shallow and dull. The divine gift of poetry seems sometimes as
accidental as the formation of the throat. I do not believe that
Tennyson was either shallow or dull; but I do not think he had so rich
a mind as Thomas Hardy's, a mind so quaint, so humorous, so sharp. Yet
Tennyson was incomparably a greater poet.

The greatest poetry always transports us, and although I read and
reread the Wessex poet with never-lagging attention--I find even the
drawings in _Wessex Poems_ so fascinating that I wish he had
illustrated all his books--I am always conscious of the time and the
place. I never get the unmistakable spinal chill. He has too thorough
a command of his thoughts; they never possess him, and they never soar
away with him. Prose may be controlled, but poetry is a possession.
Mr. Hardy is too keenly aware of what he is about. In spite of the
fact that he has written verse all his life, he seldom writes
unwrinkled song. He is, in the last analysis, a master of prose who
has learned the technique of verse, and who now chooses to express his
thoughts and his observations in rime and rhythm.

The title of Mr. Hardy's latest volume of poems, _Moments of
Vision_, leads one to expect rifts in the clouds--and one is not
disappointed. It is perhaps characteristic of the independence of our
author, that steadily preaching pessimism when the world was peaceful,
he should now not be perhaps quite so sure of his creed when a larger
proportion of the world's inhabitants are in pain than ever before.
One of the fallacies of pessimism consists in the fact that its
advocates often call a witness to the stand whose testimony counts
against them. Nobody really loves life, loves this world, like your
pessimist; nobody is more reluctant to leave it. He therefore, to
support his argument that life is evil, calls up evidence which proves