man in this generation, though his diagnosis is, I believe, mistaken) indicate very well Mr. Hardy’s place and rank in English poetry. He is the poet who has most steadily refused to be comforted. The comfort of forgetfulness, the comfort of beliefs, he has put both these away. Hence his singular preoccupation with death; because it is in the contemplation of death that the necessity for human attitudes, in the face of an indifferent universe, to become self-supporting is felt most poignantly. Only the greatest tragic poets have achieved an equally self-reliant and immitigable acceptance. From Mr. Hardy to Mr. De la Mare may seem a large transition, though readers of Mr. De la Mare’s later work will agree that there are interesting resemblances--in _Who’s That_ and in other poems in _The Veil_ where Mr. De la Mare is notably less himself than when writing at his best. In his best poetry, in _The Pigs and the Charcoal Burner_, in _John Mouldy_, no intimation of the contemporary situation sounds. He is writing of, and from, a world which knows nothing of these difficulties, a world of pure phantasy for which the distinction between knowledge and feeling has not yet dawned. When in other poems, more reflective, in _The Tryst_, for example, Mr. De la Mare does seem to be directly facing the indifference of the universe towards “poor mortal longingness” a curious thing happens. His utterance, in spite of his words, becomes not at all a recognition of this indifference, but voices instead an impulse to turn away, to forget it, to seek shelter in the warmth of his own familiar thickets of dream, not to stay out in the wind. His rhythm, that indescribable personal note which clings to all his best poetry, is a lulling rhythm, an anodyne, an opiate, it gives sleep and visions, phantasmagoria; but it does not give _vision_, it does not awaken. Even when he most appears to be contemplating the fate of the modern, “whom the words of the wise have made sad,” the drift of his verse is still “seeking after that sweet golden clime” where the mental traveller’s journey _begins_. There is one exception to this charge (for in a sense it is an adverse criticism, though not one to be pressed except against a great poet), there is one poem in which there is no such reluctance to bear the blast--_The Mad Prince’s Song_ in _Peacock Pie_. But here the spirit of the poem, the impulse which gives it life, comes from a poet who more than most refused to take shelter; _The Mad Prince’s Song_ derives from _Hamlet_.