SENSIBILITY.

SENSIBILITY, how charming,

Thou, my friend, canst truly tell ; But distress, with horrors arming, Thou hast also known too well!

Fairest flower, behold the lily,
Blooming in the sunny ray:
Let the blast sweep o'er the valley,-
See it prostrate on the clay !

Hear the woodlark charm the forest,
Telling o'er his little joys:
Hapless bird! a prey the surest

To each pirate of the skies.

Dearly bought the hidden treasure
Finer feelings can bestow:
Chords that vibrate sweetest pleasure

Thrill the deepest notes of woe.

CRABBE.

1754-1832.

PRINCIPAL WORKS:-The Library, 1781.-The Village, 1783, which met with instant and complete success. It had the advantage or disadvantage of Johnson's corrections. Some of the descriptions (as that of the Parish Workhouse) were copied into all the periodicals, and took that place in our national literature which they still retain.'-The Parish Register, 1807: it had an almost unprecedented success. — The Borough, 1810, a poem of the same class, and more connected and complete.'Tales in Verse, 1812.-Tales of the Hall, 1819. Crabbe is preeminently the poet of real life as it is amongst the rustic poor. As a delineator of the simple annals of the poor,' as distinguished from the more pleasing but imaginary style of the fashionable pastoral,' the usual, and, until the appearance of The Village, the only form indeed in which poetry had condescended to sing of the lower life, he is without a rival in poetry. What Dickens was afterwards in prose-fiction Crabbe is in verse; and he performed the same service for the 'cottage' that Cowper had done for the country.' The Village and The Parish Register are the best of his works, and in their own province they are without a rival. In the Tales of the Hall the poet left his humbler theme to describe the manners of the higher life, in which he is not quite so happy. They, nevertheless, contain some fine passages. 'The redeeming and distinguishing feature of his genius was its fidelity to nature, even when it was dull and unprepossessing. His power of observation and description might be limited, but his pictures have all the force of dramatic representations, and may be compared to those actual and existing models which the sculptor or painter works from, instead of vague and general conceptions. They are often too true, and human nature being exhibited in its naked reality, with all its defects, and not through the bright and alluring medium of romance or imagination, our vanity is shocked and our pride mortified. His anatomy of character and passion harrows up our feelings, and leaves us in the end sad and ashamed of our own common nature. The personal circumstances and experience of the poet affected the bent of his genius. He knew how untrue and absurd were the pictures of rural life that figured in poetry. His own youth was dark and painful, spent in low society, amidst want and

Y

misery, irascible gloom, and passion. Latterly, he had more of the comforts and elegancies of social life at his command than Cowper, his rival as a domestic painter. When he took up his pen, his mind turned to Aldborough [in Suffolk, his native village], and its wild amphibious race-to the parish workhouse, where the wheel hummed doleful through the day-to erring damsels and luckless swains, the prey of overseers or justices or to the haunts of desperate poachers and smugglers, gipsies and gamblers, where vice and misery stalked undisguised in their darkest forms.' (Cyclopædia of English Literature.) Cowper and Crabbe were, in their first careers, almost contemporaneous; the latter being two years in advance. The Village was published in 1783, The Task in 1785. While the former belonged by birth and education to the upper ranks of society, Crabbe sprung from the lower class. It is not the least creditable circumstance of his career that, after having made his name famous and attracted the patronage of several powerful patrons, by whom he was early in life presented to 'livings' (he had taken orders), he did not abandon the unfashionable themes of his first efforts.

THE PARISH WORKHOUSE.

THEIRS is yon house that holds the parish poor,
Whose walls of mud scarce bear the broken door;
There, where the putrid vapours flagging, play,
And the dull wheel hums doleful through the day;
There children dwell who know no parents' care;
Parents, who know no children's love, live there;
Heart-broken matrons on their joyless bed;
Forsaken wives and mothers never wed;
Dejected widows with unheeded tears;

And crippled age with more than childhood-fears;
The lame, the blind, and, far the happiest they,
The moping idiot and the madman gay.

Here, too, the sick their final doom receive,
Here brought, amid the scenes of grief to grieve,
Where the loud groans from some sad chamber flow,
Mix'd with the clamours of the crowd below:

Here sorrowing, they each kindred sorrow scan,
And the cold charities of man to man ;

Whose laws indeed for ruin'd age provide,

And strong compulsion plucks the scrap from pride;
But still that scrap is bought with many a sigh,
And pride embitters what it can't deny.

Say ye, oppress'd by some fantastic woes,
Some jarring nerve that baffles your repose;
Who press the downy couch, while slaves advance
With timid eye, to read the distant glance;
Who with sad prayers the weary doctor tease,
To name the nameless ever-new disease;

Who with mock patience dire complaints endure,
Which real pain, and that alone, can cure;
How would ye bear in real pain to lie,
Despised, neglected, left alone to die?

How would ye bear to draw your latest breath
Where all that's wretched paves the way for death?
Such is that room which one rude beam divides,
And naked rafters form the sloping sides;
Where the vile bands that bind the thatch are seen,
And lath and mud are all that lie between,
Save one dull pane that, coarsely patch'd, gives way
To the rude tempest, yet excludes the day:
Here, on a matted flock, with dust o'erspread,
The drooping wretch reclines his languid head :
For him no hand the cordial cup applies,
Or wipes the tear that stagnates in his eyes;
No friends with soft discourse his pain beguile,
Or promise hope till sickness wears a smile.

The Village.

'AN OLD STORY.'

Two summers since, I saw at Lammas fair
The sweetest flower that ever blossom'd there,
When Phoebe Dawson gaily cross'd the green,
In haste to see and happy to be seen:
Her air, her manners, all who saw admired,
Courteous though coy, and gentle though retired;
The joy of youth and health 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.

At length the youth, ordain'd to move her breast,
Before the swains with bolder spirit press'd;
With looks less timid made his passion known,
And pleased by manners, most unlike her own;
Loud though in love, and confident though young,
Fierce in his air, and voluble of tongue;

By trade a tailor, though in scorn of trade,

He served the squire, and brush'd the coat he made;