or at all these crimes of
Nature, the poet flees from the copse as from an accursed place, and he
determines that life offers him no consolation except the company of
those human beings who are as beleaguered as himself:--

"Since, then, no grace I find
Taught me of trees,
Turn I back to my kind
Worthy as these.
There at least smiles abound,
There discourse trills around,
There, now and then, are found,
Life-loyalties."

It is absurd, he decides, to love Nature, which has either no response
to give, or answers in irony. Let us even avoid, as much as we can, deep
concentration of thought upon the mysteries of Nature, lest we become
demoralised by contemplating her negligence, her blindness, her
implacability. We find here a violent reaction against the poetry of
egotistic optimism which had ruled the romantic school in England for
more than a hundred years, and we recognise a branch of Mr. Hardy's
originality. He has lifted the veil of Isis, and he finds beneath it,
not a benevolent mother of men, but the tomb of an illusion. One short
lyric, "Yell'ham-Wood's Story," puts this, again with a sylvan setting,
in its unflinching crudity:--

"Coomb-Firtrees say that Life is a moan,
And Clyffe-hill Clump says 'Yea!'
But Yell'ham says a thing of its own:
It's not, 'Gray, gray,
Is Life alway!'
That Yell'ham says,
Nor that Life is for ends unknown.

"It says that Life would signify
A thwarted purposing:
That we come to live, and are called to die.
Yes, that's the thing
In fall, in spring,
That Yell'ham says:--
Life offers--to deny!'"

It is therefore almost exclusively to the obscure history of those who
suffer and stumble around him, victims of the universal disillusion, men
and women "come to live but called to die," that Mr. Hardy dedicates his
poetic function. "Lizbie Browne" appeals to us as a typical instance of
his rustic pathos, his direct and poignant tenderness, and if we compare
it with such poems of Wordsworth's as "Lucy Gray" or "Alice Fell" we see
that he starts by standing much closer to the level of the subject than
his great predecessor does. Wordsworth is the benevolent philosopher
sitting in a post-chaise or crossing the "wide moor" in meditation. Mr.
Hardy is the familiar neighbour, the shy mourner at the grave; his
relation is a more intimat