The Darkling Thrush (14)

Back to birdsong, and I know that this poem by Thomas Hardy is a favourite with several of my blog readers. Does any other poem describe so beautifully and so movingly the triumph of hope over despair? There seems no good reason for the thrush's song: it's winter out there, it's frosty, it's bleak, the earth is 'shrunken' and 'hard'. Except for the dispirited narrator of the poem, everyone is indoors, trying to get meagre comfort at the fireside hearth. Then, suddenly, unexpectedly, that 'full-hearted' voice, singing of 'joy illimited' — unreasoning, almost irrational, counteracting the deathly gloom, singing despite everything. And the singer, pointedly, is 'aged' (wise, experienced), 'frail, gaunt and small' (everything's against him: his age, his size, his health) and 'in blast-beruffled plume' (beset by the ravages of nature). And yet, in the face of almost overwhelming odds and opposition, the thrush sings. 'So little cause for carolings'!  Yet there is song — joyful, redemptive, transcendent. The thrush has some positive response, some hopeful answer, which may have eluded the narrator, the poet and the reader; but, by giving it freely and naturally, the thrush transmits that hope to all of us.     

The Darkling Thrush

I leant upon a coppice gate
      When Frost was spectre-grey,
And Winter's dregs made desolate
      The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
      Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
      Had sought their household fires.

The land's sharp features seemed to be
      The Century's corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
      The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
      Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
      Seemed fervourless as I.

At once a voice arose among
      The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
      Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
      In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
      Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carolings
      Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
      Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
      His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
      And I was unaware.

THOMAS HARDY

Beauty may be found in the least likely of places and circumstances.

Walking As A Cultural And Aesthetic Act (8)

Camino, Spain

Nowadays we take it for granted that walking is a laudable pastime and recreational activity. We tend to give a positive nod to the walkers we see: they are taking exercise, they are getting out in the fresh air, they are enjoying being part of nature. All Good Things. It was not always thus.

Up until the late eighteenth century no one walked unless they could help it, unless they were poor and could not afford horse, carriage or coach. And, for the ubiquitous poor, walking was not always a pleasurable pursuit. It was a means to an end, not an end in itself - the practical, indeed the only way to drive cattle and pigs to market, to reach crops grown on feudal agricultural strips, to visit friends and family. Beyond the village, routes were uncertain, if not dangerous. Highwaymen and footpads roamed the highways and byways, and folk in other settlements could be suspicious of, or downright hostile to, strangers. Even as late as 1782 the German minister Carl Moritz, walking across England, found himself abused by innkeepers, and ejected from hostelries where he wished to spend the night. His crime? He was on foot! He wrote: A traveller on foot in this country seems to be considered as a sort of wild man, or an out-of-the-way being, who is stared at, pitied, suspected, and shunned by everybody that meets him.

But, by the early nineteenth century, all of this had changed. Influenced by the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who originated the idea of the 'noble savage' living free and uncorrupted in the wild, poets and writers like William Wordsworth and Henry David Thoreau wholeheartedly embraced the cultural, aesthetic and moral value of nature. And, to get close to nature, you had to walk through it. Thoreau's two-year sojourn in a hut by Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts, is well known. He wrote: When we walk, we naturally go to the fields and the woods: what would become of us, if we walked only in a garden or a mall?

And Wordsworth - often accompanied by his sister, Dorothy, or fellow Romantics like Coleridge or De Quincey - must have walked tens of thousands of miles during his lifetime. He would regularly cover fifteen or twenty miles a day, and, even when at home in his Lakeland cottage, would stride endlessly up and down the garden in a creative reverie. Walking in nature gave him solace and inspiration, and he would commonly compose his poems while walking, rather than at his desk. To return to Thoreau, Thoreau also wrote: When a traveler asked Wordsworth's servant to show him her master's study, she answered, 'Here is his library, but his study is out of doors.' Wordsworth's masterpiece of a poem, The Prelude, is really just a long walk in words. 

Throughout the nineteenth century, this walking lark really caught on. Tourism was invented - helped by the boom of the railways - and people travelled further, and walked further, to admire and be awestruck at picturesque views, raging cataracts and terrifying mountain scenery. Hikers and climbers started to explore the European Alps and other mountain chains. Souvenirs were manufactured, and cameras began to record it all. The activity of walking also began to appear in the literature of the day. If you read Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice or Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles, you'll find they are full of people walking.

Earth-Secrets

I know it's not August, and I know it's not yet midnight, and I know I said I'd put Hardy aside for a while ... but ... I've just read this, and it's so utterly delighful that I had to share it.

An August Midnight

A shaded lamp and a waving blind,
And the beat of a clock from a distant floor:
On this scene enter - winged, horned and spined -
A longlegs, a moth, and a dumbledore;
While 'mid my page there idly stands
A sleepy fly, that rubs its hands ...

Thus meet we five, in this still place,
At this point of time, at this point in space.
- My guests besmear my new-penned line,
Or bang at the lamp and fall supine.
'God's humblest, they!' I muse. Yet why?
They know Earth-secrets that know not I.

THOMAS HARDY

(A dumbledore is a bumble-bee or a cockchafer.)

So Various

I'll end this 9-post riff on Hardy with some quotations I jotted down while reading Claire Tomalin's terrific biography Thomas Hardy:The Time-Torn Man.

The wounds inflicted by life never quite healed in Hardy. Humiliation, rejection, condescension, failure and loss of love remained so close to the skin that the scars bled again at the slightest occasion. This is why many of his poems return to the griefs of the past. It is also why the rage that appears in his last novel, Jude The Obscure, was fuelled in the 1890s by the anger he felt in the 1860s.

The shifting feelings in a marriage, and in a family, are as complex and unpredictable as cloud formations.

Looking at the expensively dressed ladies at an evening party, he [Hardy] famously asked himself, 'If put into rough wrappers in a turnip-field, where would their beauty be?'

Hardy took some of his pessimism from Schopenhauer, who saw the world as malignant, God and immortality as illusions, and the extinction of the human race through chastity as an end to be sought: best of all not to be born. Yet he [Hardy] was always too imaginative to follow any one philosopher.

Here she [Tess] is reviving after disaster: 'some spirit within her rose automatically as the sap in the twigs. It was unexpended youth, surging up anew after its temporary check, and bringing with it hope, and the invincible instinct towards self-delight.'

He [Hardy] was exact when he said a novel is not an argument but an impression, and this novel [Tess Of The D'Urbervilles] lives through its impressions of Tess and the landscapes through which she moves.

No one has ever claimed that the book [Tess Of The D'Urbervilles] is perfectly written or constructed, or without clumsiness, but it glows with the intensity of his [Hardy's] imagination; and Tess's capacity to arouse visceral distaste in some and profound affection and admiration in others is a measure of the sexual power he built into his heroine.

Leonard and Virginia Woolf paid a visit to Hardy in July 1926. Leonard Woolf wrote about the encounter: He is one of the few people who have left upon me the personal impression of greatness... He was a human being, not 'the great man'.

[The poem] So Various describes a man made up of contradictions, highly strung but also stiff and cold; a faithful lover but fickle too; pleased with his own cleverness but easily put down; always sad but cheerful company; cool to friends yet eager to please - all of course versions of himself.

(These posts have been a kind of blogging experiment in which I've tried to approach Hardy from all sorts of different perspectives - novels, poems, biography, philosophy, religion, romanticism, realism, nature, walking. No post was particularly preplanned. Each post just seemed to evolve spontaneously from the previous one - in the typical way of blogs. I hope something of my enthusiasm for Hardy has communicated; and if I've encouraged anyone to read or reread Hardy, that's great.)

(During my recent reading about Hardy I also jotted down all the adjectives I could find which were used to describe him by his family, friends and acquaintances. These are some of them: shy, introverted, kind, elusive, sphinx-like, ill-at-ease, depressive, private, lively, grey, self-possessed, unassuming, snobbish, mean, generous, unfathomable, quiet-mannered, curious, charming, unaffected, observant.)

Mechanic Speech And Mind-Chains

These are 2 of my favourite Hardy poems. The 1st is about the death of youthful romanticism and idealism - but paradoxically the poem's very existence, its form and expression, breathes fresh life into them. The 2nd poem is about the freedom of solitude, the liberation of mind and soul bestowed by the hills, compared with the memory-laden lowlands and the mean-spirited towns. Here, on the heights, one can keep ghosts at bay, and be rid of clanking "mind-chains". I have a feeling both of these poems may strike a chord with some of you.

Shut Out That Moon

Close up the casement, draw the blind,
Shut out that stealing moon,
She wears too much the guise she wore
Before our lutes were strewn
With years-deep dust, and names we read
On a white stone were hewn.

Step not forth on the dew-dashed lawn
To view the Lady's Chair,
Immense Orion's glittering form,
The Less and Greater Bear:
Stay in; to such sights we were drawn
When faded ones were fair.

Brush not the bough for midnight scents
That come forth lingeringly,
And wake the same sweet sentiments
They breathed to you and me
When living seemed a laugh, and love
All it was said to be.

Within the common lamp-lit room
Prison my eyes and thought;
Let dingy details crudely loom,
Mechanic speech be wrought:
Too fragrant was Life's early bloom,
Too tart the fruit it brought!

1904

Wessex Heights

There are some heights in Wessex, shaped as if by a kindly hand
For thinking, dreaming, dying on, and at crises when I stand,
Say, on Ingpen Beacon eastward, or on Wylls-Neck westwardly,
I seem where I was before my birth, and after death may be.

In the lowlands I have no comrade, not even the lone man's friend -
Her who suffereth long and is kind; accepts what he is too weak to mend:
Down there they are dubious and askance; there nobody thinks as I,
But mind-chains do not clank where one's next neighbour is the sky.

In the towns I am tracked by phantoms having weird detective ways -
Shadows of beings who fellowed with myself of earlier days:
They hang about at places, and they say harsh heavy things -
Men with a wintry sneer, and women with tart disparagings.

Down there I seem to be false to myself, my simple self that was,
And is not now, and I see him watching, wondering what crass cause
Can have merged him into such a strange continuator as this,
Who yet has something in common with himself, my chrysalis.

I cannot go to the great grey Plain; there's a figure against the moon,
Nobody sees it but I, and it makes my breast beat out of tune;
I cannot go to the tall-spired town, being barred by the forms now passed
For everybody but me, in whose long vision they stand there fast.

There's a ghost at Yell'ham Bottom chiding loud at the fall of the night,
There's a ghost in Froom-side Vale, thin lipped and vague, in a shroud of white,
There is one in the railway-train whenever I do not want it near,
I see its profile against the pane, saying what I would not hear.

As for one rare fair woman, I am now but a thought of hers,
I enter her mind and another thought succeeds me that she prefers;
Yet my love for her in its fulness she herself even did not know;
Well, time cures hearts of tenderness, and now I can let her go.

So I am found on Ingpen Beacon, or on Wylls-Neck to the west,
Or else on homely Bulbarrow, or little Pilsdon Crest,
Where men have never cared to haunt, nor women have walked with me,
And ghosts then keep their distance; and I know some liberty.

1896

The Memory Of Belief

He could no longer believe, but he cherished the memory of belief... From CLAIRE TOMALIN's biography Thomas Hardy: The Time-Torn Man.

Hardy's novels were ahead of their time in the way they introduced subjects such as class inequality, sexual passion, and strong, independent women. Because of this he shocked and angered many of the more traditional critics and reviewers. His attacks on institutions like marriage and the Church resulted in the expurgation of his novels (which first came out in serial form) by his publishers - to Hardy's disgust. But he bowed to this, as he was modest and quiet-mannered in character; and, after all, he did want to make a living. Subsequent editions of his works were textually restored in their entirety.

As is the case with many imaginative novelists and artists, Hardy was ambivalent about many things, including religion. But there was no going back to the old certainties of Christian faith after the publication of Darwin's On The Origin Of Species in 1859 (Hardy was 19 years old when this earth-shattering, God-shattering book came out). He did of course know the book, and he had also read Matthew Arnold's poem Dover Beach - a pivotal poem of the 19th century about the melancholy induced by loss of Faith.

Here is the desolate but beautiful last verse of Matthew Arnold's famous poem (Arnold, poet, critic, essayist and school inspector - his father was Thomas Arnold, headmaster of Rugby School - was very much a bridge between Romanticism and Modernism, as Hardy was himself in some ways):

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

The adjective "darkling" purposefully recalls the Romantic use of the same word in Ode To A Nightingale by Keats; and Hardy himself chooses this word in his celebrated poem The Darkling Thrush, which I posted previously.

I remember very well the effect that Dover Beach had on me the 1st time I read it in my teenage years. For me it was a kind of rite of passage poem. Somehow it marked a setting aside of childish things and the beginning of adulthood. One can see quite clearly how this poem points the way to the Existentialist ideas of the next century.

Something And Nothing To Say

A few last words about The Return Of The Native. As I've already said, this was Hardy's favourite among his novels, and it contains lightly disguised autobiographical elements.

Hardy was often called a Romantic by his readers and critics. Which he strongly repudiated, considering himself a Realist. This dichotomy is realized in his portrayal of Clym Yeobright and Eustacia Vye on the one hand, and Diggory Venn on the other. Clym and Eustacia embody 2 different kinds of romantic idealism - an idealism based on illusion, which founders in dejection, disappointment and, in Eustacia's case, death. Clym is enthusiastic about ideas but careless about outward things; Eustacia longs for a world beyond the Heath where she believes the grass grows greener. In contrast Venn, the reddleman, is rational, realistic, artful, practical and premeditated in his ways. He's isolated and independent, his own man, and closely associated with the Heath itself. He reminds one of Gabriel Oak in Far From The Madding Crowd. Although Venn finally marries Thomasin, Hardy did not originally intend this ending, preferring a wholly tragic conclusion. In fact there are both Romantic and Realist aspects to this novel - unsurprisingly, for Hardy himself was just such a mixture of opposing characteristics, as I described in yesterday's post.

Venn is a man of few words, but he's not afraid to speak when he has something to say. On this occasion he remains untalkative: 'Upon my life, it fairly startled me when the man spoke!' said Fairway, handing a candle. 'Oh - 'tis the reddleman. You've kept a quiet tongue, young man.''Yes, I had nothing to say,' observed Venn. In a few minutes he arose and wished the company good-night.

To finish with, here are some words Eustacia says to Clym: Sometimes more bitterness is sown in five minutes than can be got rid of in a whole life... This is one of the novel's themes. The bitterness resulting from pride, stubbornness, deception and uncontrollable desire leads relentlessly to tragedy.

Walking: Creation And Revelation

The road became a theatre for action in his imagination... CLAIRE TOMALIN on THOMAS HARDY

I've finished The Return Of The Native (Hardy's own personal favourite of his novels) and I'm now immersed in Claire Tomalin's excellent and very readable biography Thomas Hardy: The Time-Torn Man (Viking, 2006). The blurb of this book presents Hardy as a paradoxical figure: one of the great Victorian novelists - and also one of the great twentieth-century poets ... a believer and an unbeliever, a socialist and a snob, an unhappy husband and a desolate widower; a driven man who who ended his days in simplicity and serenity. Simplicity and serenity. Not a bad way in which to end one's days.

Every day the boy Hardy walked the 3 miles from his family cottage in Higher Bockhampton to school in Dorchester and back. Later he did the same trip in his 1st job as an architect's apprentice. A keen observer of nature and of people, he took in everything he saw during these daily walks - and these details impressed themselves on his mind and found their way into many of his writings.

As Tomalin says early in her biography: Walking the roads, meeting others on the road, exchanging news with travellers, being overtaken by riders, carts and carriers, or offered lifts, were all part of his daily experience throughout his boyhood, so that it is not surprising that the road became a theatre for action in his imagination and walking a central activity in his writing, used dramatically and to establish or underline character. Most of his charcters are prodigious walkers. Tess and Jude both walk themselves through the crises in their lives, and Jude effectively kills himself by walking in the rain. Gabriel Oak walks to find work, and Fanny Robin walks through the snow to plead with her lover, and then drags herself along the road to the workhouse, leaning on an obliging dog, to die. Elfride in A Pair Of Blue Eyes runs 'through the pelting rain like a hare; or more like pheasant when, scampering away with a lowered tail, it has a mind to fly, but does not.' The newly-wed lovers in Two On A Tower walk nine miles across country to a railway station to avoid being noticed. The Hand Of Ethelberta opens with Ethelberta, a young widow, taking a solitary walk on a heath, where she sees a wild duck being pursued by a hawk, runs after the birds to see what will happen and loses her way. At the beginning of The Mayor Of Casterbridge, Henchard is shown on the road, his character to be read not in his words but his walk: 'his measured springless walk was the walk of the skilled country man as distinct from the desultory shamble of the general labourer; while in the turn and plant of each foot there was, further, a dogged and cynical indifference, personal to himself.' And at the end of the book he leaves Casterbridge on foot, a diminishing figure going into the distance, and observed in fine detail: 'the yellow straw basket at his back moving up and down with each tread, and the creases behind his knees coming and going alternately.' In The Return Of The Native, Mrs Yeobright recognizes a distant, anonymous furze-cutter simply by his walk: 'a gait she had seen somewhere before; and the gait revelaed the man to her... "His walk is exactly as my husband's used to be," she said; and then the thought burst upon her that the furze-cutter was her son.'

(Claire Tomalin has also written acclaimed biographies of Mary Wollstonecraft, Shelley, Dickens, Katherine Mansfield, Jane Austen and Samuel Pepys. She is married to the playwright, novelist and translator Michael Frayn.)

Education, Ambition, Career

Some quotations from The Return Of The Native. Humphrey, who is building a stack of furze-faggots for the old man, Eustacia's grandfather, says to him:

'They say, too, that Clym Yeobright is become a real perusing man, with the strangest notions about things. There, that's because he went to school early, such as school was.'

'Strange notions has he,' said the old man. 'Ah, there's too much of that sending to school in these days! It only does harm. Every gatepost and barn's door you come to is sure to have some bad word or other chalked upon it by the young rascals: a woman can hardly pass for shame sometimes. If they'd never been taught how to write they wouldn't have been able to scribble such villainy. Their fathers couldn't do it, and the country was all the better for it.'

(Clym Yeobright is the Egdon Heath native who returns home from Paris where he worked in a jeweller's shop.)

Some pages later Clym is talking to his status-conscious mother who nurses high ambitions for him. He confesses he is tired of the jewellery trade:

'Mother, I hate the flashy business. Talk about men deserving the name, can any man deserving the name waste his time in that effeminate way, when he sees half the world going to ruin for want of somebody to buckle-to and teach 'em how to breast the misery they were born to? I get up every morning and see the whole creation groaning and travailing in pain, as St. Paul says, and yet there am I, selling trinkets to women and fops, and pandering to the meanest vanities - I, who have health and strength enough for anything. I have been troubled in my mind about it all year, and the end is that I cannot do it any more.'

Mrs Yeobright responds disappointedly:

'And yet you might have been a gentleman if you had only persevered. Manager to that large establishment - what better can a man wish for? What a post of trust and respect! 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. Mother, what is doing well?'

Mrs Yeobright was far too thoughtful a woman to be content with ready definitions, and, like the 'What is wisdom?' of Plato's Socrates, and the 'What is truth?' of Pontius Pilate, Yeobright's burning question received no answer.'

We can see above a local countryman's view of education. Clym Yeobright has been educated. A glittering career was expected of him in Paris. Yet he returns to his native soil - with (as it becomes clear a little later) idealistic but impractical ambitions.

I'll leave it at that. With just a few questions to ponder: what is education? Is it always a good thing? Is it a good thing to come back to one's birthplace - for good? (Clym, it turns out, has returned once and for all - finally to become a humble furze-cutter.) What is 'doing well'?

Socrates asked, 'What is wisdom?'

Pilate asked, 'What is truth?'

The Dew-fall Hawk

Leafing through my copy of Thomas Hardy: Selected Poems (edited by Walford Davies, Everyman's Library, 1982), I find I still like many of the poems very much, but this one remains my firm favourite:

Afterwards

When the Present has latched its postern behind my tremulous stay,
And the May month flaps its glad green leaves like wings,
Delicate-filmed as new-spun silk, will the neighbours say,
'He was a man who used to notice such things'?

If it be in the dusk when, like an eyelid's soundless blink,
The dewfall-hawk comes crossing the shades to alight
Upon the wind-warped upland thorn, a gazer may think,
'To him this must have been a familiar sight.'

If I pass during some nocturnal blackness, mothy and warm,
When the hedgehog travels furtively over the lawn,
One may say, 'He strove that such innocent creatures should come to no harm,
But he could do little for them; and now he is gone.'

If, when hearing that I have been stilled at last, they stand at the door,
Watching the full-starred heavens that winter sees,
Will this thought rise on those who will meet my face no more,
'He was one who had an eye for such mysteries'?

And will any say when my bell of quittance is heard in the gloom,
And a crossing breeze cuts a pause in its outrollings,
Till they rise again, as they were a new bell's boom,
'He hears it not now, but used to notice such things'?

Firstly there's the whole, luscious sound of it - "glad green leaves", "delicate-filmed as new-spun silk", "dewfall-hawk", "mothy and warm"...

Then there's the poignancy of it - Hardy is talking about a time when he will no longer be there to "notice" and witness the delights and "mysteries" of nature, and, by extension, to describe and celebrate these things in his writings.

And finally there's the unanswered question - "...will the neighbours say, 'He was a man who used to notice such things'?" Hardy hopes the answer is "yes" - and he would probably feel fairly sure of this answer, especially since all of his novels and many of his poems had already been published before this particular poem was written. But can we ever be sure of our own legacy, and whether or how we will live on in the minds and memories of others? Will our thoughts and actions, will our love of nature and "innocent creatures", will what we may like to think of as our keen senses and sensibilities - will they actually be remembered? Many prolific writers even, famous in their day, are now forgotten...

(I quoted briefly from this poem once before in my post Glad Green Leaves.)

Some Blessed Hope

Almost back to winter again this morning with frost and fog and a temperature of -2 degrees. This blog's been occupied with cold weather, songbirds and Thomas Hardy lately - so what better poem to quote today than Hardy's The Darkling Thrush.

The Darkling Thrush

I leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-gray,
And Winter's dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.

The land's sharp features seemed to be
The Century's corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fervourless as I.

At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.

31 December 1900

Perfection.

The Novelty Of Pageantry

Loren Webster is discussing the novels of Thomas Hardy in his blog, starting with The Return Of The Native. I've been reading The Return Of The Native too. It struck me that there's a lot of walking done in Hardy's novels. At the beginning of Tess Of The D'Urbervilles Jack D'Urbeyfield walks tipsily home from the inn. Bathsheba Everdene meets Sergeant Troy for the 1st time on her routine evening ramble round her farm in Far From The Madding Crowd. And The Return Of The Native opens with an old man - who turns out to be The Captain, grandfather of Eustacia Vye - walking across desolate Egdon Heath.

As an example of the loveliness and smooth flow of Hardy's prose, I've chosen this paragraph which comes at the start of Chapter 1 of Book Second of The Return Of The Native. As a bonus, the passage also mentions walking!

On fine days at this time of year, and earlier, certain ephemeral operations were apt to disturb, in their trifling way, the majestic calm of Egdon Heath. They were activities which, beside those of a town, a village, or even a farm, would have appeared as the ferment of stagnation merely, a creeping of the flesh of somnolence. But here, away from comparisons, shut in by the stable hills, among which mere walking had the novelty of pageantry, and where any man could imagine himself to be Adam without the least difficulty, they attracted the attention of every kind of bird within eyeshot, every reptile not yet asleep, and set the surrounding rabbits curiously watching from hillocks at a safe distance.

What a wonderful description of the slow, rustic life of this remote, bleak heathland with its scatttered cottages and farmsteads - an existence where ordinary, unremarkable activities take on an aura of great significance.

Egdon Heath - gloomy, glorious, monotonous, mysterious. Egdon Heath - in many ways the main 'character' in the novel, and the backdrop against which the human characters play out their tragic destinies. Egdon Heath - symbol of Reality. If I may quote what Loren Webster commented to me about the Heath: I think Hardy uses Egdon Heath to symbolize REALITY, the Nature of things. It is our reaction to reality, and not to our stereotypes of reality, that determines our happiness. Reality is not always a pleasant place, so at best people are going to be unhappy and miserable at times, but they have their best chance for happiness if they understand and adapt to that Reality.

Glad Green Leaves

When the Present has latched its postern behind my tremulous stay,
And the May month flaps its glad green leaves like wings,
Delicate-filmed as new-spun silk, will the neighbours say,
'He was a man who used to notice such things?'

The 1st stanza of Thomas Hardy's poem Afterwards.

We spend weeks and weeks looking forward to the true arrival of Spring; then it happens one weekend when our backs are turned, when our minds are on other things. We walk round the garden, round the village, startled and amazed, wondering:

When did those 1st hawthorn leaves unfurl, so soft and green?

Why didn't we notice earlier the smoky haze of bluebells in the oakwood?

How long has the cherry blossom hung there like snow?