This chapter addresses two important ways in which Hardy’s poetry emphasises intensely experienced and passionate episodes. These range on an increasingly optimistic scale from solipsistic desire to shared moments of realised passion. In several of Hardy’s poems imagined moments of romance are greatly celebrated. For example, in “A Thunderstorm in Town” (1914), and “Faintheart in a Railway Train” (1922), romantic opportunities do not necessary exist, but his speakers imagine that a liaison could have occurred if they had been bolder and had seized the moment. At the same time, such apparent solipsism is leavened with humour, as Hardy’s speakers laugh at their own tendency towards self-delusion. Elsewhere, in romantic poems such as “Under the Waterfall” (1914) and “The Night of the Dance” (1909), the speaker celebrates the powerfully lingering memory of actual moments of shared passion. In poems such as “To Meet, or Otherwise” (1914) and “A Kiss” (1917), the reverberations of such passionate moments are hopefully imagined as enduring, potentially forever. My analysis of the poems in this section will also discuss the significant influence of works by Charles Darwin, George Meredith, Robert Browning, Sappho, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Algernon Charles Swinburne upon Hardy’s celebration of romantic moments.