Jude the Obscure (Oxford World's Classics)

Jude the Obscure
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After many turnings he came up to the 
first ancient mediæval pile
that he had encountered. It was a college, as he could see by the
gateway. He entered it, walked round, and penetrated to dark cor-
ners which no lamplight reached. Close to this college was another,
and a little further on another; and then he began to be encircled as it
were with the breath and sentiment of the venerable city. When he
passed objects out of harmony with its general expression he allowed
his eyes to slip over them as if he did not see them.
A bell began clanging, and he listened till a hundred-and-one
strokes had sounded. He must have made a mistake, he thought: it
was meant for a hundred.*
When the gates were shut and he could no longer get into the
quadrangles he rambled under the walls and doorways, feeling with
his 
fingers the contours of their mouldings and carving. The minutes
passed; fewer and fewer people were visible, and still he serpentined
among the shadows, for had he not imagined these scenes through
ten bygone years, and what mattered a night’s rest for once? High
against the black sky the 
flash of a lamp would show crocketed
pinnacles and indented battlements. Down obscure alleys, appar-
ently never trodden now by the foot of man, and whose very exist-
ence seemed to be forgotten, there would jut into the path porticoes,
oriels, doorways of enriched and 
florid middle-age design, their
extinct air being accentuated by the rottenness of the stones. It
seemed impossible that modern thought could house itself in such
decrepit and superseded chambers.
Knowing not a human being here Jude began to be impressed
with the isolation of his own personality, as with a self-spectre, the
sensation being that of one who walked, but could not make himself
seen or heard. He drew his breath pensively, and seeming thus
almost his own ghost, gave his thoughts to the other ghostly
presences with which the nooks were haunted.
During the interval of preparation for this venture, since his wife
and furniture’s uncompromising disappearance into space, he had
read and learnt almost all that could be read and learnt by one in his
position of the worthies who had spent their youth within these
reverend walls, and whose souls had haunted them in their maturer
age. Some of them, by the accidents of his reading, loomed out in his
fancy disproportionately large by comparison with the rest. The
brushing of the wind against the angles, buttresses and door-jambs
At Christminster
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were as the passing of these only other inhabitants, the tappings of
each ivy leaf on its neighbour were as the mutterings of their mourn-
ful souls, the shadows as their thin shapes in nervous movement,
making him comrades in his solitude. In the gloom it was as if he ran
against them without feeling their bodily frames.
The streets were now deserted, but on account of these things he
could not go in. There were poets abroad, of early date and of late,
from the friend and eulogist of Shakespeare down to him who has
recently passed into silence, and that musical one of the tribe who is
still among us. Speculative philosophers drew along, not always with
wrinkled foreheads and hoary hair as in framed portraits, but pink-
faced, slim, and active as in youth; modern divines sheeted in their
surplices, among whom the most real to Jude Fawley were the foun-
ders of the religious school called Tractarian; the well-known three,
the enthusiast, the poet, and the formularist, the echoes of whose
teachings had in
fluenced him even in his obscure home. A start of
aversion appeared in his fancy to move them at sight of those other
sons of the place, the form in the full-bottomed wig, statesman, rake,
reasoner, and sceptic; the smoothly shaven historian so ironically
civil to Christianity; with others of the same incredulous temper,
who knew each quad as well as the faithful, and took equal freedom
in haunting its cloisters.
He regarded the statesmen in their various types, men of 
firmer
movement and less dreamy air; the scholar, the speaker, the plodder;
the man whose mind grew with his growth in years, and the man
whose mind contracted with the same.
The scientists and philologists followed on in his mind-sight in an
odd impossible combination, men of meditative faces, strained fore-
heads, and weak-eyed as bats with constant research; then o
fficial
characters––such men as Governor-generals and Lord-lieutenants,
in whom he took little interest; Chief-justices and Lord chancellors,
silent, thin-lipped 
figures of whom he knew barely the names. A
keener regard attached to the prelates, by reason of his own former
hopes. Of them he had an ample band––some men of heart, others
rather men of head; he who apologized for the Church in Latin; the
saintly author of the Evening Hymn; and near them the great itiner-
ant preacher, hymn-writer, and zealot, shadowed like Jude by his
matrimonial di
fficulties.
Jude found himself speaking out loud, holding conversations with