Here is a twilight effect from _The Return of the Native_:— “The sombre stretch of rounds and hollows seemed to rise and meet the evening gloom in pure sympathy, the heath exhaling darkness as rapidly as the heavens precipitated it. . . . The place became full of a watchful intentness now; for when other things sank brooding to sleep, the heath appeared slowly to awake and listen. Every night its Titanic form seemed to await something; but it had waited thus unmoved during so many centuries, through the crises of so many things, that it could only be imagined to await one last crisis—the final overthrow. . . . Twilight combined with the scenery of Egdon Heath to evolve a thing majestic without severity, impressive without showiness, emphatic in its admonitions, grand in its simplicity.” Contrast with this a twilight piece from Stevenson:— “The sky itself was of a ruddy, powerful, nameless changing colour, dark and glossy like a serpent’s back. The stars by innumerable millions stuck boldly forth like lamps. The milky way was bright, like a moonlit cloud; half heaven seemed milky way. The greater luminaries shone each more clearly than a winter’s moon. Their light was dyed in every sort of colour—red, like fire; blue, like steel; green, like the tracks of sunset; and so sharply did each stand forth in its own lustre that there was no appearance of that flat, star-spangled arch we know so well in pictures, but all the hollow of heaven was one chaos of contesting luminaries—a hurly-burly of stars. Against this the hill and rugged tree-tops stood out redly dark.” Each passage has a fresh beauty that removes it from the perfunctory tributes of the ordinary writer. But the difference between the Artist and the Philosopher is obvious. Not that Mr. Hardy has no claims as an artist. Different as their styles are, and although Stevenson has a more fastidious taste for words, the large, deliberate, massive art of Hardy is equally effective in its fashion. That, however, by the way. The point is that Mr. Hardy never rests _as_ an artist—he is quite as concerned with the philosophic as with the pictorial aspects of the scene. Stevenson rejoices as a Romantic; admires like an Artist. VI But if Stevenson does not care to philosophize over Nature—herein parting company with Thoreau as well as Hardy—he can moralize on occasion, and with infinite relish too. “Something of the Shorter Catechist,” as his friend Henley so acutely said. There is the Moralist in his essays, in some of the short stories—_Jekyll and Hyde_ is a morality in disguise, and unblushingly so is _A Christmas Sermon_. Some of his admirers have deplored this tendency in Stevenson; have shaken their heads gloomily over his Scottish ancestry, and spoken as apologetically about the moralizing as if it had been kleptomania.