It's a sad song, but I don't think it could be any better.

So I'm not done yet, but I think Jude the Obscure might be one of my new favorite books of all time. I should probably take some of my own advice and read the ending before I finish it so that I can appreciate Thomas Hardy's work as a whole (Like author Alafair Burke said in an NPR interview, "With a good book, knowing the end shouldn't spoil the book"), but I'm enjoying it too much, and I'm too afraid that it won't turn out well. Hardy isn't known for happily-ever-afters. Whether it does or doesn't, passages like this have already made it marvelous in my book:

The yard was a little centre of regeneration. Here, with keen edges and smooth curves, were forms in the exact likeness of those he had seen abraded and time-eaten on the walls. These were the ideas in modern prose which the lichened colleges presented in old poetry. Even some of those antiques might have been called prose when they were new. They had done nothing but wait, and had become poetical. How easy to the smallest building; how impossible to most men.