dful to define in what this pessimism consists. It is not
the egotism of Byron or the morbid melancholy of Chateaubriand. It is
directed towards an observation of others, not towards an analysis of
self, and this gives it more philosophical importance, because although
romantic peevishness is very common among modern poets, and although
ennui inspires a multitude of sonnets, a deliberate and imaginative
study of useless suffering in the world around us is rare indeed among
the poets. It is particularly to be noted that Mr. Hardy, although one
of the most profoundly tragic of all modern writers, is neither
effeminate nor sickly. His melancholy could never have dictated the
third stanza of Shelley's "Lines written in Dejection in the Bay of
Naples." His pessimism is involuntary, forced from him by his experience
and his constitution, and no analysis could give a better definition of
what divides him from the petulant despair of a poet like Leopardi than
the lines "To Life":--

"O life, with the sad scared face,
I weary of seeing thee,
And thy draggled cloak, and thy hobbling pace,
And thy too-forced pleasantry!

"I know what thou would'st tell
Of Death, Time, Destiny--
I have known it long, and know, too, well
What it all means for me.

"But canst thou not array
Thyself in rare disguise,
And feign like truth, for one mad day,
That Earth is Paradise?

"I'll tune me to the mood,
And mumm with thee till eve,
And maybe what as interlude
I feign, I shall believe!"

But the mumming goes no deeper than it does in the exquisite poem of
"The Darkling Thrush," where the carolings of an aged bird, on a frosty
evening, are so ecstatic that they waken a vague hope in the listener's
mind that the thrush may possibly know of "some blessed hope" of which
the poet is "unaware." This is as far as Mr. Hardy ever gets on the
blest Victorian pathway of satisfaction.

There are certain aspects in which it is not unnatural to see a parallel
between Mr. Hardy and George Crabbe. Each is the spokesman of a
district, each has a passion for the study of mankind, each has gained
by long years of observation a profound knowledge of local human
character, and each has plucked on the open moor, and wears in his coat,
the hueless flower of disillusion. But there is a great distinction in
the aim of the two poets. Cra