Though thirty years of blur and blot
    Have slid since I beheld that spot,
    And saw in curious converse there
      Moving slowly, moving sadly,
      That mysterious tragic pair,
    Its olden look may linger on—­
    All but the couple; they have gone.

    Whither?  Who knows, indeed....  And yet
    To me, when nights are weird and wet,
    Without those comrades there at tryst
      Creeping slowly, creeping sadly,
      That love-lane does not exist. 
    There they seem brooding on their pain,
    And will, while such a lane remain.

And death is no kinder than life to lovers:—­

    I shall rot here, with those whom in their day
          You never knew. 
    And alien ones who, ere they chilled to clay,
          Met not my view,
    Will in yon distant grave-place ever neighbour you.

    No shade of pinnacle or tree or tower,
          While earth endures,
    Will fall on my mound and within the hour
          Steal on to yours;
    One robin never haunt our two green covertures.

Mr. Hardy, fortunately, has the genius to express the burden and the mystery even of a world grey with rain and commonplace in achievement.  There is a beauty of sorrow in these poems in which “life with the sad, seared face” mirrors itself without disguise.  They bring us face to face with an experience intenser than our own.  There is nothing common in the tragic image of dullness in A Common-place Day:—­

        The day is turning ghost,
    And scuttles from the kalendar in fits and furtively,
        To join the anonymous host
    Of those that throng oblivion; ceding his place, maybe,
        To one of like degree....

        Nothing of tiniest worth
    Have I wrought, pondered, planned; no one thing asking blame or praise,
        Since the pale corpse-like birth
    Of this diurnal unit, bearing blanks in all its rays—­
        Dullest of dull-hued days!

        Wanly upon the panes
    The rain slides, as have slid since morn my colourless thoughts; and yet
        Here, while Day’s presence wanes,
    And over him the sepulchre-lid is slowly lowered and set,
        He wakens my regret.

In the poem which contains these verses the emotion of the poet gives words often undistinguished an almost Elizabethan rhythm.  Mr. Hardy, indeed, is a poet who often achieves music of verses, though he seldom achieves music of phrase.

We must, then, be grateful without niggardliness for the gift of his verse.  On the larger canvas of his prose we find a vision more abundant, more varied, more touched with humour.  But his poems are the genuine confessions of a soul, the meditations of a man of genius, brooding not without bitterness but with pity on the paths that lead to the grave, and the figures that flit along them so solitarily and so ineffectually.