ke no selection, and his field is modest to humility and yet
practically boundless. We have a poem on the attitude of two people with
nothing to do and no book to read, waiting in the parlour of an hotel
for the rain to stop, a recollection after more than forty years. That
the poet once dropped a pencil into the cranny of an old church where he
was sketching inspires an elaborate lyric. The disappearance of a rotted
summer-house, the look of a row of silver drops of fog condensed on the
bar of a gate, the effect of candlelight years and years ago on a
woman's neck and hair, the vision of a giant at a fair, led by a dwarf
with a red string--such are amongst the subjects which awaken in Mr.
Hardy thoughts which do often lie too deep for tears, and call for
interpretation in verse. The skeleton of a lady's sunshade, picked up on
Swanage Cliffs, the pages of a fly-blown Testament lying in a railway
waiting-room, a journeying boy in a third-class carriage, with his
ticket stuck in the band of his hat--such are among the themes which
awake in Mr. Hardy's imagination reveries which are always wholly
serious and usually deeply tragic.

Mr. Hardy's notation of human touches hitherto excluded from the realm
of poetry is one of the most notable features of his originality. It
marked his work from the beginning, as in the early ballad of "The
Widow," where the sudden damping of the wooer's amatory ardour in
consequence of his jealousy of the child is rendered with extraordinary
refinement. The difficulty of course is to know when to stop. There is
always a danger that a poet, in his search after the infinitely
ingenious, may lapse into _amphigory_, into sheer absurdity and
triviality, which Cowper, in spite of his elegant lightness, does not
always escape. Wordsworth, more serious in his intent, fell headlong in
parts of _Peter Bell_, and in such ballads as "Betty Foy." Mr. Hardy,
whatever the poverty of his incident, commonly redeems it by the oddity
of his observation; as in "The Pedigree":--

"I bent in the deep of night
Over a pedigree the chronicler gave
As mine; and as I bent there, half-unrobed,
The uncurtained panes of my window-square
Let in the watery light
Of the moon in its old age:
And green-rheumed clouds were hurrying past
Where mute and cold it globed
Like a dying dolphin's eye seen through a lapping wave."

Mr. Hardy's love of strange experiences, and of