"Sing; how 'a would sing! How 'a would raise the tune When we rode in the waggon from harvesting By the light o' the moon!
"Dance; how 'a would dance! If a fiddlestring did but sound She would hold out her coats, give a slanting glance, And go round and round.
"Laugh; how 'a would laugh! Her peony lips would part As if none such a place for a lover to quaff At the deeps of a heart,"
and which then turns to the most plaintive and the most irreparable tragedy, woven, as a black design on to a background of gold, upon this basis of temperamental joyousness.
Alphonse Daudet once said that the great gift of Edmond de Goncourt was to, "_rendre l'irrendable_." This is much more true of Mr. Hardy than it was of Goncourt, and more true than it is of any other English poet except Donne. There is absolutely no observation too minute, no flutter of reminiscence too faint, for Mr. Hardy to adopt as the subject of a metaphysical lyric, and his skill in this direction has grown upon him; it is nowhere so remarkable as in his latest volume, aptly termed _Moments of Vision_. Everything in village life is grist to his mill; he seems to make 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.