e all other modern poets by the deliberate
purity of his responsiveness. The contagion of the world's slow stain
has not touched him; from the first he held aloof from the general
conspiracy to forget in which not only those who are professional
optimists take a part. Therefore his simplest words have a vehemence and
strangeness of their own:--

'It will have been:
Nor God nor Demon can undo the done,
Unsight the seen
Make muted music be as unbegun
Though things terrene
Groan in their bondage till oblivion supervene.'

What neither God nor Demon can do, men are incessantly at work to
accomplish. Life itself rewards them for their assiduity, for she
scatters her roses chiefly on the paths of those who forget her thorns.
But the great poet remembers both rose and thorn; and it is beyond his
power to remember them otherwise than together.

It was fitting, then, and to some senses inevitable, that Mr Hardy
should have crowned his work as a poet in his old age by a series of
love poems that are unique for power and passion in even the English
language. This late and wonderful flowering has no tinge of miracle; it
has sprung straight from the main stem of Mr Hardy's poetic growth. Into
'Veteris Vestigia Flammas' is distilled the quintessence of the power
that created the Wessex Novels and 'The Dynasts'; all that Mr Hardy has
to tell us of life, the whole of the truth that he has apprehended, is
in these poems, and no poet since poetry began has apprehended or told
us more. _Sunt lacrimae rerum_.

[NOVEMBER, 1919.

* * * * *

POSTSCRIPT

Three months after this essay was written the first volume of the long
awaited definitive edition of Mr Hardy's works (the Mellstock Edition)
appeared. It was with no common thrill that we read in the precious
pages of introduction the following words confirming the theory upon
which the first part of the essay is largely based.

'Turning now to my verse--to myself the more individual part of my
literary fruitage--I would say that, unlike some of the fiction,
nothing interfered with the writer's freedom in respect of its form
or content. Several of the poems--indeed many--were produced before
novel-writing had been thought of as a pursuit; but few saw the
light till all the novels had been published....

'The few volumes filled by the verse cover a producing period of
some eighteen years first