bbe, as he describes himself in _The Parish
Register_, was "the true physician" who "walks the foulest ward." He was
utilitarian in his morality; he exposed the pathos of tragedy by
dwelling on the faults which led to it, forgetful of the fatality which
in more consistent moments he acknowledged. Crabbe was realistic with a
moral design, even in the _Tales of the Hall_, where he made a gallant
effort at last to arrive at a detachment of spirit. No such effort is
needed by Mr. Hardy, who has none of the instinct of a preacher, and who
considers moral improvement outside his responsibility. He admits, with
his great French contemporary, that

"Tout desir est menteur, toute joie ephemere,
Toute liqueur au fond de la coupe est amere,"

but he is bent on discovering the cause of this devastation, and not
disposed to waste time over its consequences. At the end he produces a
panacea which neither Crabbe nor Byron dreamed of--resignation.

But the poet has not reached the end of his disillusion. He thinks to
secure repose on the breast of Nature, the _alma mater_, to whom Goethe
and Wordsworth and Browning each in his own way turned, and were
rewarded by consolation and refreshment. We should be prepared to find
Mr. Hardy, with his remarkable aptitude for the perception of natural
forms, easily consoled by the influences of landscape and the inanimate
world. His range of vision is wide and extremely exact; he has the gift
of reproducing before us scenes of various character with a vividness
which is sometimes startling. But Mr. Hardy's disdain of sentimentality,
and his vigorous analysis of the facts of life, render him insensible
not indeed to the mystery nor to the beauty, but to the imagined
sympathy, of Nature. He has no more confidence in the visible earth than
in the invisible heavens, and neither here nor there is he able to
persuade himself to discover a counsellor or a friend. In this
connection, we do well to follow the poet's train of thought in the
lyric called "In a Wood," where he enters a copse dreaming that, in that
realm of "sylvan peace," Nature would offer "a soft release from man's
unrest." He immediately observes that the pine and the beech are
struggling for existence, and trying to blight each other with dripping
poison. He sees the ivy eager to strangle the elm, and the hawthorns
choking the hollies. Even the poplars sulk and turn black under the
shadow of a rival. In the end, filled with horr