The footsteps of simplicity, impressed And manners profligate were rarely found 406 Sat for the picture; and the poet's hand, 414 Impossible, when virtue is so scarce 427 * * * But slighted as it is, and by the great Abandoned, and, which still I more regret, Infected with the manners and the modes It knew not once, the country wins me still. 440 I never framed a wish or formed a plan That flattered me with hopes of earthly bliss, But there I laid the scene. There early strayed 446 My fancy, ere yet liberty of choice To Nature's praises. Heroes and their feats 460 465 Ingenious Cowley: and though now, reclaimed 471 By modern lights from an erroneous taste, 476 Not unemployed, and finding rich amends Is an ingredient in the compound, man, 480 Is still the livery she delights to wear, Though sickly samples of the exuberant whole. What are the casements lined with creeping herbs The prouder sashes fronted with a range 511 That man, immured in cities, still retains And they that never pass their brick-wall bounds To range the fields, and treat their lungs with air, Yet feel the burning instinct: over-head Suspend their crazy boxes planted thick 520 And watered duly. There the pitcher stands A fragment, and the spoutless tea-pot there: Sad witnesses how close-pent man regrets GEORGE CRABBE (1754-1832) When Goldsmith sat down to sketch for all time the picture of his native village, it was after an absence of eighteen years and he saw it through a tinted haze of retrospect and soft sentimental reflection. Crabbe came to his task fresh from the hardships of his youth; he wrote with his eye on the object'; and he painted the cotas Truth will paint it and as Bards will not, in all the reality of its hard and sordid detail. The Village was Aldborough, a rude fishing port on the frowning coast' of Suffolk. Here Crabbe was born, the eldest child of a collector of salt-duties. After a scattered education which consisted partly in loading butter and cheese in the neighboring port, he was apprenticed, at fourteen, to a surgeon near Bury St. Edmunds, who employed him in 'hoeing turnips.' After some years of study he set up as a surgeon in his native village; but his rewards were meager and he desired to marry. In the meantime, he had begun to cultivate the Muses and he resolved to try his lot in London. On the verge of starvation, he was taken up by Burke, who introduced him to his distinguished friends, aided the publication of his first successful poem, The Library (1781), and induced him to exchange the knife for the prayer-book. Returning to Aldborough as a curate, he became, shortly after, through Burke's introduction, a protégé of the Duke of Rutland, and was never again in want. His literary fame, during most of his life, was based on The Village, which he published in 1783 and followed with a silence of twenty-four years, broken only by the publication of a trifling poem, The Newspaper (1785). During these years he wrote and destroyed large quantities of verse and a treatise on botany and busied himself with domestic life, but was especially occupied in healing both the minds and bodies of the poor of his various parishes. His second period of publication, beginning with The Parish Register (1807), including The Borough (1810) and Tales in Verse (1812), and concluding with Tales of the Hall (1819), brought him into the world of Wordsworth, Byron, and Scott. He outlived the second and died in the same year with the last. Crabbe's powerful realism has been greatly admired by the men of his own craft. He has, as Tennyson said, a world of his own.' It is a far more populous world than that of Cowper or even of Wordsworth and it is not more unlovely than that of Burns; but he brought to its interpretation little of the tenderness of the first, the internal brightness' of the second, or the human tears and laughter of the third. We may be stunned or impressed by Crabbe's world, but we will never love it. |