The Life of Thomas Hardy

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Greenberg, Incorporated, 1925 - 259 pages
 

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Page 214 - WOMAN much missed, how you call to me, call to me, Saying that now you are not as you were When you had changed from the one who was all to me, But as at first, when our day was fair. Can it be you that I hear? Let me view you, then, Standing as when I drew near to the town Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then.
Page 124 - IF but some vengeful god would call to me From up the sky, and laugh : " Thou suffering thing, Know that thy sorrow is my ecstasy, That thy love's loss is my hate's profiting ! " Then would I bear it, clench myself; and die, Steeled by the sense of ire unmerited ; Half-eased in that a Powerfuller than I Had willed and meted me the tears I shed. But not so. How arrives it joy lies slain, And why unblooms the best hope ever sown ? — Crass Casualty obstructs the sun and rain, And dicing Time for gladness...
Page 75 - A SATURDAY afternoon in November was approaching the time of twilight, and the vast tract of unenclosed wild known as Egdon Heath embrowned itself moment by moment. Overhead the hollow stretch of whitish cloud shutting out the sky was as a tent which had the whole heath for its floor.
Page 142 - Ill 0 that far morning of a summer day When, down a terraced street whose pavements lay Glassing the sunshine into my bent eyes, 1 walked and read with a quick glad surprise New words, in classic guise...
Page 44 - Helmed legionnaires, who proudly rear The Eagle, as they pace again The Roman Road. But no tall brass-helmed legionnaire Haunts it for me. Uprises there A mother's form upon my ken, Guiding my infant steps, as when We walked that ancient thoroughfare, The Roman Road.
Page 174 - The truth seems to be that a long line of disillusive centuries has permanently displaced the Hellenic idea of life, or whatever it may be called. What the Greeks only suspected we know well ; what their ^Eschylus imagined our nursery children feel.
Page 73 - They went noiselessly over mats of starry moss, rustled through interspersed tracts of leaves, skirted trunks with spreading roots, whose mossed rinds made them like hands wearing green gloves ; elbowed old elms and ashes with great forks, in which stood pools of water that overflowed on rainy days, and ran down their stems in green cascades.
Page 76 - The spot was, indeed, a near relation of night, and when night showed itself an apparent tendency to gravitate together could be perceived in its shades and the scene. The somber stretch of rounds and hollows seemed to rise and meet the evening gloom in pure sympathy, the heath exhaling darkness as rapidly as the heavens precipitated it. And so the obscurity in the air and the obscurity in the land closed together in a black fraternization towards which each advanced half-way.
Page 214 - Can it be you that I hear ? Let me view you, then, Standing as when I drew near to the town Where you would wait for me : yes, as I knew you then, Even to the original air-blue gown ! Or is it only the breeze...

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