CHAPTER III
The Soil (. . . 1850)
From this self-contained place rose in stealthy silence tall stems of smoke, which the eye of imagination could trace downward to their root on quiet hearth-stones festooned overhead with hams and flitches. It was one of those sequestered spots outside the gates of the world where may usually be found more meditation than action, and more passivity than meditation; where reasoning proceeds on narrow premises, and results in. inferences wildly imaginative; yet where, from time to time, dramas of a grandeur and unity truly Sophoclean are enacted in the real, by virtue of the concentrated passions and closely knit interdependence of the lives therein.
BY many a literary incantation such as this has Thomas Hardy called into being and summoned up before his readers the Genii of his native country. Or, viewed from a slightly different angle, "Wessex" has been to him a vast stage upon which things both animate and inanimate have been woven together in comic and tragic patterns, as the winds of chance blew upon them, or as causal chains, stretching infinitely into the past, have determined them.
"Wessex" has been to Hardy primarily a land of associations. He never walked through it saying, "So, and so, and so, might events have complicated themselves—thus, and thus, in such a place." He rather imagined, "Here tragedies did actually play themselves out, and did actually lead on, and will always lead on, to further
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