; it enters into, echoes in,
modulates and modifies all his particular emotions, and the individual
poems of which they are the substance. Each work of his is a fragment of
a whole--not a detached and arbitrarily severed fragment, but a unity
which implies, calls for and in a profound sense creates a vaster and
completely comprehensive whole His reaction to an episode has behind and
within it a reaction to the universe. An overwhelming endorsement
descends upon his words: he traces them as with a pencil, and
straightway they are graven in stone.

Thus his short poems have a weight and validity which sets them apart in
kind from even the very finest work of his contemporaries. These may be
perfect in and for themselves; but a short poem by Mr Hardy is often
perfect in a higher sense. As the lines of a diagram may be produced in
imagination to contain within themselves all space, one of Mr Hardy's
most characteristic poems may expand and embrace all human experience.
In it we may hear the sombre, ruthless rhythm of life itself--the
dominant theme that gives individuation to the ripple of fragmentary
joys and sorrows. Take 'The Broken Appointment':--

'You did not come,
And marching Time drew on, and wore me numb.--
Yet less for loss of your dear presence there
Than that I thus found lacking in your make
That high compassion which can overbear
Reluctance for pure lovingkindness' sake
Grieved I, when, as the hope-hour stroked its sum,
You did not come.

'You love not me,
And love alone can lend you loyalty
--I know and knew it. But, unto the store
Of human deeds divine in all but name,
Was it not worth a little hour or more
To add yet this: Once you, a woman, came
To soothe a time-torn man; even though it be
You love not me?'

On such a seeming fragment of personal experience lies the visible
endorsement of the universe. The hopes not of a lover but of humanity
are crushed beneath its rhythm. The ruthlessness of the event is
intensified in the motion of the poem till one can hear the even pad of
destiny, and a moment comes when to a sense made eager by the strain of
intense attention it seems to have been written by the destiny it
records.

What is the secret of poetic power like this? We do not look for it in
technique, though the technique of this poem is masterly. But the
technique of 'as the hope-hour stroked its sum' is of such a kind that
we know as we read that