How we cite our quotes: Citations follow this format: (Book.Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #7
"I wish we didn't live here, Clym. The world seems all wrong in this place."
"Well – if we make it so." (4.7.11-2)
It's character contrast time – Eustacia is ready to write off the world as "wrong," but Clym pipes up with an alternate view: people make the world, and nature, what it is.
Quote #8
He was in a nest of vivid green. The ferny vegetation round him, though so abundant, was quite uniform; it was a grove of machine-made foliage, a world of green triangles with saw-edges [...] The scene seemed to belong to the ancient world of the carboniferous period, when the forms of plants were few, and of the fern kind [...] nothing but monotonous extent of leafage, amid which no bird sang. (3.5.34)
The diction is kind of out-of-control here. First, we get words that imply life and beauty, such as "vivid green" and "abundant." But we quickly shift to more negative diction that discusses machines and industry and the impact man can have on the environment, with words like "saw-edges." But then we shift again to a very different set of words, which refer to the "ancient world." Hardy ends up proposing a very funky idea here. He suggests that by using machines to cut-up and transform nature, people have not progressed but have actually regressed to some sort of boring and lame "ancient world." People work against natural progress by changing and harming nature.
Quote #9
As he watched the dead flat of the scenery overpowered him, though he was fully alive to the beauty of that untarnished early summer green. [...] There was something in its oppressive horizontality which too much reminded him of the arena of life; it gave him a sense of bare equality with, and no superiority to, a single living thing under the sun. (3.5.69)
This is one of the most significant thematic passages of the entire novel with very powerful images of a "flat" and empty landscape. The land here has a literal leveling effect on Clym, who is somewhat horrified to find himself completely "equal" to everything else on Earth. The idea that people aren't any better or worse than nature is a key idea of Naturalism.