e one: he is patient, humble, un-upbraiding.
Sometimes, as in the remarkable colloquy called "The Ruined Maid," his
sympathy is so close as to offer an absolute flout in the face to the
system of Victorian morality. Mr. Hardy, indeed, is not concerned with
sentimental morals, but with the primitive instincts of the soul,
applauding them, or at least recording them with complacency, even when
they outrage ethical tradition, as they do in the lyric narrative called
"A Wife and Another." The stanzas "To an Unborn Pauper Child" sum up
what is sinister and what is genial in Mr. Hardy's attitude to the
unambitious forms of life which he loves to contemplate.

His temperature is not always so low as it is in the class of poems to
which we have just referred, but his ultimate view is never more
sanguine. He is pleased sometimes to act as the fiddler at a dance,
surveying the hot-blooded couples, and urging them on by the lilt of
his instrument, but he is always perfectly aware that they will have "to
pay high for their prancing" at the end of all. No instance of this is
more remarkable than the poem called "Julie-Jane," a perfect example of
Mr. Hardy's metrical ingenuity and skill, which begins thus:--

"Sing; how 'a would sing!
How 'a would raise the tune
When we rode in the waggon from harvesting
By the light o' the moon!

"Dance; how 'a would dance!
If a fiddlestring did but sound
She would hold out her coats, give a slanting glance,
And go round and round.

"Laugh; how 'a would laugh!
Her peony lips would part
As if none such a place for a lover to quaff
At the deeps of a heart,"

and which then turns to the most plaintive and the most irreparable
tragedy, woven, as a black design on to a background of gold, upon this
basis of temperamental joyousness.

Alphonse Daudet once said that the great gift of Edmond de Goncourt was
to, "_rendre l'irrendable_." This is much more true of Mr. Hardy than it
was of Goncourt, and more true than it is of any other English poet
except Donne. There is absolutely no observation too minute, no flutter
of reminiscence too faint, for Mr. Hardy to adopt as the subject of a
metaphysical lyric, and his skill in this direction has grown upon him;
it is nowhere so remarkable as in his latest volume, aptly termed
_Moments of Vision_. Everything in village life is grist to his mill; he
seems to ma