession." ~ George Eliot, Middlemarch


As soon as I read this, I immediately thought of Charlotte Mason's No. 12, Education is the Science of Relations. Making connections with the rest of our existence is what brings a cohesive understanding of the world in which we have been created for.  And when you happen upon yet another one of these connections and realize its significance, there is inevitable delight and wonder as you experience even more order in God's universe.