Yet the poet, from whom we quote, died only three years before Burns was born; but I think we can see from the graces of this modest schoolmaster singer, that taste and accomplishment were both ripening in those north latitudes for the times and the man, in which and in whom, such poetry as that of Burns should be possible.
There was, too, another growth in those days in that northern capital of Great Britain; Dr. Robertson had written his History of America and his History of Charles V. Adam Smith (the friend of Hume) was busy on his Wealth of Nations (published during the year in which Hume died). Hugh Blair, the eloquent doctor, was delivering his lectures on rhetoric. Henry Mackenzie, the amiable Dean of the Edinboro' literati, was writing his Man of Feeling and his Julia de Roubigné,—books of great reputation in the early part of this century, but with graces in them that were only imitative, and sentiment that was dismally affected and over-wrought; and there was Lord Kames, the Gentleman Farmer, with a fine great house in the Canongate, who wrote on criticism, with acuteness and taste. You will not read any of the books of these last-named people; 't were unfair to ask you to do so; but they were preparing the way for that literary development which will find expression before many years in the columns of the Edinburgh Review (established at the beginning of this century), and in the border minstrelsy of Scott.
George Crabbe.
Crabbe.
We step back into England now, to find two poets whose principal work belonged to the closing years of the last century; and with echoes, fresh and strong, trailing over into the beginning of this. Neither their work nor their lives belonged to the noises or to the atmosphere of London. City sounds do not press into their verse; but instead are the sounds of sea-waves or of winds on woods, or of church bells, or of the clink and murmur of the lives of cottagers. The first I name to you of these two is George Crabbe[[7]]—a name that may sound strangely, being almost unknown and unconsidered now; yet fifty years ago there was not a reading-book in any of the schools, nor an album full of elegant selections, which was not open for the story of Phœbe Dawson, or a glimpse of the noble peasant, Isaac Ashford. But all that is gone:[[8]]
"I see no more those white locks thinly spread
Round the bald polish of that honored head;
No more that awful glance on playful wight
Compelled to knee and tremble at the sight,
To fold his fingers all in dread the while
Till Mister Ashford softened to a smile."
This gives the manner and strain of Crabbe; it is Pope, but it is Pope muddied and rusticated; Pope in cow-skin shoes, instead of Pope in prunella.
Crabbe was born in the little shore town of Aldborough—looking straight out upon the North Sea; and the rhythmic beat of those waves so stamped itself on his boyish brain, that it came out afterward—when he could manage language, in which he had great gift—very clear and very real; there's nothing better, all up and down his rural tales, than his fashion of putting waves into his rhythmic measures—as you shall see:—
"Upon the billows rising—all the deep
Is restless change: the waves so swelled and steep,
Breaking and sinking, and the sunken swells
Nor one, one moment, in its station dwells.
*****
Curled as they come, they strike with furious force,
And then, renewing, take their grating course,
Raking the rounded flints, which ages past
Rolled by their rage, and shall to ages last.
*****
In shore, their passage tribes of sea-gulls urge,
And drop for prey within the sweeping surge,
Oft in the rough opposing blast they fly
Far back, then turn and all their force apply,
While to the storm they give their weak complaining cry,
Or clap the sleek white pinion on the breast,
And in the restless ocean dip for rest."