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 scheme of things was also comprehended. There was no experience and no event too trivial, and none too imposing, to find a record in Hardy's lyrics. The whole range of his interests and of his ideas achieved expression here, as well as his immediate imaginative reaction to events of the time, nowhere recorded in his prose works.

Some of these poems showed Hardy in an entirely new light—that of a "laureate" poet; but the most obviously "occasional" pieces demonstrated once for all the fact that that official distinction could never be his.

The passing of Edward VII and the accession of the present George called forth two notable poems. For A King's Soliloquy—On the Night of His Funeral was a lament over the unfruitfulness, "the days of drudgery, the nights of stress" of the life of a monarch, even when he is determined to get the best of all the enjoyments that his extraordinary opportunities put within his reach;—the "average track of average men" is to be preferred—and the poem ends on a fatalistic note:

The Coronation was a most extraordinary working-out of an idea that might have been molded into a masterpiece. The older rulers of the island are awakened by the noises of the erection of the temporary scaffolding for the ceremony at Westminster, and speculate on the significance of the disturbance. The reader speculates