trange question) is the more consoling, the more
satisfying, the more acceptable? Is it not Mr Hardy? There is sorrow,
but it is the sorrow of the spheres. And this, not the apparent anger
and dismay of a self's discomfiture, is the quality of greatness in Mr
Hardy's poetry. The Mr Hardy of the love poems of 1912-13 is not a man
giving way to memory in poetry; he is a great poet uttering the cry of
the universe. A vast range of acknowledged experience returns to weight
each syllable; it is the quality of life that is vocal, gathered into a
moment of time with a vista of years:--

'Ignorant of what there is flitting here to see,
The waked birds preen and the seals flop lazily,
Soon you will have, Dear, to vanish from me,
For the stars close their shutters and the
Dawn whitens hazily.
Trust me, I mind not, though Life lours
The bringing me here; nay, bring me here again!
I am just the same as when
Our days were a joy and our paths through flowers.'

[NOVEMBER, 1919.

We have read these poems of Thomas Hardy, read them not once, but many
times. Many of them have already become part of our being; their
indelible impress has given shape to dumb and striving elements in our
soul; they have set free and purged mute, heart-devouring regrets. And
yet, though this is so, the reading of them in a single volume, the
submission to their movement with a like unbroken motion of the mind,
gathers their greatness, their poignancy and passion, into one stream,
submerging us and leaving us patient and purified.

There have been many poets among us in the last fifty years, poets of
sure talent, and it may be even of genius, but no other of them has this
compulsive power. The secret is not hard to find. Not one of them is
adequate to what we know and have suffered. We have in our own hearts a
new touchstone of poetic greatness. We have learned too much to be
wholly responsive to less than an adamantine honesty of soul and a
complete acknowledgment of experience. 'Give us the whole,' we cry,
'give us the truth.' Unless we can catch the undertone of this
acknowledgment, a poet's voice is in our ears hardly more than sounding
brass or a tinkling cymbal.

Therefore we turn--some by instinct and some by deliberate choice--to
the greatest; therefore we deliberately set Mr Hardy among these. What
they have, he has, and has in their degree--a plenary vision of life. He
is the master of the fundamental theme