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.