The Project Gutenberg EBook of A Pair of Blue Eyes, by Thomas Hardy

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Title: A Pair of Blue Eyes

Author: Thomas Hardy

Release Date: July 8, 2008 [EBook #224]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A PAIR OF BLUE EYES ***

Produced by John Hamm

A PAIR OF BLUE EYES

by Thomas Hardy

'A violet in the youth of primy nature,
Forward, not permanent, sweet not lasting,
The perfume and suppliance of a minute;
No more.'

PREFACE

The following chapters were written at a time when the craze for
indiscriminate church-restoration had just reached the remotest nooks
of western England, where the wild and tragic features of the coast
had long combined in perfect harmony with the crude Gothic Art of the
ecclesiastical buildings scattered along it, throwing into extraordinary
discord all architectural attempts at newness there. To restore the
grey carcases of a mediaevalism whose spirit had fled, seemed a not
less incongruous act than to set about renovating the adjoining crags
themselves.

Hence it happened that an imaginary history of three human hearts,
whose emotions were not without correspondence with these
material circumstances, found in the ordinary incidents of such
church-renovations a fitting frame for its presentation.

The shore and country about 'Castle Boterel' is now getting well known,
and will be readily recognized. The spot is, I may add, the furthest
westward of all those convenient corners wherein I have ventured to
erect my theatre for these imperfect little dramas of country life and
passions; and it lies near to, or no great way beyond, the vague border
of the Wessex kingdom on that side, which, like the westering verge of
modern American settlements, was progressive and uncertain.

This, however, is of little importance. The place is pre-eminently (for
one person at least) the region of dream and mystery. The ghostly birds,
the pall-like sea, the frothy wind, the eternal soliloquy of the waters,
the bloom of dark purple cast, that seems to exhale from the shoreward
precipices, in themselves lend to the scene an atmosphere like the
twil