Thomas Hardy: The Woodlanders

16. CHAPTER XVI. (continued)

"'She moved upon this earth a shape of brightness, A power, that from its objects scarcely drew One impulse of her being--in her lightness Most like some radiant cloud of morning dew, Which wanders through the waste air's pathless blue, To nourish some far desert: she did seem Beside me, gathering beauty as she grew, Like the bright shade of some immortal dream Which walks, when tempests sleep, the wave of life's dark stream.'"

The consummate charm of the lines seemed to Winterborne, though he divined that they were a quotation, to be somehow the result of his lost love's charms upon Fitzpiers.

"You seem to be mightily in love with her, sir," he said, with a sensation of heart-sickness, and more than ever resolved not to mention Grace by name.

"Oh no--I am not that, Winterborne; people living insulated, as I do by the solitude of this place, get charged with emotive fluid like a Leyden-jar with electric, for want of some conductor at hand to disperse it. Human love is a subjective thing--the essence itself of man, as that great thinker Spinoza the philosopher says--ipsa hominis essentia--it is joy accompanied by an idea which we project against any suitable object in the line of our vision, just as the rainbow iris is projected against an oak, ash, or elm tree indifferently. So that if any other young lady had appeared instead of the one who did appear, I should have felt just the same interest in her, and have quoted precisely the same lines from Shelley about her, as about this one I saw. Such miserable creatures of circumstance are we all!"

"Well, it is what we call being in love down in these parts, whether or no," said Winterborne.

"You are right enough if you admit that I am in love with something in my own head, and no thing in itself outside it at all."

"Is it part of a country doctor's duties to learn that view of things, may I ask, sir?" said Winterborne, adopting the Socratic {Greek word: irony} with such well-assumed simplicity that Fitzpiers answered, readily,