Page:Life of Thomas Hardy - Brennecke.pdf/71

 out A Name, sees them all. Then huge elephantine forms, the mastodon, the hippopotamus, the tapir, antelopes of monstrous size, the megatherium and the mylodon, also huge-billed birds and swinish creatures as large as horses. Such an uncouth rout of inhabitants constitutes the fantastically romantic animate prologue for the appearance of the first Wessex men: fierce creatures, living in mean times, although perhaps no meaner than the present. Clothed in hides of beasts and carrying, for defence and attack, huge clubs and pointed spears, they "rose from the rock like the phantoms before the doomed Macbeth. They lived in hollows, woods and mud huts—perhaps in caves of the neighboring rocks." Dig down a few feet anywhere in Dorsetshire, and you will find the mute evidences of these bizarre races. Nineteenth Century science has bared them all to the vision of the romancer.

There followed wars and tumults. Tribes grew into nations. Life, then as now, tasted bitter; still men drank deeply of it, prolonged its deceptive hopes as effectively as they could. They attacked their neighbors, and erected elaborate defenses against them. Mai Dun, the result of years of toil, lakes of sweat and blood, reared up its grim ponderosity over the teeming green wilderness of the Frome Valley. Hundreds of tiny beings, Lilliputians in comparison with the colossal magnitude of their materialized ambitions, swarmed over the country in little bands and flocks, driven on by forces they could never understand.

Inspired by their awesome apprehension of a malignant, though perhaps only indifferent, spirit, brooding