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 halfway. 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 crisis of so many things, that it could only be imagined to await one last crisis the final over It was at present a place perfectly accordant with man's nature - neither ghastly, hateful, nor ugly; neither commonplace, unmeaning, nor tame; but, like man, slighted and enduring: and withal, singularly colossal and mysterious in its swarthy monotony. As with some persons who have long lived far apart solitude seemed to look out of its countenance. Before him Along an aged highway walked an old man. stretched the long, laborious road, dry, empty, and white. It was quite open to the heath on each side, and bisected that vast dark surface like the parting line on a head of black hair, diminishing and bending away on the furthest horizon.1 66 66 Study the admirable phrases which enforce the dominant tone of the heath: embrowned itself moment by moment, " "an installment of night," "retard the dawn, sadden noon," "the sombre stretch," "slighted and enduring," singularly colossal and mysterious in its swarthy monotony." Note the figure "bisected that vast dark surface like the parting line on a head of black hair," which a glance at the picture shows is a masterpiece of careful observation. Thus close to the soil is 1 Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native, Ch. i. Hardy's "local color." His work should be emphasized, for it offers the most stimulating examples of the relation of setting to events and characters. It is exhilarating to make a walking tour through the Hardy country, reading the stories on the scenes of action. But since that is possible for very few of us, the next best thing is to read the novels and look up the backgrounds in Hermann Lea's Thomas Hardy's Wessex, which is equipped with two hundred and forty pictures from photographs and a map of Wessex. The dairy farms, manor houses, churches, inns, roads, and villages which figure in his stories are done from the real. A few more examples will be interesting. In Tess of the D' Urbervilles the scene of the tragic honeymoon of Tess and Angel Clare is "the mouldy old habitation" of Wool Bridge- called by Hardy Wellbridge. Later the story moves to Kingsbere, where in the church is the ancient tomb of the D'Urbervilles. In the dusk, Tess enters the church, and, in a highly dramatic way, comes face to face with Alec D'Urberville, who had been the evil genius of her life. Within the window were the tombs of the family, covering in their dates several centuries. They were canopied, altar-shaped, and plain; their carvings being defaced and broken; their brasses torn from the matrices, the rivet-holes remaining like marten-holes in a sand-cliff. Of all the reminders that she had ever received that her people were socially extinct there was none so forcible as this spoliation. She drew near to a dark stone on which was inscribed: Ostíum sepulchri antiquae familiae D'Urberville. Tess did not read Church-Latin like a Cardinal, but she knew that this was the door of her ancestral sepulchre, and that the |