the expression?

The vision of the woman writing, as a supplement to the words
written, had no individuality. She was a misty shape, and well she
might be, considering that her original was at that moment sound
asleep and oblivious of all love and letter-writing under the sky.
Whenever Boldwood dozed she took a form, and comparatively ceased to
be a vision: when he awoke there was the letter justifying the dream.

The moon shone to-night, and its light was not of a customary kind.
His window admitted only a reflection of its rays, and the pale sheen
had that reversed direction which snow gives, coming upward and
lighting up his ceiling in an unnatural way, casting shadows in
strange places, and putting lights where shadows had used to be.

The substance of the epistle had occupied him but little in
comparison with the fact of its arrival. He suddenly wondered
if anything more might be found in the envelope than what he had
withdrawn. He jumped out of bed in the weird light, took the
letter, pulled out the flimsy sheet, shook the envelope--searched it.
Nothing more was there. Boldwood looked, as he had a hundred times
the preceding day, at the insistent red seal: "Marry me," he said
aloud.

The solemn and reserved yeoman again closed the letter, and stuck
it in the frame of the glass. In doing so he caught sight of his
reflected features, wan in expression, and insubstantial in form.
He saw how closely compressed was his mouth, and that his eyes were
wide-spread and vacant. Feeling uneasy and dissatisfied with himself
for this nervous excitability, he returned to bed.

Then the dawn drew on. The full power of the clear heaven was not
equal to that of a cloudy sky at noon, when Boldwood arose and
dressed himself. He descended the stairs and went out towards the
gate of a field to the east, leaning over which he paused and looked
around.

It was one of the usual slow sunrises of this time of the year, and
the sky, pure violet in the zenith, was leaden to the northward,
and murky to the east, where, over the snowy down or ewe-lease on
Weatherbury Upper Farm, and apparently resting upon the ridge, the
only half of the sun yet visible burnt rayless, like a red and
flameless fire shining over a white hearthstone. The whole effect
resembled a sunset as childhood resembles age.

In other directions, the fields and sky were so much of one colour by
the snow, that it was difficult in a hasty glance to tell wherea