by Thomas Hardy
(Everyman, Alfred A. Knopf, 1992)
In high school and university The Return of the Native was one of my favorite books. My admiration set me off on a spree of Hardy novel reading. I still like it although I feel differently about it now. I favored it originally because of other feelings and experiences associated with the time and place of first reading.
No English novelist has more comprehensive a power of realizing the fictional situation he constructs, and on which his imagination broods.
Page xi.
A Pair of Blue Eyes is the first novel in which Hard demonstrates his peculiar genius for absorbing himself and us in a locality and an atmosphere.
Page xi.
Young and comparatively unknown as he was at the time of The Return of the Native, he had no need to distance himself deliberately form his creation; but there is no doubt that his choice of setting, the ‘Great Heath’ that lay just behind the cottage in Upper Bockhampton where he was born, returned him to the past and to the intimacy of his own childhood.
Page xiii.
A sense of being young, and of the vulnerability of being young, broods over the noel.
Page xiv.
Although its characters are grown-up there is something helpless and childish about them, as if they were trapped in a big threatening world over which they have no control.
Page xiv.
In none of Hardy’s mature novels is marriage presented as an unmixed blessing, but its prospects in The Return of the Native seem more than usually doomed and blighted. It is a state form which little or any good can come.
Page xiv.
The heath has the appeal of a timeless world.
Page xv.
Childhood for Hardy could never be an innocent or a happy state.
Page xv.
At all ages Hardy was highly susceptible to feminine charm and influence, and Eustacia Bye is one of the most memorable of his female portraits.
Page xvi.
Eustacia is a woman who appeals to the child in man; and this may well be the secret of Hardy’s powerful portrayal of both her charm and her fatality. She is not a girl to marry, and yet men cannot forget her or keep away from her.
Page xvi.
The autobiographical element in The Return of the Native should not be exaggerated. But it is unquestionably there.
Page xvii.
Man’s helplessness in the grip of his own nature and in that of universal circumstance.
Page xvii.
The honest young dairyman, Diggory Venn, has already courted her, as Gabriel Oak courted Bathsheba; and that she turned him down, though with characteristic gentleness, because like many young girls of her kind she was sexually fascinated by the idea of a man like Wildeve.
Page xx.
Hardy’s consciousness was obsessed by the romance of class as well as that of sex, and by the close connections and enhancements of the two.
Page xx.
The class and marriage theme was standard stuff in Victorian fiction.
Page xxi.
Class has a strange isolated importance in the sexual politics of the heath.
Page xxi.
Eustacia’s parentage is exotic - her father a Corfiote musician, in an earlier draft a Belgian - and her grandfather a sea captain. Wildeve is a near gentleman, trained to be an engineer and declined to the still respectable status of inn-keeper.
Page xxi.
Egdon itself, for all its air of vast and mournful desolation, is also a homely place where the humdrum business of living, its daily joys and sorrows, carries steadily on.
Page xxiii.
Venn is an apparition, a human microcosm of the heath’s strangeness; and also an ordinary farmer in a good way of business, seeking a sweetheart.
Page xxiii.
Much of Hardy’s fiction projects this silent struggle between the world of his childhood, and the new career and personality he had made for himself; gut in no other novel is it so evident and so close beneath the surface as it is in The Return of the Native.
Page xxiv.
Eustacia is so vivid a character because born form so many different and incongruous origins. She shows for one thing how strongly Hardy was attracted to women whom he would have found it hard to get along with in the long run.
Page xxv.
Eustacia situation dominates the novel, seeming a natural part of the unchanging pattern of life symbolized by the great heath.
Page xxvi.
It is misunderstanding rather than malevolence which causes the trouble. That, too, is not an uncommon feature of the Victorian novel, with its Hegelian background and its growing awareness that social ills and personal troubles can seldom be laid at the door of the individual, but are part of a complex sequence of cause and effect which human beings are powerless to change until they can fully understand it.
Page xxvii.
It remains unclear whether Eustacia’s death was accident or a kind of suicide.
Page xxvii.
Clym is left alone, the native whose return to the heath has not joined him, as he had hoped, to his own place and to the bosom of his on folk.
Pages xxvii-xxviii.
In coming home you may find yourself more solitary than before, cut off from those you hoped to meet again, and estranged, it may be, from new friends and new relationships, which have no wish to share a home in the place of your origins.
Page xxviii.
In death she lies with a tranquility unknown to her stormy existence.
Page xxviii.
The date at which the following events are assumed to have occurred may be set down as between 1840 and 1850.
Page xl.
The Christian name of ‘Eustacia’, borne by the heroine of the story, was that of the Lady of the Manor of Ower Moigne, in the reign of Henry the Fourth.
Page xli.
The face of the heath by its mere complexion added half an hour to evening; it could in like manner retard the dawn, sadden noon, anticipate the frowning of storms scarcely generated, and intensify the opacity of a moonless midnight to a cause of shaking and dread.
Page 3.
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 4.
The storm was its lover, and the wind its friend.
Page 5.
It had a lonely face, suggesting tragical possibilities.
Page 6.
Civilization was its enemy; and ever since the beginning of vegetation its soil had worn the same antique brown dress.
Page 6.
The traveller with the cart was a reddleman - a person whose vocation it was to supply farmers with redding for their sheep. He was one of a class rapidly becoming extinct in Wessex, filling at present in the rural world the place which, during the last century, the dodo occupied in the world of animals. He is a curious, interesting, and nearly perished link between obsolete forms of life and those which generally prevail.
Page 9.
In these lonely places wayfarers, after a first greeting, frequently plod on for miles without speech.
Page 10.
Red suns and tufts of fire one by one began to arise, flecking the whole country round. They were the bonfires of other parishes and hamlets that were engaged in the same sort of commemoration.
Page 16.
The men recognize the locality of each fire by its angle and direction, though nothing of the scenery could be viewed.
Page 16.
It is pretty well known that such blazes as this the heathmen were now enjoying are rather the lineal descendants from jumbled Druidical rites and Saxon ceremonies than the invention of popular feeling about Gunpowder Plot.
Page 17.
Black chaos comes, and the fettered gods of the earth say, Let there be light.
Page 18.
‘I met Mis’ess Yeobright, the young bride’s aunt, last night, and she told me that her son Clym was coming home a’ Christmas. Wonderful lever, ‘a believe - ah, I should like to have all that’s under that young man’s hair.’
Page 20.
‘Is it because of the wedding that Clym is coming home a’ Christmas - to make a new arrangement because is mother is ow left in the house alone?’
Page 20.
‘You be bound to dance at Christmas because ’tis the time o’year; you must dance at weddings because ‘tis the time o’life.’
Page 24.
To give him his due he’s a clever, learned fellow in his way - a’most as clever as Clym Yeobright used to be. He was brought up to better things than keeping the quiet Woman. An engineer - that’s what the man was, as we know; but he threw away his chance, and so ‘a took a public-house to live. His learning was no use to him at all.’
Page 24.
‘Wildeve is older than Tamsin Yeobright by a good-few summers.’
Page 25.
‘What do you say to giving the new man and wife a bit of a song tonight afore we go to bed - being their wedding-day?’
Page 29.
When the flame arose it revealed a young man in tight raiment, and red from top to toe.
Pages 34-35.
Persons with any weight of character carry, like planets, their atmospheres along with them in their orbits.
Page 36.
‘’Tis a weight upon a man to be looked up to as commander.’
Page 38.
‘I was once acquainted with him, aunt, and when I saw him to-day I thought I should prefer his van to any conveyance of a stranger.’
Page 44.
They turned towards the inn, known in the neighbourhood as the Quiet Woman, the sign of which represented the figure of a matron carrying her head under her arm, beneath which gruesome design was written the couplet so well known to frequenters of the inn: -
SINCE THE WOMAN’S QUIET
LET NO MAN BREED A RIOT
Pages 46-47.
Upon the door was a neglected brass plate, bearing the unexpected inscription, ‘Mr. Wildeve, Engineer’ - a useless yet cherished relic form the time when he had been started in that profession in an office at Budmouth by those who had hoped much from him, and had been disappointed.
Page 47.
He was quite a young man, and of the two properties, form and motion, the latter first attracted the eye in him. The grace of his movement was singular; it was the pantomimic expression of a lady-killing career. Next came into notice the more material qualities, among which was a profuse crop of hair impending over the top of his face, lending to his forehead the high-cornered outline of an early Gothic shield; and a neck which was smooth and round as a cylinder. The lower half of his figure was of light build. Altogether he was one in whom no man would have seen anything to admire, and in whom no woman would have seen anything to dislike.
Page 48.
Looking from the window which was unshuttered and unblinded, Timothy said, ‘Well, what a fess little bonfire that one is, out by Cap’n Vye’s! ‘Tis burning just the same now as ever, upon my life.’ … ‘ It was lighted before ours was,’ Fairway continued; ‘and yet every one in the country round is out afore ‘n.’
Page 57.
‘The lonesome dark-eyed creature up there that some say is a witch - ever I should call a fine young woman such a name - is always up to some odd conceit or other.’
Page 57.
Her extraordinary fixity, her conspicuous loneliness, her heedlessness of night, betokened among other things an utter absence of fear.
Pages 60-61.
She lifted her left hand, which held a closed telescope. This she rapidly extended, as if she were well accustomed to the operation, and raising it to her eye directed it towards the light beaming from the inn.
Page 63.
‘Eustacia! could I forget that last autumn at this same day of the month and at this same lace you lighted exactly such a fire as a signal for me to come and see you? Why should there have bene a bonfire again by Captain Vye’s house if not for the same purpose?’
Page 71.
You are not worthy of me: I see it, and yet I love you.
Page 72.
‘The curse of inflammability is upon me, and I must live under it, and take any snub from a woman. It has brought me down from engineering to innkeeping: what lower stage it has in store for me I have yet to learn.’
Page 72.
‘Perhaps it is not wholly because of you that I get gloomy’ she archly added. ‘It is in my nature to feel like that. It was born in my blood, I suppose.’
Page 73.
‘You may come again to Rainbarrow if you like, but you won’t see me; and you may call, but I shall not listen; and you may tempt me, but I won’t give myself to you any more.’
Page 73.
‘Such natures as yours don’t easily adhere to their words.’
Page 73.
‘I have not yet married her: I have come in obedience to your call.’
‘I merely lite that fire because I was dull, and thought I would get a little excitement by calling you up and triumphing over you as the Witch of Endor called up Samuel. I determined you should come; and you have come! I have shown my power. A mile and half hither, and a mile and half back again to your home - three miles in the dark for me. Have I not shown my power?’
Page 74.
Eustacia Vye was the raw material of a divinity. … she had the passions and instincts which make a model goddess.
Page 76.
She was in person full-limbed and somewhat heavy; without ruddiness, as without pallor; and soft to the touch as a cloud.
Page 76.
She had Pagan eyes, full of nocturnal mysteries, and their light … you could fancy the colour of Eustacia’s soul to be flame-like.
Page 77.
Her presence brought memories of such things as Bourbon roses, rubies, and tropical midnights; her moods recalled lotus-eaters and the march in ‘Athalie’; her motions, the ebb and flow of the sea; her voice, the viola.
Page 77.
Egdon was her Hades, and since coming there she had imbibed much of what was dark in its tone, though inwardly and eternally unreconciled thereto.
Page 78.
Budmouth was her native place, a fashionable seaside resort at that date. She was the daughter of the bandmaster of a regiment which had been quartered there - a Corfiote by birth, and a fine musician.
Page 78.
The girl was left to the care of her grandfather.
Page 79.
She felt like one banished; but here she was forced to abide.
Page 79.
To be loved to madness - such was her great desire. Love was to her the one cordial which could drive away the eating loneliness of her days.
Page 80.
Her loneliness deepened her desire.
Page 80.
She often repeated her prayers: not at particular times, but, like the unaffectedly devout, when she desired to pray. Her prayer was always spontaneous, and often ran thus, ‘O deliver my heart from this fearful gloom and loneliness: send me great love from somewhere, else I shall die.’
Page 81.
She was a girl of some forwardness of mind.
Page 81.
To dwell on a heath without studying its meanings was like wedding a foreigner without learning his tongue. The subtle beauties of the heath were lost to Eustacia; she only caught its vapours.
Page 82.
She suffered much from depression of spirits, and took slow walks to recover them, in which she carried her grandfather’s telescope and her grandmother’s hour-glass - the latter because of a peculiar pleasure she derived from watching a material representation of time’s gradual glide away.
Page 83.
Uglier persons than gipsies were known to cross Egdon at times and a reddleman was one of them.
Pages 86-87.
Reddle spreads its lively hues over everything it lights on, and stamps unmistakably, as with the mark of Cain, any person who has handled it half an hour.
A child’s first sight of a reddleman was an epoch in his life. That blood-coloured figure was a sublimation of all the horrid dreams which had afflicted the juvenile spirit since imagination began.
Page 91.
The reddleman lived like a gipsy; but gipsies he scorned. … He was such an unnatural colour to look at that the men of roundabouts and wax=work shows seemed gentlemen beside him.
Page 92.
The one point that was forbidding about this reddleman was his colour. Freed from that he would have been as agreeable a specimen of rustic manhood as one would often see.
Page 92.
Rejected suitors take to roaming as naturally as unhived gees; and the business to which he had cynically devoted himself was in many ways congenial to Venn.
Page 94.
Thomasins’s heath, and hear her, yet unseen, was the one ewe-lamb of pleasure left to him.
Page 94.
The reddleman’s love was generous.
Page 95.
He had stood in the shoes of Tantalus, ad seemed to look upon a certain mass of disappointment as the natural preface to all realizations.
Page 96.
‘Thomasin is now staying at her aunt’s shut up in a bedroom, and keeping out of everybody’s sight,’ he said indifferently.
Page 97.
Love is the dismallest thing where the lover is quite honest.
Page 98.
‘Will you go with me to America? I have kindred in Wisconsin.’
Page 101.
Going to church, except to be married or buried, was exceptional at Egdon.
Page 103.
Eustacia was reserved, and lived very much to herself. Except the daughter of one of the cotters, who was their servant, and a lad who worked in the garden and stable, scarcely any one but themselves ever entered the house. They were the only genteel people of the district except the Yeobrights.
Page 103.
... a slow fire could blaze on occasion.
Page 109.
The man who had begun by being merely her amusement, and would never have been more than her hobby but for his skill in deserting her at the right moments, was now again her desire. Cessation in his love-making had revivified her love. Such feeling as Eustacia had idly given to Wildeve was dammed into a flood by Thomasin.
Page 111.
‘You are in the awkward position of an official who is no longer wanted.’
Page 119.
The sentiment which lurks more or less in all animate nature - that of not desiring the undesired of others - was lively as a passion in the supersubtle, epicurean heart of Eustacia.
Page 120.
To be conscious that the end of the dream is approaching, and yet has not absolutely come, is one of the most wearisome as well as the most curious stages along the course between the beginning of a passion and its end.
Pages 120-121.
A young and clever man was coming into the lonely heath from, of all contrasting places in the world, Paris. It was like a man coming from heaven.
Page 129.
The scene of a day-dream is sufficient for a pilgrimage at nineteen.
Page 129.
... the dignity of a necessary performance.
Pages 129-130.
‘Is there any use in saying what can do no good, aunt?’
‘Yes,” said her aunt, with some warmth. ‘To thoroughly fill the air with the past misfortune, so that other girls may take warning and keep clear of it’
Page 132.
When the west grew red the two relatives came again form the house and plunged into the heath in a different direction from the first, towards a point in the distant highway along which the expected man was to return.
Page 136.
The fantastic nature of her passion, which lowered her as an intellect, raised her as a soul.
Page 141.
She took an airing twice or thrice a day upon the Egdon hills, and kept her eyes employed.
Page 141.
In an ordinary village or country town one can safely calculate that, either on Christmas-day or the Sunday contiguous, any native home for the holidays, who has not through age or ennui lost the appetite for seeing and being seen, will turn up in some pew or tother, shining with hope, self-consciousness and new clothes.
Page 143.
For mummers and mumming Eustacia had the greatest contempt.
Page 145.
A traditional pastime is to be distinguished form a mere revival in no more striking feature than in this, that while in the revival all is excitement and fervour, the survival is carried on with a stolidity and absence of stir which sets one wondering why a thing that is done so perfunctorily should be kept up at all.
Page 145.
‘Want of an object to live for - that’s all is the matter with me!’
Page 151.
He appeared on the dark ridge of heathland, like a fly on a negro.
Page 151.
On Egdon there was no absolute hour of the day. The time at any moment was a number of varying doctrines professed by the different hamlets.
Page 155.
She had come out to see a man who might possibly have the power to deliver her soul from a most deadly oppression.
Page 157.
To dance with a man is to concentrate a twelemonth’s regulation fire upon him in the fragment of an hour.
Page 157.
Between Captain Vye and the Yeobrights there had never existed much acquaintance, the former having come as a stranger and purchased the long-empty house at Mistover Knap not long before the death of Mrs. Yeobright’s husband; and with that event and the departure of her son such friendship as had grownup became quite broken off.
Page 158.
... the age of modern man is to be measured by the intensity of his history.
Page 165.
... thought is a disease of flesh, and indirectly bore evidence that ideal physical beauty is incompatible with emotional development and a full recognition of the coil of things.
Page 166.
She had loved him partly because he was exceptional in this scene, partly because she had determined to love him, chiefly because she was in desperate need of loving somebody after wearying of Wildeve.
Pages 170-171.
Once let a maiden admit the possibility of her being stricken with love for some one at a certain hour and place, and the thing is as good as done.
Page 171.
She had overlooked the fact that, in coming as a boy among other boys, she would be treated as a boy.
Page 173.
Her grandfather was in bed at this hour, for she so frequently walked upon the hills on moonlight nights that he took no notice of her comings and goings, and, enjoying himself in his own way, left her to do likewise.
Page 175.
The old captain’s prevailing indifference to his granddaughter’s movements left her free as a bird to follow her own courses.
Page 177.
She caught a glimpse of a receding back and shoulders; and she felt a wretched twinge of misery, she knew not why. It was the sickening feeling which, if the changed heart has any generosity at all in its composition, accompanies the sudden sight of a once-loved one who is beloved no more.
Page 180.
Eustacia looked curiously at the singular man who spoke thus. What a strange sort of love, to be entirely free from that quality of selfishness which is frequently the chief constituent of the passion, and sometimes its only one! The reddleman’s disinterestedness was so well deserving of respect that it overshot respect by being barely comprehended; and she almost thought it absurd.
Page 182.
Thomasin’s cheek was flushed to a pitch far beyond that which it had reached before her troubles, and her eyes glittered.
Page 187.
‘Human nature is weak.’
Page 188.
‘It really seems as if he had been playing with you in tis way in revenge for my humbling him as I did by standing up against him at first.’
Page 189.
Some swearing apparel and other articles were collected anew for Thomasin, and remarks on domestic details were frequently made, so as to obscure any inner misgivings about her future as Wildeve’s wife.
Page 190.
The sun, where it could catch it, made a mirror of Thomasin’s hair, which she always wore braided. It was braided according to a calendric system: the more important the day the more numerous the strands in the braid. On ordinary working days she braided it in threes; on ordinary Sundays in fours; at Maypolings, gipsyings, and the like, she braided it in fives. Years ago she had said that when she married she would braid it in sevens. She had braided it in sevens to-day.
Page 190.
The view of life as a thing to be put up with, replacing the zest for existence which was so intense in early civilizations, must ultimately enter so thoroughly into the constitution of the advanced races that its facial expression will become accepted as a new artistic departure. … Physically beautiful men - the glory of the race when it was young - are almost an anachronism now.
Page 201.
Yeobright’s fame had spread to an awkward extent before he left home.
Page 202.
Possibly Clym’s fame, like Homer’s, owed something to the accidents of his situation; nevertheless famous he was.
Page 203.
I’ve come home because, all things considered, I can be a trifle less useless here than anywhere else.
Page 205.
‘My business was the idlest, vainest, most effeminate business that ever a man could be put to. That decided me: I would give it up and try to follow some rational occupation among the people I knew gest, and to whom I could be of most use. I have come home; and this is how I mean to carry out my plan. I shall keep a school as near to Egdon as possible.’
Page 206.
Yeobright loved his kind. He had a conviction that the want of most men was knowledge of a sort which brings wisdom rather than affluence. He wished to raise the class at the expense of individuals rather than individuals at the expense of the class.
Page 207.
Yeobright’s local peculiarity was that in striving at high thinking he still cleaved to plain living.
Page 207.
Successful propagandists have succeeded because the doctrine they bring into form is that which their listeners have for some time felt without being able to shape.
Page 208.
Was Yeobright’s mind well-proportioned? No. A well-proportioned mind is one which shows no particular bias; one of which we may safely say that it will never cause him to be applauded as a propjet, revered as a priest, or exalted as a king. Its usual blessings are happiness and mediocrity. … It never would have allowed Yeobright to do such a ridiculous thing as throw up his business to benefit his fellow-creatures.
Page 208.
Take all the varying hates felt by Eustacia Vye towards the heath, and translate them into loves, and you have the heart of Clym.
Page 209.
‘Your fancies will be your ruin, Clym.’
Page 210.
There am I, trafficking in glittering splendours with wealthy women and titles libertines, and pandering to the meanest vanities.
Page 211.
‘That large diamond establishment.’
Page 212.
‘I suppose you will be like your father; like him, you are getting weary of doing well.’
‘No,’ said her son; ‘I am not weary of that, though I am weary of what you mean by it.’
Page 212.
‘We found that Susan Nunsuch had pricked Miss Vye with a long stocking-needle, as she had threatened to do as soon as ever she could get the young lady to church, where she don’t come very often. She’ve waited for this chance for weeks, so as to draw her blood and put an and to the bewitching of Susan's children that has been carried on so long.’
Page 213.
‘I have not much love for my fellow-creatures. Sometimes I quite hate them.’
Page 223.
‘There is not use in hating people - if you hate anything, you should hate what produced them.’
Page 223.
‘Five years of a great city would be a perfect cure for that.’
Page 224.
‘It is incredible to me that a man accustomed to the attractive women of Paris and elsewhere should be so easily worked up by a girl in a heath.’
Page 226.
He had reached the stage in a young man’s life when the grimness of the general human situation first becomes clear; and the realization of this causes ambition to halt awhile. In France it is not uncustomary to commit suicide at this state; in England we do much better.
Pages 226-227.
There are instances of persons who, without clear ideas of the things they criticize, have yet had clear ideas of the relations of those things.
Page 227.
More than ever he longed to be in some world where personal ambition was not the only recognized form of progress.
Page 234.
‘That’s because you occupy yourself, and so blind yourself to my absence.’
Page 235.
‘One thing is certain - I do love you - past all compass and description . I love you to oppressiveness - I, who have never before felt more than a pleasant passing fancy for any woman I have ever seen.’
Page 235.
‘Nothing can ensure the continuance of love. It will evaporate like a spirit, and so I feel full of fears.’
Page 236.
Many a man’s love has been a curse to him.
Page 236.
‘You will never adhere to your education plan, I am quite sure; and then it will be all right for me; and so I promise to be yours for ever and ever.’
Page 238.
‘See how our time is slipping, slipping, slipping!’ She pointed towards the half eclipsed moon.
Page 238.
‘Don’t mistake me, Clym: though I should like Paris, I love you for yourself alone. To be your wife and live in Paris would be heaven to me; but I would rather life with you I a hermitage here than not be yours at all. It is gain to me either way, and very great gain.’
Page 239.
How terrible it would be if a time should come when I could not love you.
Page 240.
Three antagonistic growths had to be kept alive: his mother’s trust in him, his plan for becoming a teacher, and Eustacia’s happiness. His fervid nature could not afford to relinquish one of these, though two of the three were as many as he could hope to preserve.
Page 241.
‘Picture not known beforehand is half wasted; to anticipate it is to double it.’
Page 246.
‘You are just like all women. They are ever content to build their lives on any incidental position that offers itself; whilst men would fain make a globe to suit them.’
Page 246.
It was a favourite way with them to walk bare hand in bare hand … They formed a very comely picture of love at full flush.
Page 247.
The sun, resting on the horizon line, streamed across the ground from between copper-coloured and lilac clouds, stretched out in flats beneath a sky of pale soft green. All dark objects on the earth that lay towards the sun were overspread by a purple haze, against which groups of wailing gnats shone out, rising upwards and dancing about like sparks of fire.
Page 248.
"Why is it that a woman can see from a distance what a man cannot see close?”
Page 255.
To be yearning for the difficult, to be weary of that offered; to care for the remote, to dislike the near; it was Wildeve’s nature always. This is the true mark of the man of sentiment. … He might have been called the Rousseau of Egdon.
Page 258.
The vision of what ought to have been is thrown side in sheer weariness, and brow-beaten human endeavour listlessly makes the best of the face that is.
Page 260.
Men are drawn from their intentions even in the course of carrying them out.
Page 273.
Wildeve was a nervous and excitable man; and the game was beginning to tell upon his temper. … Venn sat with lips impassively closed and eyes reduced to a pair of unimportant twinkles; he scarcely appeared to breathe. He might have been all Arab, or an automaton.
Page 276.
Wildeve forgot the loss of the money at the sight of his lost love, whose preciousness in his eyes was increasingly in geometrical progression with each new incident that reminded him of their hopeless division.
Page 281.
Venn, in his anxiety to rectify matters, had placed in Thomasin’s hands not only the fifty guineas which rightly belonged to her, but also the fifty intended for her cousin Clym. His mistake had been based upon Wildeve’s words at the opening of the game, when he indignantly denied that the guinea was not his own. It had not been comprehended b the reddleman that at half-way through the performance the game was continued with the money of another person; and it was an error which afterwards helped to cause more misfortune than treble the loss in money value could have done.
Page 283.
The absolute solitude in which they lived intensified their reciprocal thoughts; yet some might have said that it had the disadvantage of consuming their mutual affections at a fearfully prodigal rate.
Pages 287-288.
Eustacia’s dream had always been that, once married to Clym, she would have the power of induce in him to return to Paris. He had carefully withheld all promise to do so; but would he be proof against her coaxing and argument? She had calculated to such a degree on the probability of success that she had represented Paris, and not Budmouth, to her grandfather as in all likelihood their future home. Her hopes were bound up in this dream. In the quiet days since their marriage, when Yeobright had been poring over her lips, her eyes, and the lines of her face, she had mused and mused on the subject, even while in the act of returning his gaze; and now the sight of the books, indicated a future which was antagonistic to her dream, struck her with a positively painful jar.
Page 288.
Mrs. Yeobright gave back heat for heat.
Page 293.
It is the effect of marriage to engender in several directions some of the reserve it annihilates in one.
Page 297.
Clym was transformed into an invalid. He was shut up in a room from which all light was excluded.
Page 298.
He was a brown spot in the midst of an expanse of olive-green gorse, and nothing more.
Page 302.
Though frequently depressed in spirit when not actually at work, owing to thoughts of Eustacia’s position and his mother’s estrangement, when in the full swing of labour he was cheerfully disposed to calm.
Page 302.
‘If I were a man in such a position I would curse rather than sing.’
Page 306.
‘The more I see of life the more do I perceive that there is noting particularly great in its greatest walks, and therefore nothing particularly small in mine of furse-cutting.’
Page 306.
To Eustacia the situation seemed such a mockery of her hopes that death appeared the only door of relief if the satire of Heaven should go much further.
Page 309.
The rebellious sadness that was rather too apparent when she sat indoors without a bonnet was cloaked and softened by her outdoor attire.
Page 309.
For the time Paganism was revived in their hearts the ride of life was all in all, and they adored none other than themselves.
Page 311.
Desperately fond of dancing herself, one of Eustacia’s expectations of Paris had been the opportunity it might afford her of indulgence in this favourite pastime.
Page 312.
To clasp as his for five minutes what was another man’s through all the rest of the year was a kind of thing he of all men could appreciate. He had long since begun to sigh again for Eustacia; indeed, it may be asserted that signing the marriage register with Thomasin was the natural signal to his heart to return to its first quarters, and that the extra complication of Eustacia’s marriage was the one addition required to make that return compulsory.
Pages 314-315.
‘I shall accept whose company I choose, for all that may be said by the miserable inhabitants of Egdon.’
Page 317.
Their troubles are of their own making.
Page 326.
Sometimes more bitterness is sown in five minutes than can be got rid of in a whole life.
Page 329.
It was just possible that Eustacia might resent any situation which could compromise her dignity as a wife, whatever the state of her heart toward him. Women were often so.
Page 336.
‘I have certainly got thistles for figs.’
Page 339.
Men are given to the trick of having a passing fancy for somebody else in the midst of a permanent love, which reasserts itself afterwards just as before.
Page 339.
‘Do I desire unreasonably much in wanting what is called life - music, poetry, passion, war, and all the beating and pulsing that is going on in the great arteries of the world? That was the shape of my youthful dream; but I did not get it. Yet I though I saw the way to it in my Clym’
Page 339.
‘If I offend you by not forgetting you, you are right to mention it; but do not talk of spurning.’
Page 340.
‘I am obliged to act by stealth, not because I do ill, but because others are pleased to say so.’
Pages 341-342.
‘We have been hot lovers in our time, but it won’t do now. Good-bye.’
Page 342.
‘It is always a bad sight to see a woman looking out at a weary wayfarer and not letting her in.’
Page 344.
‘’tis very bad to talk nonsense.’
Page 344.
‘He has come into a fortune of eleven thousand pounds - uncle died in Canada, just after hearing that all his family, whom he was sending home, had gone to the bottom in the Cassiopeia; so Wildeve has come into everything, without in the least expecting it.’
Page 358.
Though she was no lover of money she loved what money could bring, and the new accessories she imagined around him clothed Wildeve with a great deal of interest.
Page 359.
The peculiarity of Wildeve was that, while at one time passionate, upbraiding, and resentful towards a woman, at another he would treat her with such unparalleled grace as to make previous neglect appear as no discourtesy, injury as no insult, interference as a delicate attention, and the ruin of her honour as excess of chivalry.
Page 360.
‘It is hard when you have done nothing to deserve it, that you should have got involved in such a web as this.’
Page 376.
When every obvious channel is blocked we grope towards the small and obscure.
Page 384.
Instead of there being before him the pale face of Eustacia, and a masculine shape unknown, there was only the imperturbable countenance of the heath, which, having defied the cataclysmal onsets of centuries, reduced to insignificance by its seamed and antique features the wildest turmoil of a single man.
Page 388.
‘Why should I not die if I wish?’ she said tremulously. ‘I have made a bad bargain with life, and I am weary of it - weary. And now you have hindered my escape.’
Page 403.
‘What makes death painful except the thought of others’ grief?’
Page 403.
To have lost is less disturbing than to wonder if we may possibly have one.
Page 407.
‘If I wish to go and decide to accept your company I will signal to you some evening at eight o’clock punctually, and this will mean that you are to be ready with a horse and trap at twelve o’clock the same night to drive me to Budmouth harbour in time for the morning boat.’
Pages 410-411.
It had become a religion with him to preserve in good condition all that had lapsed from his mother’s hands to his own.
Page 412.
Harsh feelings produce harsh usage, and this by reaction quenches the sentiments that gave it birth. The more he reflected the more he softened.
Page 413.
She had used to think of the heath alone as an uncongenial spot to be in: she felt it now of the whole world.
Page 420.
The gloom of the night was funereal.
Page 424.
When a woman in such a situation, neither old, deaf, crazed, nor whimsical, takes upon herself to sob and soliloquize aloud there is something grievous the matter.
Page 426.
‘How I have tried and tried to be a splendid woman, and how destiny has been against me! … I was capable of much; but I have been injured and blighted and crushed by things beyond my control!’
Page 426.
It began to rain and blow hard as the evening advanced.
Page 430.
‘There are more ways of letting out life than through a bullet-hole.’
Page 434.
The noise of the wind over the heath was shrill, and as if it whistled for joy at finding a night so congenial as this.
Page 436.
Though he meant to adhere to Eustacia’s instructions to the letter, to deposit her where she wished and to leave her, should that be her will, the spell that she had cast over him intensified, and his heart was beating fast in the anticipated futility of such commands in the face of a mutual wish that they should throw in their lot together.
Page 443.
Shadwater Weir had at its foot a large circular pool, fifty feet in diameter, into which the water flowed through ten huge hatches, raised and lowered by a winch and cogs in the ordinary manner. The sides of the pool were of masonry, to prevent the water from washing away the bank.
Page 445.
Venn vanished under the steam, and came up with an armful of wet drapery enclosing a woman’s cold form, which was all that remained of the desperate Eustacia.
Page 448.
He thought of those who were upstairs. Two were corpses, one had barely escaped the jaws of death, another was sick and a widow. The last occasion on which he had lingered by that fireplace was when the raffle was in progress; when Wildeve was alive and well; Thomasin active and smiling in the next room; Yeobright and Eustacia just made husband and wife, and Mrs. Yeobright living at Blooms-End. It had seemed t that time that the then position of affairs were good for at least twenty years to come. Yet, of all the circle, he himself was the only one whose situation had not materially changed.
Page 450.
‘Those who ought to have lived lie dead; and here am I alive!’
Page 453.
I am getting used to the horror of my existence.
Page 453.
The very suddenness of her bereavement dulled, to some extent, Thomasin’s feelings; yet, irrationally enough, a consciousness that the husband she had lost ought to have been a better man did not lessen her mourning at all.
Page 457.
I am getting used to the horror of my existence.
Page 453.
To be born is a palpable dilemma, and ... instead of men aiming to advance in life with glory they should calculate how to retreat out of it without shame.
Page 459.
Resources do not depend upon gross amounts, but upon the proportion of spendings to takings.
Page 459.
Every pulse of loverlike feeling which had not been stilled during Eustacia’s lifetime had gone into the grave with her. His passion for her had occurred too far on in his manhood to leave fuel enough on hand for another fire of that sort, as may happen with more boyish loves.
Page 464.
What a man has once been he may be again. ... Except that it is rather harder now.
Page 471.
It is an unfortunate fact that any particular whim of parents, which might have been dispersed by half an hour’s conversation during their lives, becomes sublimated by their deaths into a fiat the most absolute, with such results to conscientious children as those parents, had they lived, would have been the first to decry.
Page 472.
He had but three activities alive in him. One was his almost daily walk to the little graveyard wherein his mother lay; another, his just as frequent visits by night to the more distant enclosure which numbered his Eustacia among its dead; the third was self-preparation for a vocation which alone seemed likely to satisfy his cravings - that of an itinerant preacher of the eleventh commandment.
Page 473.
‘I don’t want to be rebellious in that way,’ she said sadly. ‘I had no business to think of him - I ought to have thought of my family.’
Page 475.
‘I have two ideas in my head, and no others. I am going to keep a night-school and I am going to turn preacher.’
Page 477.
His eyesight, by long humouring in his native air, had grown stronger, but not sufficiently strong to warrant his attempting is extensive educational project.
Page 484.
Yeobright had, in fact, found his vocation in the career of an itinerant open-air preacher and lecturer of morally unimpeachable subjects.
Page 498.
The more written the more seems to remain to be written.
Page 498.