News at Eleven: Many, like Virginia Woolf, were struck

by his [Thomas Hardy's] kindliness, and he insisted on calling himself an "evolutionary meliorist," not a pessimist. But [Claire] Tomalin quotes an astonishing letter of condolence that he wrote when Henry Rider Haggard, the adventure writer, lost his 10-year-old son: "To be candid, I think the death of a child is never really to be regretted, when one reflects on what he has escaped."

from The New York Times: Thomas Hardy's English Lessons

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