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I paddled up and down and dipped my net,
But (such his pleasure) I could nothing get,-
A father's pleasure, when his toil was done,
To plague and torture thus an only son!
And so I sat and looked upon the stream,
How it ran on, and felt as in a dream;
But dream it was not; no !-I fixed my eyes
On the mid stream and saw the spirits rise;
I saw my father on the water stand,
And hold a thin pale boy in either hand;
And there they glided ghastly on the top

Of the salt flood, and never touched a drop;

I would have struck them, but they knew the intent,

And smiled upon the oar, and down they went.

Remorse in Peter's mind takes the shape of bitter hatred for his victims; and with another characteristic confusion, he partly attributes his sufferings to some evil influence intrinsic in the locality :

There were three places, where they ever rose,

The whole long river has not such as those,―
Places accursed, where, if a man remain,

He'll see the things which strike him to the brain.

And then the malevolent ghosts forced poor Peter to lean on his oars, and showed him visions of coming horrors. Grimes dies impenitent, and fancying that his tormentors are about to seize him. Of all haunted men in fiction, it is not easy to think of a case where the horror is more terribly realized. The blood-boulter'd Banquo tortured a noble victim, but scarcely tortured him more effectually. Peter Grimes was doubtless a close relation of Peter Bell. Bell having the advantage of Wordsworth's interpretation, leads us to many thoughts which lie altogether beyond Crabbe's reach; but, looking simply at the sheer tragic force of the two characters, Grimes is to Bell what brandy is to small beer. He would never have shown the white feather like his successor, who,

after ten months' melancholy, Became a good and honest man.

If, in some sense, Peter Grimes is the most effective of Crabbe's heroes, he would, if taken alone, give a very distorted impression of the general spirit of the poetry. It is only at intervals that he introduces us to downright criminals. There is, indeed, a description of a convicted felon, which, according to Macaulay, has made "many a rough and cynical reader cry like a child," and which, if space were unlimited, would make a striking pendant to the agony of the burdened Grimes. But, as a rule, Crabbe can find motives enough for tenderness in sufferings which have nothing to do with the criminal law, and of which the mere framework of the story is often interesting enough. His peculiar power is best displayed in so presenting to us the sorrows of commonplace characters as to make us feel that a shabby coat and a narrow education, and the most unromantic causes, need not cut off our sympathies with a

fellow-creature; and that the dullest tradesman who treads on our toes in an omnibus may want only a power of articulate expression to bring before us some of the deepest of all problems. The parish clerk and the grocer or whatever may be the proverbial epitome of human dullnessmay swell the chorus of lamentation over the barrenness and the hardships and the wasted energies and the harsh discords of life which is always "steaming up" from the world, and to which it is one, though perhaps not the highest, of the poet's functions to make us duly sensible. Crabbe, like all realistic writers, must be studied at full length, and therefore quotations are necessarily unjust. It will be sufficient if I referpretty much at random-to the short stories of "Phoebe Dawson " in the Parish Register, to the more elaborate stories of "Edward Shore" and the "Parting Hour" in the Tales, or to the story of "Ruth" in the Tales of the Hall, where again the dreary pathos is strangely heightened by Crabbe's favourite seaport scenery, to prove that he might be called as truly as Goldsmith affectuum potens, though scarcely lenis, dominator.

It is time, however, to conclude by a word or two as to Crabbe's peculiar place in the history of English literature. I said that, unlike his contemporaries, Cowper and Burns, he adhered rigidly to the form of the earlier eighteenth century school, and partly for this reason excited the wayward admiration of Byron, who always chose to abuse the bridge which carried him to fame. But Crabbe's clumsiness of expression makes him a very inadequate successor of Pope or of Goldsmith, and his claims are really founded on the qualities which led Byron to call him "nature's sternest painter, yet her best." On this side he is connected with some tendencies of the school which supplanted his early models. So far as Wordsworth and his followers represented the reaction from an artificial to a love of unsophisticated nature, Crabbe is entirely at one with them. He did not share that unlucky taste for the namby-pamby by which Wordsworth annoyed his contemporaries, and spoilt some of his earlier poems. Its place was filled in Crabbe's mind by an even more unfortunate disposition for the simply humdrum and commonplace, which, it must be confessed, makes it almost as hard to read a good deal of his verses as to consume large quantities of suet pudding, and has probably destroyed his popularity with the present generation. Still, Crabbe's influence was powerful as against the old conventionality. He did not, like his predecessors, write upon the topics which interested "persons of quality," and never gives us the impression of having composed his rhymes in a full-bottomed wig or even in a Grub Street garret. He has gone out into country fields and village lanes, and paints directly from man and nature, with almost a cynical disregard of the accepted code of propriety. But the points on which he parts company with his more distinguished predecessors is equally obvious. Mr. Stopford Brooke has lately been telling us with great eloquence what is the theology which underlies the poetical tendencies of the last generation of poets. Of that creed, a sufficiently vague one, it must be admitted, Crabbe was by no means an apostle. Rather

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one would say he was as indifferent as a good old-fashioned clergyman could very well be to the existence of any new order of ideas in the world. The infidels, whom he sometimes attacks, read Bolingbroke, and Chubb, and Mandeville, and have only heard by report even of the existence of Voltaire. The Dissenters, whom he so heartily detests, have listened to Whitefield and Wesley, or perhaps to Huntington, S.S.—that is, as it may now be necessary to explain, Sinner Saved. Every newer development of thought was still far away from the quiet pews of Aldborough, and the only form of Church restoration of which he has heard is the objectionable practice of painting a new wall to represent a growth of lichens. Crabbe appreciates the charm of the picturesque, but has never yet heard of our elaborate methods of creating modern antiques. Lapped in such ignorance, and with a mind little given to speculation, it is only in character that Crabbe should be totally insensible to the various moods of thought represented by Wordworth's pantheistic conceptions of nature, or by Shelley's dreamy idealism, or Byron's fierce revolutionary impulses. Still less, if possible, could he sympathize with that love of beauty, pure and simple, of which Keats was the first prophet. He might, indeed, be briefly described by saying that he is at the very opposite pole from Keats. The more bigoted admirers of Keats-for there are bigots in all matters of taste or poetry as well as in science or theology or politics-would refuse the title of poet to Crabbe, altogether on the strength of the absence of this element from his verses. Like his most obvious parallels in painting, he is too fond of boors and pothouses to be allowed the quality of artistic perception. I will not argue the point, which is, perhaps, rather a question of classification than of intrinsic merit; but I will venture to suggest a test which will, I think, give Crabbe a very firm, though, it may be, not a very lofty place. I should be unwilling to be reckoned as one of Macaulay's "rough and cynical readers." I admit that I can read the story of the convicted felon, or of Peter Grimes without indulging in downright blubbering. Most readers, I fear, can in these days get through pathetic poems and novels without absolutely using their pocket-handkerchiefs. But though Crabbe may not prompt such outward and visible signs of emotion, I think that he produces a more distinct titillation of the lachrymatory glands than almost any poet of his time. True, he does not appeal to emotions, accessible only through the finer intellectual perceptions, or to the thoughts which "lie too deep for tears." That prerogative belongs to men of more intense character, greater philosophical power, and more delicate instincts. But the power of touching readers by downright pictures of homespun griefs and sufferings is one which, to my mind, implies some poetical capacity, and which clearly belongs to Crabbe.

My Loss.

IN the world was one green nook I knew,
Full of roses, roses red and white,

Reddest roses summer ever grew,

Whitest roses ever pearled with dew;

And their sweetness was beyond delight,
Was all love's delight.

Wheresoever in the world I went

Roses were, for in my heart I took
Blow and blossom and bewildering scent,
Roses never with the summer spent,

Roses always ripening in that nook,
Love's far summer nook.

In the world a soddened plot I know,
Blackening in this chill and misty air,

Set with shivering bushes in a row,
One by one the last leaves letting go:
Wheresoe'er I turn I shall be there,
Always sighing there.

Ah, my folly! Ah, my loss, my pain!
Dead, my roses that can blow no more!
Wherefore looked I on our nook again?
Wherefore went I after autumn's rain

Where the summer roses bloomed before,
Bloomed so sweet before?

AUGUSTA WEBSTER.

8, Lancaster Street, Lancaster Gate, W.

1

475

Virgil's Sea Descriptions.

AMONG the crowds mustering at the sea's margin, we trust there are those who will not object to let the reminiscent murmur of a Latin line mix the rising, the falling, the tossing of its syllables with the multitudinous ripple, the hollow plash, the tumbling roll of the waves it tries to picture. We doubt, however, that the Virgilian music, stately as it is, will coincide with that of the ocean only most fragmentarily; for we have to charge it against Virgil that his sea descriptions are poor-that they are failures. Indeed, we solemnly affirm that he was what might fairly be styled sea-blind. Everybody's verbal descriptions of the ocean fail; but they do so after more or less of success. Virgil in this task represents zero among poets of the first class.

Let us at once honestly make a needed qualification in admitting that literary description of any and all natural objects is still in a very rudimentary stage. Human language, modern English as well as ancient Latin, remains poorly equal to it. A great show of praise is sometimes made on this point; but this is because, without being fully aware of it, we have all practically agreed to consider descriptions in words as being much better than they really are. If a poet brings a score of words together in full fitness, so that they clearly show us the object they stand for, we fall into a rapture over the feat. Any one who had the heart to be unyieldingly critical would have little difficulty in making plain with what meagre verbal accounts of things we are satisfied. Chaucer and Burns show just the bent head of the daisy in their pictured phrase: generation after generation never wearies of praising it. But repeat the words over a real cluster of the yellow-hearted, white-rayed, crimson-edged, flyhaunted, sun-loving, wind-scared, woolly-stemmed, broad green-leaved, root-hiding things, and you will find a good many details available for poetry left out. Our string of compounded names is a mere catalogue, hard and cumbrous enough to kill the fancy; but that is the very fault of language we are complaining of. For adequate verbal descriptions we need great pages as they now stand compressing into paragraphs, sentences of these crushing into phrases, the words themselves refining to a glittering powder, and then to be able to make better epithets of the coloured syllabic particles. At present, the utmost that can be done in the most likely cases is to try and give the effect of the activity of a single sense. There are instances in which this has nearly been achieved; but they are of things so simple that somehow it is embarrassing to name them.

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