The time seems near, if it has not actually arrived, when the chastened sublimity of a moor, a sea, or a mountain will be all of nature that is absolutely in keeping with the moods of the more thinking among mankind.
She had the passions and instincts which make a model goddess, that is, those which make not quite a model woman.
This weakness of character, as it may be called, suggested that he was the sort of man who was born to ache a good deal before the fall of the curtain upon his unnecessary life should signify that all was well with him again.
Sanderson, who was also blind, gave excellent lectures on colour, and taught others the theory of ideas which they had and he had not. In the social sphere these gifted ones are mostly women; they can watch a world which they never saw, and estimate forces of which they have only heard. We call it intuition.
Bathsheba you are the first woman of any shade or nature that I have ever looked at to love, and it is the having been so near claiming you for my own that makes this denial so hard to bear. How nearly you promised me! But I don’t speak now to move your heart, and make you grieve because of my pain; it is no use, that. I must bear it; my pain would get no less by paining you.
O deliver my heart from this fearful gloom and loneliness; send me great love from somewhere, else I shall die.
To escape the past and all that appertained thereto was to annihilate it, and to do that she would have to get away.
It seemed impossible that modern thought could house itself in such decrepit and superseded chambers.
But though to visit the sins of the fathers upon the children may be a morality good enough for divinities, it is scorned by the average human nature; and it therefore does not mend the matter.
You are one of the very men Christminster was intended for when the colleges were founded; a man with a passion for learning, but no money, or opportunities, or friends. But you were elbowed off the pavement by the millionaires’ sons.
Yes- I must own it- I am bright-tonight: cheerful and more than cheerful- so much so that I am almost sad again with the sense that all of it passing away. And sometimes, when I am excessively hopeful and blithe, a trouble is looming in the distance: so that I often get to look upon gloom in me with content, and to fear a happy mood. Still this maybe be absurd- I feel that it is absurd. Perhaps my day is dawning at last.
It is an ignorant place, except as to the townspeople, artisans, drunkards, and paupers, she said, perverse still at his differing from her. They see life as it is, of course; but few of the people in the colleges do. You prove it in your own person. You are one of the very men Christminster was intended for when the colleges were founded; a man with a passion for learning, but no money, or opportunities, or friends. But you were elbowed off the pavement by the millionaires’ sons.
They say that a time comes when men laugh at misery through long acquaintance with it.
The trees overhead deepened the gloom of the hour, and they dripped sadly upon him, impressing him with forebodings – illogical forebodings; for though he knew that he loved her he also knew that he could not be more to her than he was.
Children begin with detail, and learn up to the general; they begin with the contiguous, and gradually comprehend the universal. The boy seemed to have begun with the generals of life, and never to have concerned himself with the particulars.
Since the receipt of the missive in the morning, Boldwood had felt the symmetry of his existence to be slowly getting distorted in the direction of an ideal passion. The disturbance was as the first floating weed to Columbus – the contemptibly little suggesting possibilities of the infinitely great.
But what was love without a home? Misery. What was a home without love? Alas, not much; but still a kind of home.
There was not a human soul near. Sad October and her saddest self seemed the only two existences haunting that lane.
The boy’s face expressed the whole tale of their situation. On that little shape had converged all the inauspiciousness and shadow which had darkened the first union of Jude, and all the accidents, mistakes, fears, errors of the last. He was their nodal point, their focus, their expression in a single term. For the rashness of those parents he had groaned, for their ill assortment he had quaked, and for the misfortunes of these he had died.
Not guessing the cause, there was nothing to remind him that experience is as to intensity, and not as to duration.