from Silas Marner

To them pain and mishap present a far wider range of possibilities than gladness and enjoyment: their imagination is almost barren of the images that feed desire and hope, but is all overgrown by recollections that are a perpetual pasture to fear.

averred- declared

pallid- pale from illness

But there might be such a thing as a man's soul being loose from his body, and going out and in, like a bird out of its nest and back.

But Silas was both sane and honest, though, as with many honest and fervent men, culture had not defined any channels for his sense of mystery, and so it spread itself over the propoer pathway of inquiry and knowledge.

colloquy- conversation

catalepsy- trance or seizure with loss of conciousness and sensation

SILAS' CRITIQUE OF HIS EARLY RELIGIOUS BEILIEFS:

There is no just god that governs the earth righteously, but a god of lies, that bears witness against the innocent.

To people accustomed to reason about the forms in which their religious feeling has incorporated itself, it is difficult to enter into that simple, untaught state of mind in which the form and the feeling have never been severed by an act of reflection

If there is an angel that records the sorrows of men as well as their sins, he knows how many and deep are the sorrows of that spring from false ideas for which no man is culpable.

IMMIGRANT FEELINGS:

Minds that have been unhinged from their old faith and love have perhaps sought this Lethean influence of exile in which the past becomes dreamy because its symbols have all vanished, and the present too is dreamy because it is linked with no memories.

Lethe- (Greek mythology) the river of forgetfulness, a condtion of forgetfulness, oblivion