TO THOMAS HARDY MINGLED the moonlight with daylight—the last in
the narrow- ing West ; Silence of nightfall lay over the shallowing valleys at rest In the Earth's green breast : Yet a small multitudinous singing, a lully of voices of birds, Unseen in the vague shelving hollows, welled up with my questioning words : All Dorsetshire's larks for connivance of sweetness seemed trysting to greet Him in whose poems the bodings of raven and nightingale meet.
Stooping and smiling, he hearkened, " No bird-notes myself do I hear Perhaps 'twas the talk of chance farers, abroad in the hush with us here— In the dusk-light clear ? "
And there peered from his eyes, as I listened, a concourse of women and men, Whom his words had made living, long-suffering—they flocked to remembrance again ; 0 Master," I cried in my heart, " lorn thy tidings, grievous thy song ; Yet thine, too, this solacing music, as we earthfolk stumble along."
WALTER DE LA MARE.
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