e. This does not
affect their common attitude, and the sympathy of these great artists
for one another's work has already been revealed, and will be still more
clearly exposed. But they were unknown to each other in 1866, when to
both of them the cheap philosophy of the moment, the glittering
femininity of the "jewelled line," the intense respect for Mrs. Grundy
in her Sunday satin, appeared trumpery, hateful, and to be trampled
upon. We find in Mr. Hardy's earliest verse no echo of the passionate
belief in personal immortality which was professed by Ruskin and
Browning. He opposed the Victorian theory of human "progress"; the
Tennysonian beatific Vision seemed to him ridiculous. He rejected the
idea of the sympathy and goodness of Nature, and was in revolt against
the self-centredness of the Romantics. We may conjecture that he
combined a great reverence for _The Book of Job_ with a considerable
contempt for _In Memoriam_.

This was not a mere rebellious fancy which passed off; it was something
inherent that remained, and gives to-day their peculiar character to Mr.
Hardy's latest lyrics. But before we examine the features of this
personal mode of interpreting poetry to the world, we may collect what
little light we can on the historic development of it. In the pieces
dated between 1865 and 1867 we find the germ of almost everything which
has since characterised the poet. In "Amabel" the ruinous passage of
years, which has continued to be an obsession with Mr. Hardy, is already
crudely dealt with. The habit of taking poetical negatives of small
scenes--"your face, and the God-curst sun, and a tree, and a pond edged
with grayish leaves" ("Neutral Times")--which had not existed in English
verse since the days of Crabbe, reappears. There is marked already a
sense of terror and resentment against the blind motions of chance--In
"Hap" the author would positively welcome a certainty of divine hatred
as a relief from the strain of depending upon "crass casualty." Here and
there in these earliest pieces an extreme difficulty of utterance is
remarkable in the face of the ease which the poet attained afterwards in
the expression of his most strange images and fantastic revelations. We
read in "At a Bridal":--

"Should I, too, wed as slave to Mode's decree,
And each thus found apart, of false desire
A stolid line, whom no high aims will fire
As had fired ours could ever have mingled we!"

This, although pe