I recall an autumn in the forests of Wessex, where the importance of each gold-brown leaf that fell was lifted to power of romance. Most subtly, delicately felt, then adequately reported. When I read the early tales of Hardy, I regret that in America we have lost so many rich Anglo-Saxon word-forms, that American English has become anæmic. It has grown thin, showy. The novels of Hardy are England, the fibre of England, while American novels are not of any land. They might have been written in comfortable ingrain, or Brussels carpeted places, where there is noise and a phonograph, in Fez or Ispahan. It is a pity to miss savor of the soil. It is a pity to be flowers grown in dry, movable, windowpots, instead of in the Earth’s brown, wrinkled breast. The soul of René Bazin is preeminently Christian, with seal of the Christian ages. He can not conceive beauty for itself. For him it must become morality. He speaks of the _grand refroidissement de l’art national_, which has been called _The Renaissance_. The soul of him belongs to the world in which pity was born, and this, if I mistake not, is trait of his nature. Even in objective seeing it threatens to become paramount. In _Redemption, Le Blé qui Lève_, Bazin belongs to the group of Millet, Rousseau, and Breton, only he happens to use words instead of oil and brush. The overflowing Loire in spring, (_Redemption_), the broad mist-dim meadows it feeds, are magnificent. The great landscape art of France is there. I felt a thrill of pleasure, sense of thirst for beauty satisfied, as when I look upon a canvas. In this canvas, it seemed to me the light was finely managed; balanced massing of shadow with sun. The effect was ennobling. There was something that made one believe again in one’s fellow men. It is good for the heart of the world to read books like his. I fancy Hardy regrets poetry was going out of fashion when he began to write, or he would have been a poet. Like two other novelists, Paul Bourget and Anatole France, he was born with gift for it. The delicately woven texture of his thoughts belongs more to poetry than prose. His brush is a poet’s brush, his are a poet’s observations. And he has read them prodigiously, great and little. English and Latin poetry few know better. He is too sensitive for the broad blare of prose. Hardy does not know women. His women are monotonous, undeveloped. They are little more than sketches. To be sure it may be objected that the peasant type he prefers does not lend itself to shading, to differences. But I will venture to assert, without definite knowledge of any kind on the subject, that he himself did not know women. If there had been anything of Burns in his nature it would have come to the surface, either in life or in books.