Read "A Dream or No" by Thomas Hardy online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
WHY go to Saint-Juliot? What's Juliot to me? / I was but made fancy / By some necromancy / That much of my life claims the spot as its key.
Yes. I have had dreams of that place in the West, / And a maiden abiding / Thereat as in hiding; / Fair-eyed and white-shouldered, broad-browed and brown-tressed.
And of how, coastward bound on a night long ago, / There lonely I found her, / The sea-birds around her, / And other than nigh things uncaring to know.
So sweet her life there (in my thought has it seemed) / That quickly she drew me / To take her unto me, / And lodge her long years with me. Such have I dreamed.
But nought of that maid from Saint-Juliot I see; / Can she ever have been here, / And shed her life's sheen here, / The woman I thought a long housemate with me?
Does there even a place like Saint-Juliot exist? / Or a Vallency Valley / With stream and leafed alley, / Or Beeny, or Bos with its flounce flinging mist?