`...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 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. '