quotation as Mr. Hardy has put into that line and a
half from _The Two Gentlemen of Verona_, which he placed on the
title-page of _Tess of the D'Urbervilles_:--

Poor wounded name, my bosom as a bed
Shall lodge thee!

In the use to which he put these words Mr. Hardy may be said to have
added to the poetry of Shakespeare. He gave them a new imaginative
context, and poured his own heart into them. For the same helpless pity
which he feels for dumb creatures he feels for men and women:

... He strove that such innocent creatures should come to no harm,
But he could do little for them.

It is the spirit of pity brooding over the landscape in Mr. Hardy's
books that makes them an original and beautiful contribution to
literature, in spite of his endless errors as an artist.

His last book is a reiteration both of his genius and of his errors. As
we read the hundred and sixty or so poems it contains we get the
impression of genius presiding over a multitude of errors. There are not
half a dozen poems in the book the discovery of which, should the
author's name be forgotten, would send the critics in quest of other
work from the same magician's hand. One feels safe in prophesying
immortality for only two, _The Oxen_ and _In Time of "the Breaking of
Nations"_; and these have already appeared in the selection of the
author's poems published in the Golden Treasury Series. The fact that
the entirely new poems contain nothing on the plane of immortality,
however, does not mean that _Moments of Vision_ is a book of verse about
which one has the right to be indifferent. No writer who is so concerned
as Mr. Hardy with setting down what his eyes and heart have told him can
be regarded with indifference. Mr. Hardy's art is lame, but it carries
the burden of genius. He may be a stammerer as a poet, but he stammers
in words of his own concerning a vision of his own. When he notes the
bird flying past in the dusk, "like an eyelid's soundless blink," he
does not achieve music, but he chronicles an experience, not merely
echoes one, with such exact truth as to make it immortally a part of all
experience. There is nothing borrowed or secondhand, again, in Mr.
Hardy's grim vision of the yew-trees in the churchyard by moonlight in
_Jubilate_:

The yew-tree arms, glued hard to the stiff, stark air,
Hung still in the village sky as theatre-scenes.

Mr. Hardy may not enable us to hear the music which is more than t