Far from the Madding Crowd, a clear sky

The night sky belongs to the second chapter, where Gabriel Oak sits with his flock. Hardy names Sirius, Capella, Aldebaran, and Betelgeuse in a few lines. He kept a lifelong interest in astronomy and built a whole novel around a young astronomer, Two on a Tower, published in 1882. Project Gutenberg carries the full novel.

Where this text comes fromHardy writes the night sky as a mechanism. The stars pulse together as though driven by one body, and the passage keeps reaching for words that belong to machinery and to timing rather than to beauty. He names individual stars in the sentence that follows this one. What you copy is the setup, before any of them are named, while the sky is still being established as a working thing.

What you might not noticeHardy tells the time by the sky: since evening the Bear has swung round the North star until it stands at a right angle to the meridian, so the sentence carries its own clock without naming an hour. Source

What it trainsThree commas across four hundred characters is the whole of the pause you get here, and that is what makes the passage tiring rather than difficult. Sentences run to twenty-four words apiece with almost nothing dividing them, so the line has to be held in your head from one full stop to the next. Four long dashes do the dividing instead, and typed on a keyboard they come through as the plain hyphen from the top row, with no space on either side; two of them attach a qualifier straight onto the word before it, so clear and remarkably arrive as one unbroken run of sixteen characters. Putting a space around that hyphen is the usual slip. Only six capitals appear in the whole fragment, and only three of those fall inside a sentence: the North star, the Bear, and England. The rest of the text runs in an even lower case that offers no landmarks.

Read the full text at the publisher: Project Gutenberg