Search -
A Laodicean; Or, the Castle of the De Stancys
A Laodicean Or the Castle of the De Stancys Author:Thomas Hardy General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1882 Original Publisher: B. Tauchnitz Subjects: Architecture / Individual Architect Fiction / Classics Fiction / Literary Games / Chess Literary Criticism / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It ha... more »s no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: 1. CHAPTER I. The sun blazed down and down, till it was within half an hour of its setting; but the sketcher still lingered at his occupation of measuring and copying the chev- roned doorway -- a bold and quaint example of a transitional style of architecture, which formed the tower entrance to an English village church. The graveyard being quite open on its western side, the tweed-clad figure of the young man, and the tall mass of antique masonry which rose above him to a battlemented parapet, were fired to a great brightness by the uninterrupted solar rays, that crossed the neighbouring mead like a warp of gold threads, in whose mazes groups of equally lustrous gnats danced and wailed incessantly. He was so absorbed in his pursuit that he did not mark the brilliant chromatic effect of which he composed the central feature, till it was brought home to his intelligence by the warmth of the moulded stonework under his touch when measuring; which led him at length to turn his head and gaze on its cause. There are few in whom the sight of a sunset does not beget as much meditative melancholy as contemplative pleasure, the human decline and death that it illustrates being too obvious to escape the notice of the simplest observer. The sketcher, as if he had been brought to this reflection many hundreds of times before by the same spectacle, showed that he did not wish to pursue it just now by turning away h...« less