Page:Life of Thomas Hardy - Brennecke.pdf/102

 shades and the scene. The somber stretch of rounds and hollows seemed to rise and meet the evening gloom in pure sympathy, the heath exhaling darkness as rapidly as the heavens precipitated it. And so the obscurity in the air and the obscurity in the land closed together in a black fraternization towards which each advanced half-way.

The place became full of a watchful intentness now; for when other things sank brooding to sleep the heath appeared slowly to awake and listen. Every night its Titanic form seemed to await something; but it had waited thus, unmoved, during so many centuries, through the crises of so many things, that it could only be imagined to await one last crisis—the final overthrow.

HE portentous organ-point sounded by these superb strophes, already recognized as ranking among the noblest descriptive prose pieces in our language, may with doubled fitness accompany and echo through a recital of the earliest events in Hardy's life.

Not only does it determine the mood of The Return of the Native , not only does it reveal the prevailing spiritual tone of the whole of the Wessex Kingdom; it also suggests the dominating character of the particular terrain which first entered the vision of the poet. For it was on the very edge of a heath like Egdon that the house in which he was born was situated. It still stands there.

Puddletown Heath and Bockhampton Heath were united to make an Egdon. And it was at Higher or Upper Bockhampton, about three miles to the north of Dorchester, that Hardy's father carried on his trade of general builder for the community. Here it was that Thomas Hardy issued forth from the womb of the Heath, of Time, and of his mother, and drew in his first breath