Where once my motive, now the thoughts of want.

Women like me, as ducks in a decoy,

Swim down a stream, and seem to swim in joy.”[[91]]

· · · · ·

‘“But from the day, that fatal day she spied

The pride of Daniel, Daniel was her pride.”[[92]]

‘As an instance of the curiosa felicitas in descriptive allusion (among many others) take the following. Our author, referring to the names of the genteeler couples, written in the parish register, thus “morals” on the circumstance:

‘“How fair these names, how much unlike they look,” etc. [The Parish Register, II. 283–300.]

‘The Library and the Newspaper, in the same volume, are heavy and common-place. Mr. Crabbe merely sermonises in his didactic poetry. He must pierce below the surface to get at his genuine vein. He is properly himself only in the petty and the painful. The Birth of Flattery is a homely, incondite lay. The author is no more like Spenser than he is like Pope. The ballad of Sir Eustace Grey is a production of great power and genius. The poet, in treating of the wanderings of a maniac, has given a loose to his conception of imaginary and preternatural evils. But they are of a sort that chill, rather than melt the mind; they repel instead of haunting it. They might be said to be square, portable horrors, physical, external, not shadowy, not malleable; they do not arise out of any passion in the mind of the sufferer, nor touch the reader with involuntary sympathy. Beds of ice, seas of fire, shaking bogs, and fields of snow, are disagreeable matters of fact; and though their contact has a powerful effect on the senses, we soon shake them off in fancy. Let any one compare this fictitious legend with the unadorned, unvarnished tale of Peter Grimes, and he will see in what Mr. Crabbe’s characteristic strength lies. He is a most potent copyist of actual nature, though not otherwise a great poet. In the case of Sir Eustace, he cannot conjure up any phantoms from a disordered imagination; but he makes honest Peter, the fisherman of the Borough, see visions in the mud where he had drowned his ’prentice boys, that are as ghastly and bewitching as any mermaid. We cannot resist giving the scene of this striking story, which is in our author’s exclusive manner. “Within that circle none durst walk but he.”[[93]]

‘“Thus by himself compell’d to live each day,” etc. [The Borough, Letter XXII. 171–204.]’