Ferment (1863-1870)
is no less vital to the mental processes of Hardy than to the philosophy of Schopenhauer, is the cause of the bewilderment with which the ordinary commentator of the Hardy novels is filled at the apparently illogical simplicity with which the idea of chance is constantly introduced into a fatalistic universe, rigidly frozen in time and space. The hint of Hardy's conception of the First Principle underlying the phenomenal world as a vast, blind Impersonality and not as a personal Deity was a distinct foreshadowing of the climactic "Immanent Will" which dominates the action of The Dynasts. The word "un-blooms" shows the characteristic use of the privative prefix, persisted in throughout his poetry, as is the expression "Casualty," used as the personification of the idea of circumstance or the conjunction of events. Time, personified and casting dice, is a natural development of the more auspicious figure already encountered in Barnes. The notion of Time as an assistant and abettor of circumstance is an idea that Hardy strongly emphasized in his early career but did not stress in the maturer poems and novels, with the possible exception of The Woodlanders and the title Time's Laughingstocks. That these abstractions are termed Doomsters is in perfect harmony with his fundamental conceptions. The poem is already so well and favorably known that it is quite superfluous to comment upon the power and conviction that speak through its telling dramatic form and expression, resulting in an artistic product of real value and beauty.
The sonnet, In Vision I Roamed, a cosmic adventure, calls to mind George Meredith's Lucifer in
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