Page:Life of Thomas Hardy - Brennecke.pdf/19

 it, such as the periodic outcropping of your Negro problems and other racial difficulties. I am too old ever to fathom this; I can only feel it vaguely, like a faint echo of a cataclysm on another star.

"I can't even always fathom quite the charm of the ancient church musicians about here. They serenaded me with some old tunes the other evening. That sort of thing carries me back to the fifties—even to the forties. I'm old enough to remember the gaudy Napoleonic military uniforms, with their long flapping tails. Their fascination has been a lasting thing. Dashing uniforms give me pleasant sensations."

Slightly inconsecutive is the Hardy discourse, but quietly dynamic. Sometimes the gears of memory actually slip for a moment. Minor characters in certain of the Wessex novels, for instance, have become quite submerged.

About other things there are flashes which brilliantly, electrically illuminate the fading past. At the mention of Swinburne, "I loved Atalanta," he confesses, simply. "I used to walk from my lodgings near Hyde Park to the draughting office every morning, and never without a copy of the first edition of the Poems and Ballads sticking out of my pocket. It was a borrowed copy ... If I'd only bought it at the time, it would be worth many guineas today.

"Tennyson and Browning both lived near me. For two years I read only poetry—no prose, except the newsprints—a curious obsession! Well, I still believe poetry to be the very essence of literature ... No editors even touched my verse for many years. Oh, yes, I sent much of