Excerpt from The Pocket Thomas Hardy: Being Selections From the Wessex Novels and Poems of Thomas Hardy It is now some twelve years since Thomas Hardy gave us his last work of fiction, since which date we have in him recognized a poet Of very high order, as his Wessex Poems, ' Poems Of the Past and the Present, ' and 'the Dynasts' show. To his work in this direction I have in the following pages given due proportion. My thanks are here acknowledged to the author and to Messrs. Macmillan and Co Ltd., the publishers of the Collected Works Of Thomas Hardy, for permission kindly given by them to make this se tion. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.