Explore "The House of Silence" by Thomas Hardy on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
"THAT is a quiet place- / That house in the trees with the shady lawn. " / "-If, child, you knew what there goes on / You would not call it a quiet place. / Why, a phantom abides there, the last of its race, / And a brain spins there till dawn."
"But I see nobody there,- / Nobody moves about the green, / Or wanders the heavy trees between. " / "-Ah, that's because you do not bear / The visioning powers of souls who dare / To pierce the material screen.
"Morning, noon, and night, / Mid those funereal shades that seem / The uncanny scenery of a dream, / Figures dance to a mind with sight, / And music and laughter like floods of light / Make all the precincts gleam.
"It is a poet's bower, / Through which there pass, in fleet arrays, / Long teams of all the years and days, / Of joys and sorrows, of earth and heaven, / That meet mankind in its ages seven, / An aion in an hour. "