clustering in their ineffectual longing round the footsteps of
those through whom alone they continue to exist. This conception has
inspired Mr. Hardy with several wonderful visions, among which the
spectacle of "The Souls of the Slain" in the Boer War, alighting, like
vast flights of moths, over Portland Bill at night, is the most
remarkable. It has the sublimity and much of the character of some
apocalyptic design by Blake. The volume of 1902 contains a whole group
of phantasmal pieces of this kind, where there is frequent mention of
spectres, who address the poet in the accents of nature, as in the
unrhymed ode called "The Mother Mourns." The obsession of old age, with
its physical decay ("I look into my glass"), the inevitable division
which leads to that isolation which the poet regards as the greatest of
adversities ("The Impercipient"), the tragedies of moral indecision, the
contrast between the tangible earth and the bodyless ghosts, and endless
repetition of the cry, "Why find we us here?" and of the question "Has
some Vast Imbecility framed us in jest, and left us now to
hazardry?"--all start from the overwhelming love of physical life and
acquaintance with its possibilities, which Mr. Hardy possesses to an
inordinate degree.

It would be ridiculous at the close of an essay to attempt any
discussion of the huge dramatic panorama which many believe to be Mr.
Hardy's most weighty contribution to English literature. The spacious
theatre of _The Dynasts_ with its comprehensive and yet concise
realisations of vast passages of human history, is a work which calls
for a commentary as lengthy as itself, and yet needs no commentary at
all. No work of the imagination is more its own interpreter than this
sublime historic peep-show, this rolling vision of the Napoleonic
chronicle drawn on the broadest lines, and yet in detail made up of
intensely concentrated and vivid glimpses of reality. But the subject of
my present study, the lyrical poetry of Mr. Hardy, is not largely
illustrated in _The Dynasts_, except by the choral interludes of the
phantom intelligences, which have great lyrical value, and by three or
four admirable songs.

When we resume the effect which the poetry of Mr. Hardy makes upon the
careful reader, we note, as I have indicated already, a sense of unity
of direction throughout. Mr. Hardy has expressed himself in a thousand
ways, but has never altered his vision. From 1867 to 1917, through half
a cent