One feels inclined to say that Hardy’s prose is poetry and his poetry prose. The present volume reveals little of the genuine lyric gift, but the singing while labored is not without force and individual color. Some of the ballads possess considerable spirit, and where character is outlined it cuts the consciousness with Hardy’s well-known skill of vivid portraiture; as for instance, “The Dance at the Phœnix,” describing the passion of an aged dame for the pleasures of her youth how she steals forth from the bed of her good man to foot it gaily at the inn and how on her return at morn she dies from over-exertion; “Her Death and After” where the lover of a dead woman sacrifices her fair fame for the sake of rescuing her child from the cruelties of a stepmother; and “The Burghers,” a tale of guilty lovers, and a husband’s unique conduct. In these, as in other poems of the kind, one can not but feel that Hardy would have put the matter so much better in prose; which, indeed, is what in some cases he has done. Some of the contemplative verse has a quaintness of expression which suggests the sonnets of Shakespeare; the lines are frequently lame, but every now and then there is a really virile phrase. In true old English style are some of the lyrics, of which “The Stranger’s Song” is perhaps the most successful:
O! my trade, it is the rarest one,
Simple shepherds all—
My trade is a sight to see;
For my customers I tie, and take ’em up on high,
And waft ’em to a far countree!
My tools are but common ones,
Simple shepherds all—
My tools are no sight to see;
A little hempen string, and a post whereon to swing,