This phrase stands with a startling contradictory purity against the elder De Lacey's
amiable platitudes concerning "brotherly love" (paragraph 25 above). Even worse, it
undercuts all the ideals for which Felix has stood as well as the intellectual command
by which he has restored his family's happiness and tranquillity. In a pinch Volney's
ideal of an open, accepting humanity gives way to an unthinking recidivism, a protective
and brutal tribalism, a masculinist belligerence, that is the moral equivalent of
war.

Compare Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Mont Blanc," lines 104-14.

That is, the Mer de Glace, the Sea of Ice, which is the horizontal glacial field fed
by three glaciers (including Montanvert) on the sides of Mont Blanc.

The sense of the momentous responsibility he has assumed seems for the moment to have
made Victor into a new being. In a curious way, by recognizing what it is to be God,
he becomes more like the sober and fearful Adam setting out from Eden at the end of
Paradise Lost, a moral being for whom, as the Creature himself has acknowledged in
reference to Byron's Manfred (II:5:18 and note, II:7:10 and note), knowledge is commensurate
with sorrow.

This is the Creature's first sense of how he appears as a figure within a natural
order. It is not a pleasant discovery to find oneself a discordant presence, but,
as the ensuing paragraph relates, a kind of natural logic helps this eight-foot anomalous
being not to feel himself divorced from the natural order. On the contrary, he seems
instinctively able to recognize his affinity with it, even down to what he shares
with beings as tiny as sparrows.

Not only a vegetarian, the Creature is likewise naturally (like the Shelley household
in general) averse to alcohol.

The terminology here has a curiously political edge to it, particularly so after we
have witnessed the demonstration of social injustice in the final chapters of Volume
1.

An archaic usage, meaning to prepare or cook: only the nominative form—"dressing"—is
still retained in English with this original import.

The modern descriptive term for Victor's experience would be awesome. Although he
dwells on how satisfying is this kind of response to nature (and in the third edition
it is particularly accentuated), it is probably so because of its reliable alterity
from his own situation. In a few paragraphs, with startling irony, he will have that
dependability rudely broken, and the sublime will come directly home to the human
who, thinking to master it, had fled from its tremendous power.

Since this noun and its derivatives tolls like a bell through the novel after it is
first used by Victor to name the Creature (I:4:3), there is a very real sense, on
a linguisitic plane, in which the condition is already broadly shared.