rth year of the war the veteran poet published _Moments of
Vision_. These show a remarkable recovery of spirit, and an ingenuity
never before excelled. With the passage of years Mr. Hardy, observing
everything in the little world of Wessex, and forgetting nothing, has
become almost preternaturally wise, and, if it may be said so,
"knowing," with a sort of magic, like that of a wizard. He has learned
to track the windings of the human heart with the familiarity of a
gamekeeper who finds plenty of vermin in the woods, and who nails what
he finds, be it stoat or squirrel, to the barn-door of his poetry. But
there is also in these last-fruits of Mr. Hardy's mossed tree much that
is wholly detached from the bitterness of satire, much that simply
records, with an infinite delicacy of pathos, little incidents of the
personal life of long ago, bestowing the immortality of art on these
fugitive fancies in the spirit of the Japanese sculptor when he chisels
the melting of a cloud or the flight of an insect on his sword hilt:--

"I idly cut a parsley stalk
And blew therein towards the moon;
I had not thought what ghosts would walk
With shivering footsteps to my tune.

"I went and knelt, and scooped my hand
As if to drink, into the brook,
And a faint figure seemed to stand
Above me, with the bye-gone look.

"I lipped rough rhymes of chance not choice,
I thought not what my words might be;
There came into my ear a voice
That turned a tenderer verse for me."

We have now in brief historic survey marshalled before us the various
volumes in which Mr. Hardy's lyrical poetry was originally collected.
Before we examine its general character more closely, it may be well to
call attention to its technical quality, which was singularly
misunderstood at first, and which has never, we believe, been boldly
faced. In 1898, and later, when a melodious _falsetto_ was much in
fashion amongst us, the reviewers found great fault with Mr. Hardy's
prosody; they judged him as a versifier to be rude and incorrect. As
regards the single line, it may be confessed that Mr. Hardy, in his
anxiety to present his thought in an undiluted form, is not infrequently
clogged and hard. Such a line as

"Fused from its separateness by ecstasy"

hisses at us like a snake, and crawls like a wounded one. Mr. Hardy is
apt to clog his lines with consonants, and he seems indifferent to the
stiffness wh