native village, and beholds again the chamber of his youth, and clasps once more the hand of her whom he loved as they wander along the "pleasant garden walk."

"Yes! all are with him now, and all the while
Life's early prospects and his Fanny's smile;
Then come his sister and his village-friend,
And he will now the sweetest moments spend
Life has to yield.

They feel the calm delight and thus proceed
Thro' the green lane; then linger in the mead-
Stray o'er the heath in all its purple bloom,
And pluck the blossoms where the wild bees hum;
Then thro' the broomy bound with ease they pass,
And press the sandy sheepwalks' slender grass,
Where dwarfish flowers among the gorse are spread,
And the lamb browzes by the linnet's bed;

Then cross the bounding brook they make their way
O'er its rough bridge, and there behold the bay!
The ocean smiling to the fervid sun-
The waves that faintly fall and slowly run—
The ships at distance and the boats at hand;
And now they walk upon the sea-side sand,
Counting the number, and what kind they be,
Ships softly sinking in the sleepy sea."

The lines marked in Italics strike us as exquisitely beautiful, both in thought and diction. The melody seems also perfect; whether the continued alliteration in the last line was intentional or accidental we do not know, but it unquestionably realizes in a very peculiar manner the appearance of vessels upon an unruffled, sunny sea in the summer time. The "lamb browzing by the linnet's bed" is sweetly expressive of rural serenity and repose.

Of Crabbe's tales the principal defect appears to be the paucity of incident, the dramatic action is the slightest imaginable; they are, in fact, only tales because they can be nothing else. Their great recommendation is their truth; the sketches of country society either have the muscular bearing of the seafaring tribe, or the more simple manners of rustic life. His village girls are not parodies of London milliners; his heroes are any thing but prodigies. Their misfortunes are evolved out of the plot in the most natural manner; they are not placed in such castles as never were built, in the midst of such forests as never grew; their misfortunes are all satisfactorily accounted for. We know that Allen Booth would have returned to marry Isabel if he had not been captured by the Spaniards, and we feel quite convinced

that "it's all up" with the "Gentleman Farmer" when he surrendered his outward man to the care of the Scotch doctor.*

The poetry of Crabbe, we suspect, is not so well known as to render an extract superfluous, and we shall endeavour to illustrate our remarks by the tale of Phoebe Dawson, which is said to have engaged the attention of Mr. Fox in the painful hours of his last illness, and to have been one of the few poetical pieces which continued to delight the declining Magician of the north.

"Two summers since, I saw at Lammas fair.
The sweetest flower that ever blossomed there,
When Phoebe Dawson gaily crossed the green
In haste to see, and happy to be seen;
Her air, her manners all who saw admired;
Courteous tho' coy, and gentle tho' retired;
The joy of health and youth her eyes display'd,
And ease of heart her every look convey'd ;
A native skill her simple robes express'd,
As with untutor'd elegance she dress'd;
The lads around admired so fair a sight,
And Phoebe felt, and felt she gave delight.
Admirers soon of every age she gain'd,

Her beauty won them, and her worth retain'd;
Envy itself could no contempt display,

They wish'd her well, whom yet they wish'd away.
Correct in thought she judged a servant's place
Preserved a rustic beauty from disgrace;

But yet on Sunday eve, in freedom's hour,
With secret joy she felt that beauty's power;

When some proud bliss upon the heart would steal,

That poor or rich a beauty still must feel."

Phoebe at length falls in love with a tailor, who, like many other people, was not as good as he ought to have been : "Now through the lane, up hill and 'cross the green, (Seen but by few. and blushing to be seen)

Dejected, thoughtful, anxious, and afraid,

Led by the lover, walk'd the silent maid,

Slow thro' the meadows roved they many a mile,
Toy'd by each bank, and trifled at each stile;
While as he painted every blissful view,
And highly coloured what he strongly drew;
The pensive damsel, prone to tender fears,
Dimm'd the false prospect with prophetic tears.
Thus pass'd th' allotted hours, till, lingering late,
The lover loiter'd at the master's gate;

There he pronounced adieu! and yet would stay,
Till chidden, soothed, entreated, forced away;

* See the tales of the " Parting Hour," and the "Gentleman Farmer."

He would of coldness, tho' indulged, complain,
And oft retire, and oft return again;

When, if his teasing vexed her gentle mind,

The grief assum'd compell'd her to be kind."

This, says Mr. Jeffrey, is the taking side of the picture; at the end of two years comes the reverse:—

"Lo! now with red rent cloak and bonnet black,
And torn green gown loose hanging at her back,
One, who an infant in her arms sustains,
And seems in patience striving with her pains.
Pinch'd are her looks, as one who pines for bread,
Whose cares are growing, and whose hopes are fled;
Pale her parch'd lips, her heavy eyes sunk low,
And tears unnoticed from their channel flow;
Serene her manner, till some sudden pain
Frets the meek soul, and then she's calm again.
Her broken pitcher to the pool she takes,
And every step with cautious terror makes;
For not alone that infant in her arms,
But nearer cause her anxious soul alarms;
With water burden'd then she picks her way
Slowly and cautious in the clinging clay;
Till in mid green she trusts a place unsound,
And deeply plunges in th' adhesive ground;
Thence, but with pain, her slender foot she takes,
While hope the mind, as strength the frame, forsakes:
For when so full the cup of sorrows grows,

Add we a drop, it instantly o'erflows.
Her home she reaches, open leaves the door,
And placing first her infant on the floor,
She bares her bosom to the wind, and sits,
And sobbing struggles with the rising fits:
In vain they come, she feels th' inflating grief,
That shuts the swelling bosom from relief;
That speaks in feeble cries a soul distressed,
Or the sad laugh that cannot be repressed.
The neighbour matron leaves her wheel, and flies
With all the aid her poverty supplies,
Unfee'd the calls of nature she obeys,
Not led by profit, not allured by praise,
And waiting long till these contentions cease,
She speaks of comfort, and departs in peace.
Friend of distress! the mourner feels thy aid,
She cannot pay thee, but thou wilt be paid!".

The story of Phoebe Dawson has nothing in it which has not been told a hundred times before, but it has never been told so well.

The rauk of Crabbe among his fellow bards has been variously assigned. While some have elevated him to the highest seat, others appear to question his right to any. His own vindication of his poetical principles may be seen in the Preface to his Tales, published in 1812, from which we shall make a brief extract. After quoting the well-known and exquisite passage from the Midsummer Night's Dream, in which Shakespear draws so beautiful a picture of poetical genius, he continues

"Hence, we observe, the poet is one who, in the excursions of his fancy between heaven and earth, lights upon a kind of fairy-land, in which he places a creation of his own, where he embodies shapes and gives action and adventure to his ideal offspring; taking captive the imagination of his readers, he elevates them above the grossness of actual being into the soothing and pleasant atmosphere of supramundane existence; there he obtains for his visionary inhabitants the interest that engages the reader's attention without ruffling his feelings, and excites that moderate kind of sympathy which the realities of nature oftentimes fail to produce, either because they are so familiar and insignificant that they excite no determinate emotion, or are so harsh and powerful that the feelings excited are grating and distasteful. Be it then granted that (as Duke Theseus observes) such tricks hath strong imagination,' and that such poets are of imagination all compact;' let it be further conceded that theirs is a higher and more dignified kind of composition, nay, the only kind that has pretensions to inspiration; still, that these poets should so entirely engross the title as to exclude those who address their productions to the plain sense and sober judgments of their readers, rather than to their fancy and imagination, I must repeat that I am unwilling to admit, because I conceive that by granting such right of exclusion a vast deal of what has been hitherto regarded as genuine poetry would no longer be entitled to that appellation.'

In this case, as in most others, the truth will be found, we apprehend, between the two extremes. There cannot surely be any necessity to refuse the honours of a painter to Gainsborough, because he could not produce the "Transfiguration;" or to deny Cowper's title to the name of poet, because he did not write a rival to Paradise Lost. In poetry, as in its sister arts, there are many degrees and kinds of excellence, and where any of the vivida vis-the true inspiration-is present, we ought to speak of the author only in terms of relative superiority or inferiority. The modern attempt to dethrone Pope only ended, as all such rash, we were going to say prophane, attempts ought to end, in the discomfiture and disgrace of the revolters. Mr. Crabbe writes upon this topic with propriety and clearness. He himself had indeed very little, if any, of that genius which Shakespear describes. His merits and defects were those of a Dutch artistvigour and coarseness. His eye, as it only embraced a few

objects, so it dissected them with the most untiring diligence. It is not a paradox to affirm that he was only great when he was little-that his most surprising effects arose out of his minuteness. If he had painted the Deluge, like Bassan, one of the most prominent objects would undoubtedly have been a brass pan. Pope was the poetical master he delighted to honour, and he was probably indebted to that well-known passage, beginning," In the worst inn's worst room," for the style which he afterwards so excelled in. One of the witty authors of Rejected Addresses called him Pope in worsted stockings. His verse was certainly of a very different texture from that of the author of the Rape of the Lock.

His language, however, is suited to the subject-hard, cold and frequently prosaic. It is only in his occasional lyrics that the absence of poetic diction is strongly felt. By poetic diction we do not mean that indiscriminate mixture of roses and posies, and flowers and bowers, which run wild over so many pages of modern verse; but a language which shall receive a hue from the imagination, and shall differ in some measure from the every-day dialect of common life. None of our readers require to be told that the language of Virgil is not the language of even Livy-much less of any other Latin historian. But many of Crabbe's poems, if deprived of their metrical form, would not only cease to retain any indication of a poetical origin, but would really become very idiomatic prose. To pursue this argument would lead us beyond our limits; we may, however, extract two stanzas from a song which is now published for the first time in the fourth volume of Crabbe's Poems. It was originally written in the album of the Duchess of Rutland.

"At sea, when threatening tempests rise,
When angry winds the waves deform,
The seaman lifts to heaven his eyes
And deprecates the dreaded storm.
Ye furious powers, no more contend;
Ye winds and seas, your conflict end;
And on the wild subsiding deep
Let fear repose and terror sleep.

At length the waves are hush'd in peace,
On flying clouds the sun prevails;
The weary winds their efforts cease,
And fill no more the flagging sails;
Fix'd to the deep the vessel rides
Obedient to the flagging tides;

No helm she feels, no course she keeps;
But on the liquid marble sleeps."

Who would imagine this to be the commencement of a love-song?