his, "Cicely" is an example which repays attention:--

"And still sadly onward I followed,
That Highway the Icen
Which trails its pale riband down Wessex
O'er lynchet and lea.

"Along through the Stour-bordered Forum,
Where legions had wayfared,
And where the slow river up-glasses
Its green canopy";

and one still more remarkable is the enchanting "Friends Beyond," to
which we shall presently recur. The drawling voice of a weary old
campaigner is wonderfully rendered in the stanza of "Valenciennes":--

"Well: Heaven wi' its jasper halls
Is now the on'y town I care to be in..
Good Lord, if Nick should bomb the walls
As we did Valencieen!"

whereas for long Napoleonic stories like "Leipzig" and "The Peasant's
Confession," a ballad-measure which contemporaries such as Southey or
Campbell might have used is artfully chosen. In striking contrast we
have the elaborate verse-form of "The Souls of the Slain," in which the
throbbing stanza seems to dilate and withdraw like the very cloud of
moth-like phantoms which it describes. It is difficult to follow out
this theme without more frequent quotation than I have space, for here,
but the reader who pursues it carefully will not repeat the rumour that
Mr. Hardy is a careless or "incorrect" metricist. He is, on the
contrary, a metrical artist of great accomplishment.

The conception of life revealed in his verses by this careful artist is
one which displays very exactly the bent of his temperament. During the
whole of his long career Mr. Hardy has not budged an inch from his
original line of direction. He holds that, abandoned by God, treated
with scorn by Nature, man lies helpless at the mercy of "those purblind
Doomsters," accident, chance, and time, from whom he has had to endure
injury and insult from the cradle to the grave. This is stating the
Hardy doctrine in its extreme form, but it is not stating it too
strongly. This has been called his "pessimism," a phrase to which some
admirers, unwilling to give things their true name, have objected. But,
of course, Mr. Hardy is a pessimist, just as Browning is an optimist,
just as white is not black, and day is not night. Our juggling with
words in paradox is too often apt to disguise a want of decision in
thought. Let us admit that Mr. Hardy's conception of the fatal forces
which beleaguer human life is a "pessimistic" one, or else words have no
meaning.

Yet it is nee