What an honor to append the nine hundred words below. From Chapter 40 in Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd, they offer a masterclass in the power of prose.

                  My work is shaping prose. I hammer away at it each day as a cobbler shoes. Sometimes I get lucky and an effect makes me smile. Studying these paragraphs I shrink, awed as before a king.

                  In school, we are taught the difference between prose and poetry. Prose informs, poetry emotes. Prose gets to the point, poetry sings a song, of which beauty is the point. Prose explains, poetry confesses. Prose is useful to the hearer, poetry to the speaker. The distinctions are just but incomplete. 

                  Hardy was a poet who wrote prose to make ends meet. His ends met splendidly in the most popular novels of his hour. He meant his novels to be popular so he could afford to write poems, which few purchased. Hardy was fifty-five when his final novel was published and eighty-seven when he died, having devoted most of his last thirty-two years to writing poems. 

                  Sometimes the prose of Hardy’s stories feels as deliberate as a cobbler’s, to satisfy their customer. Most prose consumers don’t want their prose too excellent – that is, nuanced and inventive – for what is new is unfamiliar and familiarity, for most of us, is bliss. Hardy was always an artist, yes, but in cobbling his prose, an entertainer first. He meant his readers to read first, admire next.

                  But sometimes, as here, the poet thunders through, elbowing the entertainer aside. The female here is a secondary character in the story, a contrivance necessary for its plot; her anguish is not our chief concern. But suddenly, she stands for all womankind, harrowed and harried by a cruel male world. And that anonymous dog! Occupying a few hundred of the novel’s many thousands of words, he looms, for my money, as its most poignant and potent character, the tactile embodiment of the truly good Samaritan. And his farewell from the scene? – that mordant slouch of a sentence – what a gut punch! – those four simple words. They invaded my sleep.

                  Curl into these paragraphs more closely. On first acquaintance these pages turn too quickly to notice, propelled by plot. We want to know what happens, not the maker’s touches. Now observe how each word does multiple duty, sounding and resounding like a cathedral bell. Note how one woman turns all women, the shadowy dog the personification of “canine greatness” – eat your heart out, Henry – this nocturnal rescue an indictment of mankind. Wonder at the jarring intervention into this action sequence of the history of the workhouse’s architecture and the splendor of the view from its front door, as if our author had turned Realtor, calculating rents. How does that jostle of our intensified attention affect us?

                  A poem, when it succeeds, which isn’t often, intensifies language, as a magnifying glass the sun, into a burning beam. A few words may move us more than a tome, stabbing past reason. Such intensified language cannot be deployed extensively, however, for it snags and arrests. Prose may be written too well.

                  Hardy here achieves prose of poetic force. And miraculously, unless we pause, we hardly suspect it. We turn the page. But we have not forgotten. The scene and its significance have lodged in mind where they reverberate, excite, and disturb.

                  Ours is an epoch of breakneck speed. What a privilege, for a moment, to wonder at words wreathing like smoke in the hush.                

* 

(Her) faculty of contrivance was worn out, Hopelessness had come at last. 

"No further!" she whispered, and closed her eyes.

From the stripe of shadow on the opposite side of the bridge a portion of shade seemed to detach itself and move into isolation upon the pale white of the road. It glided noiselessly towards the recumbent woman.

She became conscious of something touching her hand; it was softness and it was warmth. She opened her eyes, and the substance touched her face. A dog was licking her cheek. 

He was a huge, heavy, and quiet creature, standing darkly against the low horizon, and at least two feet higher than the present position of her eyes. Whether Newfoundland, mastiff, bloodhound, or what not, it was impossible to say. He seemed to be of too strange and mysterious a nature to belong to any variety among those of popular nomenclature. Being thus assignable to no breed, he was the ideal embodiment of canine greatness -- a generalization from what was common to all. Night, in its sad, solemn, and benevolent aspect, apart from its stealthy and cruel side, was personified in this form. Darkness endows the small and ordinary ones among mankind with poetical power, and even the suffering woman threw her idea into figure. 

In her reclining position she looked up to him just as in earlier times she had, when standing, looked up to a man. The animal, who was as homeless as she, respectfully withdrew a step or two when the woman moved, and, seeing that she did not repulse him, he licked her hand again.

A thought moved within her like lightning. "Perhaps I can make use of him -- I might do it then!"

She pointed in the direction of Casterbridge, and the dog seemed to misunderstand: he trotted on. Then, finding she could not follow, he came back and whined.

The ultimate and saddest singularity of woman's effort and invention was reached when, with a quickened breathing, she rose to a stooping posture, and, resting her two little arms upon the shoulders of the dog, leant firmly thereon, and murmured stimulating words. Whilst she sorrowed in her heart she cheered with her voice, and what was stranger than that the strong should need encouragement from the weak was that cheerfulness should be so well stimulated by such utter dejection. Her friend moved forward slowly, and she with small mincing steps moved forward beside him, half her weight being thrown upon the animal. Sometimes she sank as she had sunk from walking erect, from the crutches, from the rails. The dog, who now thoroughly understood her desire and her incapacity, was frantic in his distress on these occasions; he would tug at her dress and run forward. She always called him back, and it was now to be observed that the woman listened for human sounds only to avoid them. It was evident that she had an object in keeping her presence on the road and her forlorn state unknown.

Their progress was necessarily very slow. They reached the bottom of the town, and the Casterbridge lamps lay before them like fallen Pleiads as they turned to the left into the dense shade of a deserted avenue of chestnuts, and so skirted the borough. Thus the town was passed, and the goal was reached.

On this much-desired spot outside the town rose a picturesque building. Originally it had been a mere case to hold people. The shell had been so thin, so devoid of excrescence, and so closely drawn over the accommodation granted, that the grim character of what was beneath showed through it, as the shape of a body is visible under a winding-sheet.

Then Nature, as if offended, lent a hand. Masses of ivy grew up, completely covering the walls, till the place looked like an abbey; and it was discovered that the view from the front, over the Casterbridge chimneys, was one of the most magnificent in the county. A neighbouring earl once said that he would give up a year's rental to have at his own door the view enjoyed by the inmates from theirs -- and very probably the inmates would have given up the view for his year's rental.

This stone edifice consisted of a central mass and two wings, whereon stood as sentinels a few slim chimneys, now gurgling sorrowfully to the slow wind. In the wall was a gate, and by the gate a bellpull formed of a hanging wire. The woman raised herself as high as possible upon her knees, and could just reach the handle. She moved it and fell forwards in a bowed attitude, her face upon her bosom.

It was getting on towards six o'clock, and sounds of movement were to be heard inside the building which was the haven of rest to this wearied soul. A little door by the large one was opened, and a man appeared inside. He discerned the panting heap of clothes, went back for a light, and came again. He entered a second time, and returned with two women.

These lifted the prostrate figure and assisted her in through the doorway. The man then closed the door.

“How did she get here?" said one of the women.

"The Lord knows," said the other.

“There is a dog outside," murmured the overcome traveller. "Where is he gone? He helped me."

“I stoned him away," said the man.