grave,
and the figures that flit along them so solitarily and so ineffectually.

2. A POET IN WINTER

In the last poem in his last book, _Moments of Vision_, Mr. Hardy
meditates on his own immortality, as all men of genius probably do at
one time or another. _Afterwards_, the poem in which he does so, is
interesting, not only for this reason, but because it contains
implicitly a definition and a defence of the author's achievement in
literature. The poem is too long to quote in full, but the first three
verses will be sufficient to illustrate what I have said:

When the Present has latched its postern behind my tremulous stay,
And the May month flaps its glad green leaves like wings,
Delicate-filmed as new-spun silk, will the people say:
"He was a man who used to notice such things"?

If it be in the dusk when, like an eyelid's soundless blink,
The dewfall-hawk comes crossing the shades to alight
Upon the wind-warped upland thorn, will a gazer think:
"To him this must have been a familiar sight"?

If I pass during some nocturnal blackness, mothy and warm,
When the hedgehog travels furtively over the lawn,
Will they say: "He strove that such innocent creatures should come to no harm,
But he could do little for them; and now he is gone"?

Even without the two other verses, we have here a remarkable attempt on
the part of an artist to paint a portrait, as it were, of his own
genius.

Mr. Hardy's genius is essentially that of a man who "used to notice such
things" as the fluttering of the green leaves in May, and to whom the
swift passage of a night-jar in the twilight has "been a familiar
sight." He is one of the most sensitive observers of nature who have
written English prose. It may even be that he will be remembered longer
for his studies of nature than for his studies of human nature. His days
are among his greatest characters, as in the wonderful scene on the
heath in the opening of _The Return of the Native_. He would have
written well of the world, one can imagine, even if he had found it
uninhabited. But his sensitiveness is not merely sensitiveness of the
eye: it is also sensitiveness of the heart. He has, indeed, that
hypersensitive sort of temperament, as the verse about the hedgehog
suggests, which is the victim at once of pity and of a feeling of
hopeless helplessness. Never anywhere else has there been such a world
of pity put into a