Eight years more passed, years marked by the stupendous effort of _The Dynasts_, before Mr. Hardy put forth another collection of lyrical poems. _Time's Laughingstocks_ confirmed, and more than confirmed, the high promise of _Wessex Poems_. The author, in one of his modest prefaces, where he seems to whisper while we bend forward in our anxiety not to miss one thrifty sentence, expresses the hope that _Time's Laughingstocks_ will, as a whole, take the "reader forward, even if not far, rather than backward." The book, indeed, does not take us "far" forward, simply because the writer's style and scope were definitely exposed to us already, and yet it does take us "forward," because the hand of the master is conspicuously firmer and his touch more daring. The _Laughingstocks_ themselves are fifteen in number, tragical stories of division and isolation, of failures in passion, of the treason of physical decay. No landscape of Mr. Hardy's had been more vivid than the night-pictures in "The Revisitation," where the old soldier in barracks creeps out on to the gaunt down, and meets (by one of Mr. Hardy's coincidences) his ancient mistress, and no picture more terrible than the revelation of each to the other in a blaze of sunrise. What a document for the future is "Reminiscences of a Dancing Man"? If only Shakespeare could have left us such a song of the London in 1585! But the power of the poet culminates in the pathos of "The Tramp Woman"--perhaps the greatest of all Mr. Hardy's lyrical poems--and in the horror of "A Sunday Morning's Tragedy."