Thus doth the Great Foresightless mechanize Its blank entrancement now as evermore Its ceaseless artistries in circumstance.... Yet seems this vast and singular confection Wherein our scenery glints of scantest size, Inutile all--so far as reasonings tell. SPIRIT OF PITIES Thou arguest still the Inadvertent Mind. But, even so, shall blankness be for aye?... SPIRIT OF THE YEARS What wouldst have hoped and had the Will to be?... SEMI-CHORUS I OF THE PITIES Nay;--shall not Its blindness break? Yea, must not Its heart awake, Promptly tending To its mending In a genial germing purpose, and for loving-kindness' sake? SEMI-CHORUS II Should It never Curb or cure Aught whatever Those endure Whom It quickens, Let them darkle To extinction Swift and sure, CHORUS But--a stirring thrills the air Like to sounds of joyance there That the rages Of the ages Shall be cancelled, and Deliverance offered From the darts that were, Consciousness the Will informing, till It fashions all things fair! The Spirit of the Years (which is another name for Hardy's reflections upon life and history) planned in sad conviction of the "blank entrancement" of the Great Foresightless Will, those sad narratives in which innocence, as in "Tess of the d'Ubervilles," is crushed, or vivid personality frustrated, as in "The Return of the Native." It is the Spirit of Pities in Hardy which wrote the stories. Philosophy constructed them, but pity worked them out. The characters that Hardy loved--Grace, Marty South, Jude, Tess-- are life, brooding, intense, potential, and lovely, struggling against a fate which they help to draw upon themselves, but which is, nevertheless, not necessary, not rational. The cruelty of this fate he assumes and depicts, but the stories are not told to describe it. It is his creatures that get the color, the interest; they are valuable to us, and would be to him, whatever the truth of his philosophy. But because he loves life, the living thing, even the lizard in the woods, he broods upon their frustrations.