Not that Mr. Hardy’s is quite so miserable a genius as is commonly supposed.  It is false to picture him as always on his knees before the grave-worm.  His faith in beauty and joy may be only a thin flame, but it is never extinguished.  His beautiful lyric, I Look into my Glass, is the cry of a soul dark but not utterly darkened:—­

    I look into my glass,
    And view my wasting skin,
    And say:  “Would God, it came to pass
    My heart had shrunk as thin!”

    For then, I, undistrest,
    By hearts grown cold to me,
    Could lonely wait my endless rest
    With equanimity.

    But Time, to make me grieve,
    Part steals, lets part abide;
    And shakes this fragile frame at eve
    With throbbings of noontide.

That is certainly worlds apart from the unquenchable joy of Browning’s “All the breath and the bloom of the world in the bag of one bee”; but it is also far removed from the “Lo! you may always end it where you will” of The City of Dreadful Night.  And despair is by no means triumphant in what is perhaps the most attractive of all Mr. Hardy’s poems, The Oxen:—­

    Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock,
      “Now they are all on their knees,”
    An elder said as we sat in a flock
      By the embers in hearthside ease.

    We pictured the meek mild creatures where
      They dwelt in their strawy pen,
    Nor did it occur to one of us there
      To doubt they were kneeling then.

    So fair a fancy few would weave
      In these years!  Yet, I feel,
    If some one said on Christmas Eve,
      “Come; see the oxen kneel

    “In the lonely barton by yonder coomb
      Our childhood used to know,”
    I should go with him in the gloom,
      Hoping it might be so.

The mood of faith, however—­or, rather, of delight in the memory of faith—­is not Mr. Hardy’s prevailing mood.  At the same time, his unfaith relates to the duration of love rather than to human destiny.  He believes in “the world’s amendment.”  He can enter upon a war without ironical doubts, as we see in the song Men who March Away.  More than this, he can look forward beyond war to the coming of a new patriotism of the world.  “How long,” he cries, in a poem written some years ago:—­

    How long, O ruling Teutons, Slavs, and Gaels,
    Must your wroth reasonings trade on lives like these,
    That are as puppets in a playing hand? 
    When shall the saner softer polities
    Whereof we dream, have sway in each proud land,
    And Patriotism, grown Godlike, scorn to stand
    Bondslave to realms, but circle earth and seas?

But, perhaps, his characteristic attitude to war is to be found, not in lines like these, but in that melancholy poem, The Souls of the Slain, in which the souls of the dead soldiers return to their country and question a “senior soul-flame” as to how their friends and relatives have kept their doughty deeds in remembrance:—­