1924年11月12日，胡適讀完The Hand of Ethelberta: A Comedy in Chapters is a novel by Thomas Hardy, published in 1876.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hand_of_Ethelberta
其中引 John Donne 的 Absence 末章，胡適將它翻譯成〈別離〉
Christopher was now over five-and-twenty. He was getting so well
accustomed to the spectacle of a world passing him by and splashing him
with its wheels that he wondered why he had ever minded it. His habit of
dreaming instead of doing had led him up to a curious discovery. It is
no new thing for a man to fathom profundities by indulging humours: the
active, the rapid, the people of splendid momentum, have been surprised
to behold what results attend the lives of those whose usual plan for
discharging their active labours has been to postpone them indefinitely.
Certainly, the immediate result in the present case was, to all but
himself, small and invisible; but it was of the nature of highest things.
What he had learnt was that a woman who has once made a permanent
impression upon a man cannot altogether deny him her image by denying him
her company, and that by sedulously cultivating the acquaintance of this
Creature of Contemplation she becomes to him almost a living soul. Hence
a sublimated Ethelberta accompanied him everywhere--one who never teased
him, eluded him, or disappointed him: when he smiled she smiled, when he
was sad she sorrowed. He may be said to have become the literal
duplicate of that whimsical unknown rhapsodist who wrote of his own
similar situation--
'By absence this good means I gain, 不見也有不見的好處：
That I can catch her, 我倒可以見著她， Where none can watch her, 不怕有誰監著她，
In some close corner of my brain: 在我腦海的深窈處；
There I embrace and kiss her; 我可以抱著她，親她的臉；
And so I both enjoy and miss her.' 雖然不見，抵得長相見。
This frame of mind naturally induced an amazing abstraction in the
organist, never very vigilant at the best of times. 
The Hand of Ethelberta: A Comedy in Chapters is a novel by Thomas Hardy, published in 1876. It was written, in serial form, for the Cornhill Magazine, which was edited by Leslie Stephen, a friend and mentor of Hardy's. Unlike the majority of Hardy's fiction, the novel is a comedy, with both humour and a happy ending for the major characters and no suicides or tragic deaths. The late nineteenth century novelist George Gissing, who knew Hardy, considered it 'surely old Hardy's poorest book'.[1]
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