larm," where the balance of conscience and instinct gives to what
in coarser hands might seem the most trivial of actions a momentous
character of tragedy.

This is one of Mr. Hardy's studies in military history, where he is
almost always singularly happy. His portraits of the non-commissioned
officer of the old service are as excellent in verse as they are in the
prose of _The Trumpet-Major_ or _The Melancholy Hussar_. The reader of
the novels will not have to be reminded that "Valenciennes" and the
other ballads have their prose-parallel in Simon Burden's reminiscences
of Minden. Mr. Hardy, with a great curiosity about the science of war
and a close acquaintance with the mind of the common soldier, has
pondered on the philosophy of fighting. "The Man he Killed," written in
1902, expresses the wonder of the rifleman who is called upon to shoot
his brother-in-arms, although

"Had he and I but met,
By some old ancient inn,
We should have set us down to wet
Right many a nipperkin."

In this connection the _Poems of War and Patriotism_, which form an
important part of the volume of 1918, should be carefully examined by
those who meditate on the tremendous problems of the moment.

A poet so profoundly absorbed in the study of life could not fail to
speculate on the probabilities of immortality. Here Mr. Hardy presents
to us his habitual serenity in negation. He sees the beautiful human
body "lined by tool of time," and he asks what becomes of it when its
dissolution is complete. He sees no evidence of a conscious state after
death, of what would have to be, in the case of aged or exhausted
persons, a revival of spiritual force, and on the whole he is
disinclined to cling to the faith in a future life. He holds that the
immortality of a dead man resides in the memory of the living, his
"finer part shining within ever-faithful hearts of those bereft." He
pursues this theme in a large number of his most serious and affecting
lyrics, most gravely perhaps in "The To-be-Forgotten" and in "The
Superseded." This sense of the forlorn condition of the dead, surviving
only in the dwindling memory of the living, inspires what has some
claims to be considered the loveliest of all Mr. Hardy's poems, "Friends
Beyond," which in its tenderness, its humour, and its pathos contains in
a few pages every characteristic of his genius.

His speculation perceives the dead as a crowd of slowly vanishing
phantoms,