bout to describe. The actors in the 'Borough' are
presented to us in a similar setting; and it may be well to put a
sea-piece beside this bit of barren common. Crabbe's range of
descriptive power is pretty well confined within the limits so defined.
He is scarcely at home beyond the tide-marks:--

Be it the summer noon; a sandy space
The ebbing tide has left upon its place;
Then just the hot and stony beach above,
Light twinkling streams in bright confusion move;

* * * * *

There the broad bosom of the ocean keeps
An equal motion; swelling as it sleeps,
Then slowly sinking; curling to the strand,
Faint lazy waves o'ercreep the ridgy sand,
Or tap the tarry boat with gentle blow,
And back return in silence, smooth and slow.
Ships in the calm seem anchored: for they glide
On the still sea, urged slowly by the tide:
Art thou not present, this calm scene before
Where all beside is pebbly length of shore,
And far as eye can reach, it can discern no more?

I have omitted a couplet which verges on the scientific; for Crabbe is
unpleasantly anxious to leave nothing unexplained. The effect is, in its
way, perfect. Anyone who pleases may compare it with Wordsworth's calm
in the verses upon Peele Castle, where the sentiment is given without
the minute statement of facts, and where, too, we have the inevitable
quotation about the 'light that never was on sea or land,' and is pretty
nearly as rare in Crabbe's poetry. What he sees we can all see, though
not so intensely, and his art consists in selecting the precise elements
that tell most forcibly towards bringing us into the required frame of
mind. To enjoy Crabbe fully, we ought perhaps to be acclimatised on the
coast of the Eastern Counties; we should become sensitive to the
plaintive music of the scenery, which is now generally drowned by the
discordant sounds of modern watering-places, and would seem insipid to a
generation which values excitement in scenery as in fiction. Readers,
who measure the beauty of a district by its average height above the
sea-level, and who cannot appreciate the charm of a 'waste enormous
marsh,' may find Crabbe uncongenial.

The human character is determined, as Mr. Buckle and other philosophers
have assured us, by the climate and the soil. A little ingenuity, such
as those philosophers display in accommodating facts to theory, might
discover a pa