still-born baby. He loves to dwell on the uncomfortable moods
of nature--on such things as:--

... the watery light
Of the moon in its old age;

concerning which moon he goes on to describe how:

Green-rheumed clouds were hurrying past where mute and cold it globed
Like a dying dolphin's eye seen through a lapping wave.

This, I fear, is a failure, but it is a failure in a common mood of the
author's. It is a mood in which nature looks out at us, almost ludicrous
in its melancholy. In such a poem as that from which I have quoted, it
is as though we saw nature with a drip on the end of its nose. Mr.
Hardy's is something different from a tragic vision. It is a desolate,
disheartening, and, in a way, morbid vision. We wander with him too
often under--

Gaunt trees that interlace,
Through whose flayed fingers I see too clearly
The nakedness of the place.

And Mr. Hardy's vision of the life of men and women transgresses
similarly into a denial of gladness. His gloom, we feel, goes too far.
It goes so far that we are tempted at times to think of it as a
factitious gloom. He writes a poem called _Honeymoon Time at an Inn_,
and this is the characteristic atmosphere in which he introduces us to
the bridegroom and bride:

At the shiver of morning, a little before the false dawn,
The moon was at the window-square,
Deedily brooding in deformed decay--
The curve hewn off her cheek as by an adze;
At the shiver of morning, a little before the false dawn,
So the moon looked in there.

There are no happy lovers or happy marriages in Mr. Hardy's world. Such
people as are happy would not be happy if only they knew the truth. Many
of Mr. Hardy's poems are, as I have already said, dramatic lyrics on the
pattern invented by Robert Browning--short stories in verse. But there
is a certain air of triumph even in Browning's tragic figures. Mr.
Hardy's figures are the inmates of despair. Browning's love-poems belong
to heroic literature. Mr. Hardy's love-poems belong to the literature of
downheartedness. Browning's men and women are men and women who have had
the courage of their love, or who are shown at least against a
background of Browning's own courage. Mr. Hardy's men and women do not
know the wild faith of love. They have not the courage even of their
sins. They are helpless as fishes in a net--a scarcely rebellious
population of the ill-matched and the ill-