"This fashionable watering-place, with its eastern and its western stations, its piers, its groves of pines, its promenades, and its covered gardens, was, to Angel Clare, like a fairy place suddenly created by the stroke of a wand, and allowed to get a little dusty. An outlying tract of the enormous Egdon Waste was close at hand, yet on the very verge of that tawny piece of antiquity such a glittering novelty as this pleasure city had chosen to spring up. Within the space of a mile from its outskirts every irregularity of the soil was prehistoric; every channel an undisturbed British trackway; not a sod having been turned there since the days of the Cæsars. Yet the exotic had grown here, suddenly as the prophet's gourd; and had drawn hither Tess. By the midnight lamps he went up and down the winding ways of this new world in an old one, and could discern between the trees and against the stars the lofty roofs, chimneys, gazebos, and towers of the numerous fanciful residences of which the place was composed. It was a city of detached mansions; a Mediterranean lounging-place on the English Channel; and as seen now by night it seemed even more imposing than it was. The sea was near at hand, but not intrusive; it murmured, and he thought it was the pines; the pines murmured in precisely the same tones, and he thought they were the sea." Space fails one to trace the boundaries of the re-created Wessex any further. Very rightly, very thoroughly has the novelist _par excellence_ of our day, appreciated all the nobleness and all the poetry that lies within the area of his chosen _mise en scène_. Not the least of the services which Mr. Thomas Hardy has rendered us, perhaps even to be prized more than his faithful portraying of rustic character, is his thus revivifying, and by consequence exciting the popular taste for and delight in so interesting a portion of our English homeland. Nor let it be forgotten that his novels are not altogether fictitious, but are impregnated with authentic social and national history. There is truth enough in his works of fiction to make him a famous historian, omitting altogether what belongs to the proper region of romance. PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN _At the Villafield Press, Glasgow, Scotland_ Transcriber's Note: Minor typographical errors have been corrected without note. Irregularities and inconsistencies in the text have been retained as printed. Words printed in italics are marked with underlines: _italics_. The cover of this ebook was created by the transcriber and is hereby placed in the public domain. End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Heart of Wessex, by Sidney Heath