"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.