This phrase comes from Hardy's poem "A Sign Seeker," which evokes those who continue to believe "that Heaven
inscrolls the wrong" of the malicious, those who "rapt to heights of trancelike trust, / These tokens claim to feel and see, / Read radiant hints of times to be--/ Of heart to heart returning after dust to dust." But, Hardy writes, "Such scope is granted not to lives like mine." Woolf herself defends Hardy against criticisms of his fiction's godlessness and outlandish coincidences, asserting that he channels that "wild spirit of poetry that saw with intense irony and grimness that no reading of life can possibly outdo the strangeness of life itself, no symbol of caprice and unreason be too extreme to represent the astonishing circumstances of our existence" ([1928] 1986:257).