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The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy
page 8 of 569 (01%)
with fair times; but alas, if times be not fair! Men have oftener
suffered from the mockery of a place too smiling for their reason
than from the oppression of surroundings oversadly tinged. Haggard
Egdon appealed to a subtler and scarcer instinct, to a more recently
learnt emotion, than that which responds to the sort of beauty called
charming and fair.

Indeed, it is a question if the exclusive reign of this orthodox
beauty is not approaching its last quarter. The new Vale of Tempe
may be a gaunt waste in Thule; human souls may find themselves in
closer and closer harmony with external things wearing a sombreness
distasteful to our race when it was young. 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. And ultimately,
to the commonest tourist, spots like Iceland may become what the
vineyards and myrtle-gardens of South Europe are to him now; and
Heidelberg and Baden be passed unheeded as he hastens from the Alps to
the sand-dunes of Scheveningen.

The most thorough-going ascetic could feel that he had a natural right
to wander on Egdon: he was keeping within the line of legitimate
indulgence when he laid himself open to influences such as these.
Colours and beauties so far subdued were, at least, the birthright of
all. Only in summer days of highest feather did its mood touch the
level of gaiety. Intensity was more usually reached by way of the
solemn than by way of the brilliant, and such a sort of intensity was
often arrived at during winter darkness, tempests, and mists. Then
Egdon was aroused to reciprocity; for the storm was its lover, and
the wind its friend. Then it became the home of strange phantoms; and
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