So do flux and reflux — the rhythm of change — alternate and persist in everything under the sky. - Thomas Hardy

On a Fine Morning”
in Poems of the Past and the Present (1901)

WHENCE comes Solace? — Not from seeing
What is doing, suffering, being,
Not from noting Life’s conditions,
Nor from heeding Time’s monitions;
But in cleaving to the Dream,
And in gazing at the gleam
Whereby gray things golden seem.

This do I this heyday, holding
Shadows but as lights unfolding,
As no specious show this moment
With its iris-hued embowment;
But as nothing other than
Part of a benignant plan;
Proof that earth was made for man.

I am now about to enter on my normal condition. For people are almost always in their graves. When we survey the long race of men, it is strange and still more strange to find that they are mainly dead men, who have scarcely ever been otherwise.

When standing before certain men the philosopher regrets that thinkers are but perishable tissue, the artist that perishable tissue has to think.