Shy as the squirrel and wayward as the swallow,
Swift as the swallow along the river's light
Circleting the surface to meet his mirrored winglets,

Fleeter she seems in her stay than in her flight.
Shy as the squirrel that leaps among the pine-tops,
Wayward as the swallow overhead at set of sun,
She whom I love is hard to catch and conquer,

Hard, but O the glory of the winning were she won!

When her mother tends her before the laughing mirror, Tying up her laces, looping up her hair,

Often she thinks, were this wild thing wedded,

More love should I have, and much less care. When her mother tends her before the lighted mirror, Loosening her laces, combing down her curls,

Often she thinks, were this wild thing wedded,

I should miss but one for the many boys and girls.

Heartless she is as the shadow in the meadows
Flying to the hills on a blue and breezy noon.
No, she is athirst and drinking up her wonder:

Earth to her is young as the slip of the new moon.
Deals she an unkindness, 'tis but her rapid measure,
Even as in a dance; and her smile can heal no less:
Like the swinging May-cloud that pelts the flowers with
hailstones

Off a sunny border, she was made to bruise and bless.

Lovely are the curves of the white owl sweeping
Wavy in the dusk lit by one large star.
Lone on the fir-branch, his rattle-note unvaried,
Brooding o'er the gloom, spins the brown eve-jar.
Darker grows the valley, more and more forgetting:
So were it with me if forgetting could be willed.
Tell the grassy hollow that holds the bubbling well-spring,
Tell it to forget the source that keeps it filled.

Stepping down the hill with her fair companions,
Arm in arm, all against the raying West,
Boldly she sings, to the merry tune she marches,
Brave in her shape, and sweeter unpossessed.
Sweeter, for she is what my heart first awaking

Whispered the world was; morning light is she.
Love that so desires would fain keep her changeless;
Fain would fling the net, and fain have her free.

Happy happy time, when the white star hovers
Low over dim fields fresh with bloomy dew,

Near the face of dawn, that draws athwart the darkness,
Threading it with colour, like yewberries the yew.
Thicker crowd the shades as the grave East deepens
Glowing, and with crimson a long cloud swells.
Maiden still the morn is; and strange she is, and secret;
Strange her eyes; her cheeks are cold as cold sea-shells.

Prim little scholars are the flowers of her garden,

Trained to stand in rows, and asking if they please. I might love them well but for loving more the wild ones: O my wild ones! they tell me more than these. You, my wild one, you tell of honied field-rose,

Violet, blushing eglantine in life; and even as they, They by the wayside are earnest of your goodness, You are of life's, on the banks that line the way.

Peering at her chamber the white crowns the red rose,
Jasmine winds the porch with stars two and three.
Parted is the window; she sleeps; the starry jasmine
Breathes a falling breath that carries thoughts of me.
Sweeter unpossessed, have I said of her my sweetest?
Not while she sleeps: while she sleeps the jasmine breathes,
Luring her to love; she sleeps; the starry jasmine

Bears me to her pillow under white rose-wreaths.

Gossips count her faults; they scour a narrow chamber
Where there is no window, read not heaven or her.
"When she was a tiny," one aged woman quavers,
Plucks at my heart and leads me by the ear.
Faults she had once as she learnt to run and tumbled:
Faults of feature some see, beauty not complete.

Yet, good gossips, beauty that makes holy

Earth and air, may have faults from head to feet.

Hither she comes; she comes to me; she lingers,
Deepens her brown eyebrows, while in new surprise
High rise the lashes in wonder of a stranger;

Yet am I the light and living of her eyes.

Something friends have told her fills her heart to brimming, Nets her in her blushes, and wounds her, and tames.

Sure of her haven, O like a dove alighting,

Arms up, she dropped: our souls were in our names.

A Song of Songs, which is Meredith's!

THE POETRY OF

THOMAS HARDY

I

IN speaking to you, the other day, Gentlemen, on the poetry of George Meredith, I admitted how faulty one's judgment may be-nay almost must needs beupon all modern work. "Still," I went on, "the task of appraising it has to be done, for the books of our time are the books of our time. They tell us in their various ways, 'How it strikes a Contemporary.

Yes: but I deferred a qualification of this—a somewhat important qualification—to which I shall begin today by asking your assent.

My qualification is this:-We elders-from among whom, for various reasons, your professors are chosen as a rule—may hope to help you in understanding poets long since dead. For Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, are removed almost as far from us as from you. They have passed definitely into the ward of Time. What was corrupt or corruptible in them is now dust, though we embalm it in myrrh, sandal-wood, cassia: dust equally for us and for you: what was incorruptible flowers as freshly for you as for us. We have but the sad advantage of having studied it a little longer.

Now when we come to poets of the time of Tennyson, Browning, Matthew Arnold, our difference of age asserts itself; middle-aged men of the 'sixties, young men of the 'nineties, children of this century, read them at correspondent removes, perceptible removes. And, though you may like it not, it is (I believe) good that we seniors should testify to you concerning these men who were our seniors, yet alive when we were young, and gave us in youth, believe me, even such thrills, such awed surmises, such wonders and wild desires as you catch in your turn from their successors. Nay, it is salutary, I believe; for the reason that it appears to be the rule for each new generation to turn iconoclast on its father's poetic gods. You will scarcely deny that on some of you the term "Victorian" acts as a red rag upon a young bull of the pasture: that, to some of you, Tennyson is "that sort of stuff your uncle read." Well, bethink you that the children of yet another generation will deal so and not otherwise with your heroes: that it is all a part of the continuous process of criticism through which our roseate raptures and our lurid antipathies pass, if not into the light of common day, into that of serener judgment. Blame not your uncle that at the age of fourteen or earlier, in the walled garden screened from the windows of the house, he charged among the vegetables chanting