Explore "Best Times" by Thomas Hardy on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
WE went a day's excursion to the stream, / Basked by the bank, and bent to the ripple-gleam, / And I did not know / That life would show, / However it might flower, no finer glow.
I walked in the Sunday sunshine by the road / That wound towards the wicket of your abode, / And I did not think / That life would shrink / To nothing ere it shed a rosier pink.
Unlooked for I arrived on a rainy night, / And you hailed me at the door by the swaying light, / And I full forgot / That life might not / Again be touching that ecstatic height.
And that calm eve when you walked up the stair, / After a gaiety prolonged and rare, / No thought soever / That you might never / Walk down again, struck me as I stood there.
Rewritten from an old draft.