Romanticism in Hardy's Return of the Native (Hank and Clay)

At it's heart, Thomas Hardy's Return of the Native is a Romantic novel full of intricate decriptions of setting, tragic love triangles, and musings about the nature of life itself. Romanticism, in large part, concerned itself with the personification of nature, and Hardy does in fact use his setting of Egdon Heath as a vital player in Return. Though Hardy is no Dickens, he does decribe every event, scene, etc. with great embelishment and illustrative precision. His characters of Clym and Eustacia are both tragic characters in the classical sense and are filled with the Romantic spirit. Though Clym tries to do his best at every turn (he retired from the diment trade to educate the denizens of the heath), he is beset with misfortune throughout the novel (lack of support from mother, death of his mother, going blind, etc.). Eustacia has large Romantic dreams of love and grandeur and tries to manipulate situations to achieve these dreams, ending in death by suicide. The combination of the vivid and animated description of the heath and the melodramatic characters makes Return of the Native undoubtedly a Romantic novel.