The Life of Thomas Hardy
We seated around her knees—
But rather as one who sees.
So far that no tongue could hail:
Past things retold were to her as things existent,
Things present but as a tale.
Edmund Gosse, in his interesting essay, The Lyrical Poetry of Thomas Hardy (included in his collection called Some Diversions of a Man of Letters), has gone so far as to hazard the guess that Hardy actually acquired his "dangerous insight into the female heart" from his grandmother's penetrating interpretations of the tales she recounted. He may be right. Some may indeed think it hardly likely that the good woman could have see fit to disillusion a youngster of ten or fifteen by repeating to him homely instances and illustrations of Francis the First's notorious epigram:
Femme souvent varie—
Fol est cil qui s'y fie.
Even if she had been such a grim-hearted grandmother as deliberately to sow the seeds of distrust and misogynism in the trusting, ingenuous mind of a child, one may imagine, it may still seem impossible that the deeply rooted cynicism of the young writer—a cynicism which almost invariably made feminae mutahiles of his early heroines—could have begun to germinate at such a ten-
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