In a small room in an English country house, famed Author Thomas Hardy lay sick in bed. Frail, 87, a little querulous in his talk, he still seemed unaccustomed to this invalid ease, the result of a chill he lad caught a month before. His hands, as thin and brown as claws, played nervously with the edge of his quilt. James Barrie came to talk to him; Hardy's peaked mournful face was turned sideways on its pillow, his voice seemed shrill and tired as he spoke to the writer who, with himself, shares the honor of being most respected by the British public. For a few days Thomas Hardy grew stronger. Then one early evening last week after signing a check and reading some of Walter de la Mare's poems, Thomas Hardy died.
After this there was a clamor about the most fitting burial place for so great an author. It was decided that the ashes of the man who had written, in the last paragraph of one of his greatest novels, "'Justice was done' . . . and the President of the Immortals had ended his sport with Tess. . . ." should be taken to Westminster Abbey, burial place of famed Englishmen, preserved in a vault. His heart, removed from his body before cremation, was buried in the earth at Dorchester.
To explain Hardy's position in English letters, it is necessary to push the story back to the middle of the 19th century, when Thackeray was writing his voluminously graceful fictions, when Gladstone was hobbling inelegantly through London, when Queen Victoria was swishing around her palace in long dresses. Hardy was then a small boy who took special pleasure in walking through Wessex fields, dawdling to talk with old men as they drove their cattle along the roads. The moors stretched out around the village of Upper Hampton where he lived; at night the wind blew a mist across them, muffling soft sounds, making a dog's voice, searching along some far hedgerow, an obscure dangerous signal, a portent of sorrow. The quiet tides of the country, the slow changes of the land and its people, were a solemn whisper always ringing in his ears like the sea's slow music echoing in a shell. It is easy to believe the legends of Hardy which picture him as he grew up writing love letters for illiterate or ineloquent country ladies; sitting in thatched cottages hearing farmers tell the stories about old battles that had once stirred their brief clamor in the endless quiet. When he was 16, Thomas Hardy was articled to a Dorchester architect.