17th Jan. 1915

Dear Mr Hardy,

I have long wished to tell you how profoundly grateful I am to you for your poems and novels, but naturally it seemed an impertinence to do so. When however, your poem to my father, Leslie Stephen, appeared in Satires of Circumstance this autumn, I felt that I might perhaps be allowed to thank you for that at least. That poem, and the reminiscences you contributed to Professor [F. W.] Maitland's Life of him [1906], remain in my mind as incomparably the truest and most imaginative portrait of him in existence, for which alone his children should be always grateful to you.

But besides this one would like to thank you for the magnificent work which you have already done, and are still to do. The younger generation, who care for poetry and literature, owe you an immeasurable debt, and in particular for your last volume of poems which, to me at any rate, is the most remarkable book to appear in my lifetime.

I write only to satisfy a very old desire, and not to trouble you to reply.

Believe me
Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf