Alive Enough

WINTER WORDS IN VARIOUS MOODS AND METRES--Thomas Hardy-- Macmillan ($2.00).

THE EARLY LIFE OF THOMAS HARDY 1840-1891 --Florence Emily Hardy -- Macmillan ($5.00).

Thomas Hardy, famed apostle of gloom, lives up to his reputation in this volume of poems posthumously published. But the very gloom makes for stark beauty.

In the introductory note Hardy shies at critics who unanimously pronounce him "gloomy and pessimistic." But the generality is at least excusable, such is the lugubriousness of his humor: item, "The Three Tall Men" of the present volume. In his spare moments a man is making a coffin that shall be long enough for him to be neither bent nor snapped. He finishes a first coffin--it is needed for his tall brother; he finishes a second-for his tall son. He starts a third. Then--

Many years later was brought to me

News that the man had died at sea.

Quite as gruesome a joke was nearly played on the poet himself--at his birth ie was tossed aside as dead, till the midwife exclaimed to the surgeon: "Dead! Stop a minute: he's alive enough, sure!" Live enough to play the infant Hercules, with the difference that the large snake found one day in his cradle was curled up on the child's chest, comfortably asleep like himself.

These things, gleaned from her husband s talk, his letters, his diary and notebooks, Mrs. Hardy pleasantly records. As a boy he loved music, as a youth practiced architecture, and only tentatively at first did he do any writing.

Many and varied were the people who sought him out, and were recorded in passing:

"February 10. Newman and Carlyle. The former's was a feminine nature, which first decides and then finds reasons for hav-ing decided. He was an enthusiast with the absurd reputation of a logician and reasoner. Carlyle was a poet with the reputation of a philosopher. Neither was truly a thinker. . . .

"Sunday. To Mrs. Procter's. Browning, there. He was sleepy. In telling a story would break off, forgetting what he was going to say. . . .

"Ellen Terry arrived--diaphanous-sort of balsam or sea-anemone, without, shadow."