of _The Dynasts_. But in the meantime the crisis of the
Boer War had cut across the poet's dream of Europe a hundred years ago,
and a group of records of the Dorsetshire elements of the British army
at the close of 1899 showed in Mr. Hardy's poetry what had not been
suspected there--a military talent of a most remarkable kind. Another
set of pieces composed in Rome were not so interesting; Mr. Hardy always
seems a little languid when he leaves the confines of his native Wessex.
Another section of _Poems of the Past and Present_ is severely, almost
didactically, metaphysical, and expands in varied language the daring
thought, so constantly present in Mr. Hardy's reverie, that God Himself
has forgotten the existence of earth, this "tiny sphere," this "tainted
ball," "so poor a thing," and has left all human life to be the
plaything of blind chance. This sad conviction is hardly ruffled by "The
Darkling Thrush," which goes as far towards optimism as Mr. Hardy can
let himself be drawn, or by such reflections as those in "On a Fine
Morning":--

"Whence comes Solace? Not from seeing
What is doing, suffering, being;
Not from noting Life's conditions,
Not from heeding Time's monitions;
But in cleaving to the Dream,
And in gazing on the gleam
Whereby gray things golden seem."

Eight years more passed, years marked by the stupendous effort of _The
Dynasts_, before Mr. Hardy put forth another collection of lyrical
poems. _Time's Laughingstocks_ confirmed, and more than confirmed, the
high promise of _Wessex Poems_. The author, in one of his modest
prefaces, where he seems to whisper while we bend forward in our anxiety
not to miss one thrifty sentence, expresses the hope that _Time's
Laughingstocks_ will, as a whole, take the "reader forward, even if not
far, rather than backward."

The book, indeed, does not take us "far" forward, simply because the
writer's style and scope were definitely exposed to us already, and yet
it does take us "forward," because the hand of the master is
conspicuously firmer and his touch more daring. The _Laughingstocks_
themselves are fifteen in number, tragical stories of division and
isolation, of failures in passion, of the treason of physical decay. No
landscape of Mr. Hardy's had been more vivid than the night-pictures in
"The Revisitation," where the old soldier in barracks creeps out on to
the gaunt down, and meets (by one of Mr. Hardy's coincidences