Far from the Madding Crowd a frugal life, and a loan, he has leased and stocked a sheep farm. He falls in love with a newcomer eight years his junior, Bathsheba Everdene, a proud beauty who arrives to live with her aunt, Mrs. Hurst. Over time, Bathsheba and Gabriel grow to like each other well enough, and Bathsheba even saves his life once. However, when he makes her an unadorned offer of marriage, she refuses; she values her independence too much, and him too little. Feeling betrayed and embarrassed, Gabriel offers blunt protestations that only foster her haughtiness. After a few days, she moves to
Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard his deceased friend, echoing Gray's narrator reading the tombstones to connect to the dead. Robert Browning relied on a similar setting to the Elegy in his pastoral poem "Love Among the Ruins", which describes the desire for glory and how everything ends in death. Unlike Gray, Browning adds a female figure and argues that nothing but love matters. Thomas Hardy, who had memorised Gray's poem, took the title of his fourth novel, Far from the Madding Crowd, from a line in it. In addition, many in his "Wessex Poems and Other Verses" (1898) contain a graveyard theme and take a