Wessex ballads. The method in which these came into the world is very
curious. Many of these stories were jotted down to the extent of a
stanza or two when the subject first occurred to the author. For
instance, "The Fire at Tranter Sweatley's," first published by Lionel
Johnson in 1894, had been begun as early as 1867, and was finished ten
years later. The long ballad of "Leipzig" and the savage "San
Sebastian," both highly characteristic, were also conceived and a few
lines of each noted down long before their completion. "Valenciennes,"
however, belongs to 1878, and the "Dance at the Phoenix," of which the
stanza beginning "'Twas Christmas" alone had been written years before,
seems to have been finished about the same time. What evidence is before
us goes to prove that in the 'seventies Mr. Hardy became a complete
master of the art of verse, and that his poetic style was by this time
fixed. He still kept poetry out of public sight, but he wrote during the
next twenty years, as though in a backwater off the stream of his
novels, the poems which form the greater part of the volume of 1898. If
no other collection of his lyrical verse existed, we should miss a
multitude of fine things, but our general conception of his genius would
be little modified.

We should judge carelessly, however, if we treated the subsequent
volumes as mere repetitions of the original _Wessex Poems_. They present
interesting differences, which I may rapidly note before I touch on the
features which characterise the whole body of Mr. Hardy's verse. _Poems
of the Past and Present_, which came out in the first days of 1902,
could not but be in a certain measure disappointing, in so far as it
paralleled its three years' product with that of the thirty years of
_Wessex Poems_. Old pieces were published in it, and it was obvious that
in 1898 Mr. Hardy might be expected to have chosen from what used to be
called his "portfolio" those specimens which he thought to be most
attractive. But on further inspection this did not prove to be quite the
case. After pondering for twelve years on the era of Napoleon, his
preoccupation began in 1887 to drive him into song:--

"Must I pipe a palinody,
Or be silent thereupon?"

He decides that silence has become impossible:--

"Nay; I'll sing 'The Bridge of Lodi'--
That long-loved, romantic thing,
Though none show by smile or nod, he
Guesses why and what I sing!"

Here is the germ