[hardy-l] Cold Hardy

[Paul Yuellig]

Wonderful descriptions. He (Hardy) ought to be required reading for everyone living...especially, politicians since, they have such a distorted view of reality, in most cases...at least here in America, at this point in time.

Rosemarie Morgan <Rosemarie.morgan at yale.edu> wrote:  I thought it had to be Flintcomb-Ash -- but maybe it's far worse in my 
imagination --

Anyway here are some snippets from Ch XLIII (OUP 1988)

"It was so high a situation, this field, that the rain had no occasion to 
fall, but raced along horizontally upon the yelling wind, sticking into 
them like glass splinters... "

or a beautiful description of cobwebs

" Cobwebs revealed their presence on sheds and walls where none had ever 
been observed till brought out into visibility by this crystallising 
atmosphere, hanging like loops of white worsted from salient points of the 
outhouses.."

and the best may be -----

Then "came a spell of dry frost, when strange birds from behind the north 
pole began to arrive silently on the upland of Flintcomb-Ash; gaunt 
spectral creature with tragical eyes -- eyes which had witnessed scenes of 
cataclysmic horror in inaccessible polar regions... in curdling 
temperatures that no man could endure; which had beheld the crash of 
icebergs and the slide of snow-hills by the shooting light of the Aurora; 
been half blinded by the whirl of colossal storms and terraqueous 
distortions..."


Don't you love "from behind the north pole" ? -- as if coming from the 
north pole in itself isn't quite ghastly enough -- so it has to be from 
some unknown, unknowable glacial hell . .

Warmly -
Rosemarie
PS I must have dug out more "snow-hills" this year than in all my New 
England winters -- starting in December and it's still falling (10 more 
inches today)..
:
>I read this morning that half a mile of sea had frozen in Dorset and much of
>England is currently snow-covered.
>
> I wondered what other subscribers thought might be the
>'coldest' passage he wrote.
>
>Patrick
>


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