Read "To an Actress" by Thomas Hardy online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
I READ your name when you were strange to me, / Where it stood blazoned bold with many more; / I passed it vacantly, and did not see / Any great glory in the shape it wore.
O cruelty, the insight barred me then! / Why did I not possess me with its sound, / And in its cadence catch and catch again / Your nature's essence floating therearound?
Could _that_ man be this I, unknowing you, / When now the knowing you is all of me, / And the old world of then is now a new, / And purpose no more what it used to be- / A thing of formal journeywork, but due / To springs that then were sealed up utterly?