SOURCE: Chew, Samuel C. “Homage to Thomas Hardy.” New Republic 23 (2 June 1920): 22-6.

In the following essay, Chew presents a brief biography and a tribute on the occasion of Hardy's eightieth birthday.

Thomas Hardy, the foremost living English poet and novelist, attains the age of eighty years on the second of June. A birthday tribute to the man whose achievement in prose has deepened the thought, widened the horizon and rectified the structure of the novel, and whose verse has appealed profoundly to many minds in these later years, may well take the form of a survey of the many-sided excellencies that make it appropriate to observe the occasion publicly.

Born in a remote humble Dorsetshire cottage, of a family formerly of importance, but (like the D'Urbervilles) fallen in fortune, Thomas Hardy received the first impressions upon a mind unusually sensitive to surroundings from nature and from the past...