bang at the lamp-glass, whirl, and sink.
'God's humblest, they!' I muse. Yet why?
They know Earth-secrets that know not I.

No such drama has been written in verse since Browning, and the people
of the drama are condensed to almost as pregnant an utterance as _Adam,
Lilith, and Eve_.

Why is it that there are so few novels which can be read twice, while
all good poetry can be read over and over? Is it something inherent in
the form, one of the reasons in nature why a novel cannot be of the
same supreme imaginative substance as a poem? I think it is, and that it
will never be otherwise. But, among novels, why is it that one here and
there calls us back to its shelf with almost the insistence of a lyric,
while for the most part a story read is a story done with? Balzac is
always good to re-read, but not Tolstoi: and I couple two of the giants.
To take lesser artists, I would say that we can re-read _Lavengro_ but
not _Romola_. But what seems puzzling is that Hardy, who is above all a
story-teller, and whose stories are of the kind that rouse suspense and
satisfy it, can be read more than once, and never be quite without
novelty. There is often, in his books, too much story, as in _The Mayor
of Casterbridge_, where the plot extends into almost inextricable
entanglements; and yet that is precisely one of the books that can be
re-read. Is it on account of that concealed poetry, never absent though
often unseen, which gives to these fantastic or real histories a meaning
beyond the meaning of the facts, beneath it like an under-current,
around it like an atmosphere? Facts, once known, are done with; stories
of mere action gallop through the brain and are gone; but in Hardy
there is a vision or interpretation, a sense of life as a growth out of
the earth, and as much a mystery between soil and sky as the corn is,
which will draw men back to the stories with an interest which outlasts
their interest in the story.

It is a little difficult to get accustomed to Hardy, or to do him
justice without doing him more than justice. He is always right, always
a seer, when he is writing about 'the seasons in their moods, morning
and evening, night and noon, winds in their different tempers, trees,
waters and mists, shades and silences, and the voices of inanimate
things.' (What gravity and intimacy in his numbering of them!) He is
always right, always faultless in matter and style, when he is showing
that 'the impressionabl