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.
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