"The spirit moved them"

"So low was an individual sound from these that a combination of hundreds only just emerged from silence, and the myriads of the whole declivity reached the woman's ear but as a shrivelled and intermittent recitative...Suddenly, on the barrow, there mingled with all this wild rhetoric of night a sound which modulated so naturally into the rest that its beginning and ending were hardly to be distinguished. The bluffs, and the bushes, and the heatherbells had broken silence; at last, so did the woman; and her articulation was but as another phrase of the same discourse as theirs. Thrown out on the winds it became twined in with them, and with them it flew away."

--The Return of the Native, Thomas Hardy

Expect more beautiful Thomas Hardy quotes as the (wild) night waxes and wanes. Though I do sometimes wish he would hurry through and not dawdle over all the flora and fauna littering his beloved anthropogenic heath.

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