Thomas Hardy

Stephen blushed; and his father looked from one to the other in a state of utter incomprehension.

The wind had freshened his warm complexion as it freshens the glow of a brand.

[T]o bear on their faces, as plainly as on a phylactery, the inscription, "Do, pray, look at the coronet on my panels;" […]

His voice had a genuine pathos now, and his large brown hands perceptibly trembled.

It was only whispered, for something unutterably mournful no less than distressing in this spectacle of a man showing himself to be so entirely the vane of a passion enervated the feminine instinct for punctilios.

People of unalterable ideas still insisted upon calling him "Sergeant" when they met him, which was in some degree owing to his having still retained the well-shaped moustache of his military days, and the soldierly bearing inseparable from his form.

[I]n the meridian times of stage-coach travelling [the Buck's Head inn] had been the place where many coaches changed and kept their relays of horses.

[…] when the interposing barriers of earth and time, and a sense that the events had been somewhat shut into oblivion, would deaden the sting that revelation and invidious remark would have for Bathsheba just now.

He descended and came to a small basin of sea enclosed by the cliffs. Troy’s nature freshened within him; he thought he would rest and bathe here before going farther.

"And what ghastly gallicrow might the poor fellow have been like, Master Fairway?" asked the turf-cutter.

[…] Bob's countenance was sublimed by his recent interview, like that of a priest just come from the penetralia of the temple.

The exaggeration with darkness imparted to the glooms of this region impressed Henchard more than he had expected. The lugubrious harmony of the spot with his domestic situation was too perfect for him, impatient of effects, scenes, and adumbrations.

Donald appeared not to see her at all, and answered her wise little remarks with curtly indifferent monosyllables […]

Among the excluding matters there was, for one, the effect upon Mr. Melbury of the womanly mien and manners of his daughter, which took him so much unawares that, though it did not make him absolutely forget the existence of her conductor homeward, thrust Giles’s image back into quite the obscurest cellarage of his brain.

In the hollow shades of the roof could be seen pale dangling arms of ivy which had crept through the joints of the tiles and were groping in vain for some support, their leaves being dwarfed and sickly for want of sunlight; [...]

The atmosphere beneath is languorous, and is so tinged with azure that what artists call the middle distance partakes also of that hue, while the horizon beyond is of the deepest ultramarine.

"And we shan't have a nice new horse, and lots o' golden money to buy fairlings! And Tess won't look pretty in her best cloze no mo-o-ore!"

The children, who had made use of this idea of Tess being taken up by their wealthy kinsfolk (as they imagined the other family to be) as a species of dolorifuge after the death of the horse, began to cry at Tess's reluctance, and teased and reproached her for hesitating.

They sometimes seem to be like the apples on our stubbard-tree.

There were nearly a hundred milchers […] and of the herd the master-dairyman milked six or eight with his own hands.

Besides the jar of contrast there came to her a chill self-reproach that she had not returned sooner, to help her mother in these domesticities, instead of indulging herself out-of-doors.

Behind him the hills are open, the sun blazes down upon fields so large as to give an unenclosed character to the landscape, the lanes are white, the hedges low and plashed, the atmosphere colourless.

The sun […] had a curious sentient, personal look, […] his present aspect […] explained the old-time heliolatries in a moment.

On reaching the fresh air he was sufficiently unsteady to incline the row of three at one moment as if they were marching to London, and at another as if they were marching to Bath - which produced a comical effect, frequent enough in families on nocturnal homegoings; and, like most comical effects, not quite so comic after all.

She drew a quick pettish breath of objection, writhing uneasily in her seat.

But it pleased her to play on my passion / And whet me to pleadings / That won from her mirthful negations / And scornings undue.

With violence the lands are spread / Even as in Israel's day, / And it repenteth me I bred / Chartered armipotents lust-led / To feuds […]