Page:Life of Thomas Hardy - Brennecke.pdf/241

 trayed and slain by a treacherous peasant. Five full stanzas are devoted to a Homeric or Æschylean catalogue of the noted fallen—a mere enumeration of the names of familiar and unfamiliar heroes. It will be seen that this is an anticipation of the technique of The Dynasts. The dramatic quality of the story is vividly reflected in the speed and the broken rhythms of the verses. The Alarm was based, like many an episode in The Trumpet-Major, on an actual Hardy-family tradition dealing with Bonaparte's threatened invasion of England, when all the country was in a fever of excitement and preparation.

In contrast to these poems, based on history and local legend, were those occasioned by Hardy's own experiences and observations in times of war. The "War-Poems" in Poems of the Past and the Present were written at various times during the Boer War, and give a picture of that struggle as viewed from Southampton, London, and Wessex. The first thing that one realizes after a mere glance through this group is that, for all his philosophic generalization, Hardy was by no means insensible to the external picturesqueness of the military spectacles he witnessed. The colorful excitement of embarcation scenes, the tramp of a battery through rain and mud, with wives and sweethearts trudging alongside as best they may, the crowds about the war-office watching the bulletins,—all these impressions are recorded. Nor was he less alive to the inevitable and natural emotions aroused in the crowds through the stirring up of the spirit of patriotism and of the love of adventure that is a part of everyone's nature. Soldierly enthusiasm