he _Desperate Remedies_ of 1871
to _The Well-Beloved_ of 1897. In the fulness of his success, and
unseduced by all temptation, he closed that chapter of his career, and
has kept it closed. Since 1898 he has been, persistently and
periodically, a poet and nothing else. That he determined, for reasons
best left to his own judgment, to defer the exhibition of his verse
until he had completed his work in prose, ought not to prejudice
criticism in its analysis of the lyrics and the colossal dramatic
panorama. Mr. Hardy, exclusively as a poet, demands our undivided
attention.

It is legitimate to speculate on other probable causes of Mr. Hardy's
delay. From such information as lies scattered before us, we gather that
it was from 1865 to 1867 that he originally took poetry to be his
vocation. The dated pieces in the volume of 1898 help us to form an idea
of the original character of his utterance. On the whole it was very
much what it remains in the pieces composed after a lapse of half a
century. Already, as a very young man, Mr. Hardy possessed his
extraordinary insight into the movements of human character, and his
eloquence in translating what he had observed of the tragedy and pain of
rustic lives. No one, for sixty years, had taken so closely to heart the
admonitions of Wordsworth in his famous Preface to the 1800 edition of
_Lyrical Ballads_ to seek for inspiration in that condition where "the
passions of men are incorporated with the beautiful forms of nature."
But it may well be doubted whether Mr. Hardy's poems would have been
received in the mid-Victorian age with favour, or even have been
comprehended. Fifty years ahead of his time, he was asking in 1866 for
novelty of ideas, and he must have been conscious that his questioning
would seem inopportune. He needed a different atmosphere, and he left
the task of revolt to another, and, at first sight, a very unrelated
force, that of the _Poems and Ballads_ of the same year. But Swinburne
succeeded in his revolution, and although he approached the art from an
opposite direction, he prepared the way for an ultimate appreciation of
Mr. Hardy.

We should therefore regard the latter, in spite of his silence of forty
years, as a poet who laboured, like Swinburne, at a revolution against
the optimism and superficial sweetness of his age. Swinburne, it is
true, tended to accentuate the poetic side of poetry, while Mr. Hardy
drew verse, in some verbal respects, nearer to pros