...  He strove that such innocent creatures should come to no harm,
    But he could do little for them.

It is the spirit of pity brooding over the landscape in Mr. Hardy’s books that makes them an original and beautiful contribution to literature, in spite of his endless errors as an artist.

His last book is a reiteration both of his genius and of his errors.  As we read the hundred and sixty or so poems it contains we get the impression of genius presiding over a multitude of errors.  There are not half a dozen poems in the book the discovery of which, should the author’s name be forgotten, would send the critics in quest of other work from the same magician’s hand.  One feels safe in prophesying immortality for only two, The Oxen and In Time of “the Breaking of Nations"; and these have already appeared in the selection of the author’s poems published in the Golden Treasury Series.  The fact that the entirely new poems contain nothing on the plane of immortality, however, does not mean that Moments of Vision is a book of verse about which one has the right to be indifferent.  No writer who is so concerned as Mr. Hardy with setting down what his eyes and heart have told him can be regarded with indifference.  Mr. Hardy’s art is lame, but it carries the burden of genius.  He may be a stammerer as a poet, but he stammers in words of his own concerning a vision of his own.  When he notes the bird flying past in the dusk, “like an eyelid’s soundless blink,” he does not achieve music, but he chronicles an experience, not merely echoes one, with such exact truth as to make it immortally a part of all experience.  There is nothing borrowed or secondhand, again, in Mr. Hardy’s grim vision of the yew-trees in the churchyard by moonlight in Jubilate: 

    The yew-tree arms, glued hard to the stiff, stark air,
      Hung still in the village sky as theatre-scenes.

Mr. Hardy may not enable us to hear the music which is more than the music of the earth, but he enables us to see what he saw.  He communicates his spectacle of the world.  He builds his house lopsided, harsh, and with the windows in unusual places; but it is his own house, the house of a seer, of a personality.  That is what we are aware of in such a poem as On Sturminster Foot Bridge, in which perfect and precise observation of nature is allied to intolerably prosaic utterance.  The first verse of this poem runs: 

    Reticulations creep upon the slack stream’s face
        When the wind skims irritably past. 
    The current clucks smartly into each hollow place
    That years of flood have scrabbled in the pier’s sodden base;
      The floating-lily leaves rot fast.

One could make as good music as that out of a milk-cart.  One would accept such musicless verse only from a man of genius.  But even here Mr. Hardy takes us home with him and makes us stand by his side and listen to the clucking stream.  He takes us home with him again in the poem called Overlooking the River Stour, which begins: