ly
collecting them. Nothing, for example, is more characteristic than the
mode in which the occasional descriptions of nature are harmoniously
blended with the human life in his poetry. Crabbe is an ardent lover of
a certain type of scenery, to which justice has not often been done. We
are told how, after a long absence from Suffolk, he rode sixty miles
from his house to have a dip in the sea. Some of his poems appear to be
positively impregnated with a briny, or rather perhaps a tarry, odour.
The sea which he loved was by no means a Byronic sea. It has no grandeur
of storm, and still less has it the Mediterranean blue. It is the
sluggish muddy element which washes the flat shores of his beloved
Suffolk. He likes even the shelving beach, with fishermen's boats and
decaying nets and remnants of stale fish. He loves the dreary estuary,
where the slow tide sways backwards and forwards, and whence

High o'er the restless deep, above the reach
Of gunner's hope, vast flocks of wildfowl stretch.

The coming generation of poets took to the mountains; but Crabbe
remained faithful to the dismal and yet, in his hands, the impressive
scenery of his native salt-marshes. His method of description suits the
country. His verses never become melodramatic, nor does he ever seem to
invest nature with the mystic life of Wordsworth's poetry. He gives the
plain prosaic facts which impress us because they are in such perfect
harmony with the sentiment. Here, for example, is a fragment from the
'Village,' which is simply a description of the neighbourhood of
Aldborough:--

Lo! where the heath, with withering brake grown o'er,
Lends the light turf that warms the neighbouring poor;
From thence a length of burning sand appears,
Where the thin harvest waves its withered ears;
Rank weeds, that every art and care defy,
Reign o'er the land, and rob the blighted rye;
There thistles stretch their prickly arms afar,
And to the ragged infant threaten war;
There poppies nodding, mock the hope of toil;
There the blue bugloss paints the sterile soil;
Hardy and high, above the slender sheaf,
The slimy mallow waves her silky leaf;
O'er the young shoot the charlock throws a shade,
And clasping tares cling round the sickly blade.

The writer is too obviously a botanist; but the picture always remains
with us as the only conceivable background for the poverty-stricken
population whom he is a