ABSTRACT
Thomas Hardy is dead, in his eighty-eighth year: one of the most illustrious of that band, Orion and the others, of whom he said himself that they ‘burnt brightlier towards their setting-day’.1 That little bird-like body was active until it was at last stricken by this winter’s cold; and the eyes in the weather-beaten old face still twinkled with humour and curiosity. At eighty-seven he could still throw his head back and laugh with a youth’s gaiety; still course briskly round his garden (a little cosmos) chattering about its Roman remains and the signatures of German prisoners on the shed door.2 Only last summer he made a speech.3 No blanketed mumbling in the chimney-corner for him. And his heart to the last was as young as his will; no faculties decayed save the purely physical, and even those were preserved beyond the normal.
