“What do you think of Childe Harold?”
“I do not know what to think of it, nor can I give you definitively my reasons for disliking his poems generally.”
“You have taken up a prejudice, perhaps, from a passage you have forgotten, and never allowed yourself patience to examine it.”
“Perhaps so; but I am not conscious of a prejudice.”
“No man is.”
*****
“And which of the living poets fulfils your ideal standard of excellence?”
“Crabbe. He is all nature without pomp or parade, and exhibits at times deep pathos and feeling. His characters are certainly homely, and his scenes rather unpoetical; but then he invests his subject with so much genuine tenderness and sweetness, that you care not who are the actors, or in what situations they are placed, but pause to recollect where it was you met something similar in real life. Do you remember the little story ‘Delay is Danger?’ I’ll recite you a few lines describing my favourite scene, an autumn-evening landscape:—
“On the right side the youth a wood survey’d,
With all its dark intensity of shade;
Where the rough wind alone was heard to move,
In this, the pause of nature and of love,
When now the young are rear’d, and when the old,
Lost to the tie, grow negligent and cold—
Far to the left he saw the huts of men
Half hid in mist that hung upon the fen;
Before him swallows, gathering for the sea,
Took their short flights, and twitter’d on the lea
And near the bean-sheaf stood, the harvest done,
And slowly blacken’d in the sickly sun;
All these were sad in nature, or they took
Sadness from him, the likeness of his look,
And of his mind—he ponder’d for a while,
Then met his Fanny with a borrow’d smile.”
“Except Gray’s Elegy, there is scarcely so melancholy and touching a picture in English poetry.”