"Here is no example of that positive inability to write well in verse which has marked several great prose writers, such as in Carlyle and Hume; nor of that still more curious ability to write once or twice well, and never to regain the careless rapture, as in Berkeley and Chateaubriand. The phenomenon is a strongly marked and appropriate accent of his own, composing (so to speak) professionally in verse, able to amuse and move us along lines strictly parallel with his prose, and yet lacking something. This is not a case like George Eliot's, where the essence of the writer's style evaporates in the restraint of verse. Never was Mr Hardy more intensely and exclusively himself than in 'My Cicely.' Yet is this a complete success? Much as we admire it, we cannot say that it is. "'And by Weatherbury Castle, and therence Through Casterbridge bore I To tomb her whose light, in my deeming, Extinguished had He,' is not quite satisfactory. Why? Simply and solely because the form is grotesque. Here is the colour of poetry but not its sound, its essence but not its shape. "It might seem only right that in the face of a volume of verse so violent and rugged as _Wessex Poems_ we should protest that this is not the more excellent way of writing poetry. At the same time, every man must preserve his individuality, if he has one to preserve, as Mr Hardy assuredly has; and we have no reason to suppose that it is the desire of the author of 'The Peasant's Confession' to found a school or issue a propaganda. On the contrary, it is far more likely that he has put forth his Wessex verses with extreme simplicity and modesty, not asking himself in what relation they stand to other people's poetry. As a matter of fact, the _Wessex Poems_ will probably enjoy a double fate. They will supply to lovers of emotional narrative verse several poetic tales which they will lay up in memory among their treasures; and in time to come professors of literary history, when observing the retrogression of an imaginative period, and when speaking of Lydgate, of Donne, of the Spasmodists here, of the Symbolists in France, will mention Mr Hardy also as a signal example of the temporary success of a violent protest against the cultivation of form in verse."