Had he and I but met
By some old ancient inn,
We should have sat us down to wet
Right many a nipperkin!

But ranged as infantry,
And staring face to face,
I shot at him as he at me,
And killed him in his place.

I shot him dead because--
Because he was my foe,
Just so: my foe of course he was;
That's clear enough; although

He thought he


Thomas Hardy

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Give the enemy not only a road for flight, but also a means of defending it.
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Where once we danced, where once we sang, Gentlemen, / The floors are shrunken, cobwebs hang.
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What is it, Angel?" she said, starting up. "Have they come for me?"

"Yes, dearest," he sa...
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Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.
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Do you know that I have undergone three quarters of this labour entirely for the sake of the fourth ...
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Had other aims than my delight.
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On a Fine Morning”
in Poems of the Past and the Present (1901)

WHENCE comes Solac...
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She had not heard him enter, and hardly realized his presence there. She was yawning, and he saw the...
THOMAS HARDY
The beggarly question of parentage--what is it, after all? What does it matter, when you come to thi...
THOMAS HARDY
My argument is that War makes rattling good history; but Peace is poor reading.
THOMAS HARDY
He had just reached the time of life at which 'young' is ceasing to be the prefix of 'man' in speaki...
THOMAS HARDY
But no one came. Because no one ever does.
THOMAS HARDY
My opinion is that a poet should express the emotion of all the ages and the thought of his own.
THOMAS HARDY
The offhand decision of some commonplace mind high in office at a critical moment influences the cou...
THOMAS HARDY
And yet to every bad there is a worse.
THOMAS HARDY
That man's silence is wonderful to listen to.
THOMAS HARDY
Love, though added emotion, is substracted capacity
THOMAS HARDY
Bathsheba loved Troy in the way that only self-reliant women love when they abandon their self-relia...
THOMAS HARDY
The atmosphere beneath is languorous, and is so tinged with azure that what artists call the middle ...
THOMAS HARDY