) his
ancient mistress, and no picture more terrible than the revelation of
each to the other in a blaze of sunrise. What a document for the future
is "Reminiscences of a Dancing Man"? If only Shakespeare could have left
us such a song of the London in 1585! But the power of the poet
culminates in the pathos of "The Tramp Woman"--perhaps the greatest of
all Mr. Hardy's lyrical poems--and in the horror of "A Sunday Morning's
Tragedy."

It is noticeable that _Time's Laughingstocks_ is, in some respects, a
more daring collection than its predecessors. We find the poet here
entirely emancipated from convention, and guided both in religion and
morals exclusively by the inner light of his reflection. His energy now
interacts on his clairvoyance with a completeness which he had never
quite displayed before, and it is here that we find Mr. Hardy's
utterance peculiarly a quintessence of himself. Especially in the
narrative pieces--which are often Wessex novels distilled into a
wine-glass, such as "Rose-Ann," and "The Vampirine Fair"--he allows no
considerations of what the reader may think "nice" or "pleasant" to
shackle his sincerity or his determination; and it is therefore to
_Time's Laughingstocks_ that the reader who wishes to become intimately
acquainted with Mr. Hardy as a moralist most frequently recurs. We
notice here more than elsewhere in his poems Mr. Hardy's sympathy with
the local music of Wessex, and especially with its expression by the
village choir, which he uses as a spiritual symbol. Quite a large
section of _Time's Laughingstocks_ takes us to the old-fashioned gallery
of some church, where the minstrels are bowing "New Sabbath" or "Mount
Ephraim," or to a later scene where the ghosts, in whose melancholy
apparition Mr. Hardy takes such pleasure, chant their goblin melodies
and strum "the viols of the dead" in the moonlit churchyard. The very
essence of Mr. Hardy's reverie at this moment of his career is to be
found, for instance, in "The Dead Quire," where the ancient
phantom-minstrels revenge themselves on their gross grandsons outside
the alehouse.

Almost immediately after the outbreak of the present war Mr. Hardy
presented to a somewhat distraught and inattentive public another
collection of his poems. It cannot be said that _Satires of
Circumstance_ is the most satisfactory of those volumes; it is, perhaps,
that which we could with the least discomposure persuade ourselves to
overlook. Such a stateme