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"Making trial of everything, with trust in new joy, and stirring the human kindness in all eyes that looked on her."

If it is an independent clause, could you please tell which is the subject and which is the verb.

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  • It does not have a finite verb (except in the subordinate clause that looked on her) so it is not a finite clause. It has no subject expressed.
    – Colin Fine
    Commented Nov 25, 2019 at 12:00
  • @ColinFine So, I'm wondering why it is in the literature passage as an independent clause?
    – Meraki
    Commented Nov 25, 2019 at 12:07
  • I have no idea. What does "the literature passage" mean?
    – Colin Fine
    Commented Nov 25, 2019 at 12:09
  • @ColinFine I'm doing SAT practice tests. The literature passage is an excerpt from literary works.
    – Meraki
    Commented Nov 25, 2019 at 12:11

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That is not a grammatical /sentence/ at all, by itself!

Here is the full sentence, which /is/ grammatical:

Eppie was a creature of endless claims and ever-growing desires, seeking and loving sunshine, and living sounds, and living movements; making trial of everything, with trust in new joy, and stirring the human kindness in all eyes that looked on her.

Since the part you quote above cannot stand on its own and have meaning, it is a subordinate clause. Eppie is the subject, even though she does not appear in the clause itself. The "making..." here is a present participle phrase, which functions somewhat like an adjective. Because the "to be" verb was used in the first part of the clause, the mood of that verb carries over to the verb "making" and this is an indicative statement about Eppie.

This is a complex sentence! Perhaps think of the clausal structure as a shorthand for writing each of the sentences starting "Eppie was..." simultaneously:

Eppie was a creature of endless claims...
Eppie was seeking and loving sunshine...
Eppie was making trial of everything...

and so forth. It's not quite exactly the same as if Eliot had done that, but it's the general idea.

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    It might help to mention that a semicolon does not always separate independent clauses. It does have that use, of course, and when it does you can treat what follows the semicolon as a separate sentence. Here, however, it's used more like an extra-strength comma than a weakened period. The two participial phrases contain commas within them, so they warrant something a bit stronger than a comma to separate them.
    – Gary Botnovcan
    Commented Nov 26, 2019 at 1:47
  • @GaryBotnovcan thank you. That is the answer I was looking for.
    – Meraki
    Commented Nov 26, 2019 at 7:10
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    You're welcome, @Meraki. The more classic example of that semicolon usage involves coordinate lists of dates or placenames: Chicago, IL; Boston, MA; Newark, NJ; and Toledo, OH. However, any coordination that contains commas within its elements is an opportunity to use the semicolon in this way.
    – Gary Botnovcan
    Commented Nov 26, 2019 at 17:47

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