ODE TO SPRING. Sweet daughter of a rough and stormy sire, And swelling buds are crowned; From the green islands of eternal youth, O thou, whose powerful voice More sweet than softest touch of Doric reed, Breathe thine own tender calm. Thee, best beloved! the virgin train await And vales and dewy lawns, With untired feet; and cull thy earliest sweet, That prompts their whispered sigh. Unlock thy copious stores,-those tender showers The milky ear's green stem, And feed the flowering osier's early shoots; And call those winds which through the whispering boughs With warm and pleasant breath Salute the blowing flowers. Now let me sit beneath the whitening thorn And mark thy spreading tints steal o'er the dale, And watch with patient eye Thy fair unfolding charms. O nymph, approach! while yet the temperate sun With bashful forehead through the cool moist air Throws his young maiden beams, And with chaste kisses wooes The earth's fair bosom; while the streaming veil From his severer blaze. Sweet is thy reign, but short:-the red dog-star Reluctant shall I bid thee then farewell: Can aught for thee atone, Fair Spring! whose simplest promise more delights LIFE. 'Animula, vagula, blandula. Life! I know not what thou art, But this I know, when thou art fled As all that then remains of me. O whither, whither dost thou fly, Where bend unseen thy trackless course, Ah, tell where I must seek this compound I? To the vast ocean of empyreal flame Wait, like some spell-bound knight, Through blank oblivious years the appointed hour Life! we've been long together, Through pleasant and through cloudy weather; 'Tis hard to part when friends are dear; Perhaps 'twill cost a sigh, a tear; Then steal away, give little warning, Say not Good night, but in some brighter clime Bid me Good morning. GEORGE CRABBE [GEORGE CRABBE was born at Aldborough in Suffolk, of poor parents, on the 24th of December, 1754. He was apprenticed in his fourteenth year to a surgeon at Wickham Brook, near Bury St. Edmunds, and after completing his term actually practised at Aldborough. He was not however successful in his profession, and being reduced to great extremities, he determined to go to London, and to devote himself to literature, for which he had at an early age discovered a strong bent. For a long time he sought in vain for patronage, but was at length fortunate enough to attract the attention of Burke, through whose kindly influence The Library (1781) was favourably received by the public. In the same year he took orders, and two years later published The Village, after first submitting it to the revision of Johnson. This work at once established his reputation; but instead of following up his success, for the period of twenty-four years he published but one poem, The Newspaper (1785), and devoted himself almost entirely to parish work. In 1807 appeared The Parish Register, which was succeeded in 1810 by The Borough, in 1812 by Tales in Verse, and in 1819 by Tales of the Hall. This was his last poetical work, though his death did not take place till February 3, 1832, thirteen years later.] Crabbe's poems form a very distinct landmark in the course of English literature. Nothing is more noticeable in the latter part of the eighteenth century than the apparent exhaustion of poetical material. Poetry thrives in an agitated atmosphere; it languishes in a state of settled repose. For more than a century before the appearance of Crabbe the prevailing tone of English poetry had been political. The interest of the people had been absorbed in the establishment of their constitutional liberties, which they had secured at the price of civil war and a disputed succession, and what was felt in society was reflected in verse. The political passions of the period show themselves in different forms in the controversial satires of Dryden, in the personal satires of Pope, in the dramatic declamation of Addison, and at last in the more composed moralising of Johnson and Goldsmith. But by degrees, under a settled dynasty, the air is cleared of serious political storms. And as the times become more quiet, we observe a rapid ebb in the inspiration of the poets who carried on the traditions peculiar to the eighteenth century. Churchill is but a poor third in satire to Dryden and Pope; The Traveller and The Vanity of Human Wishes are ill replaced in the didactic class of poetry by Erasmus Darwin's frigid Loves of the Plants, or Payne Knight's Progress of Society. In another direction the strong centrifugal tendency of poetry, afterwards so fully developed by the Lake School, first discovers itself in the solitary and meditative muse of Cowper, and in the Doric provincialism of Burns. Another feature equally observable in late eighteenth-century poetry is the decline of the Romantic pastoralism of the classical Renaissance. From The Shepheards Calender down to the Pastorals of Pope this literary fashion of thought had continued to afford materials to the English poet. It was derived from the fiction of a Golden Age of virtue and innocence, traces of which were supposed still to linger in the simplicity of country life. A belief so artificial could only thrive in an artificial atmosphere; it was congenial to Courts. For a long period 'every flowery courtier writ romance,' and in all that portion of society which pretended to good breeding, each lover thought of himself as a shepherd, and sighed for his mistress as a nymph. Slight indications of the fashion are to be found even in poets so plain and unaffected as Cowper and Burns. But as wealth accumulated, and the democratic influence of cities extended, it was gradually felt that for a rich and refined society to be always emulating the manners of shepherds was somewhat absurd. This feeling found a vigorous exponent in Johnson, whose Lives of the Poets abound in expressions of contempt for the insipidity and unreality of pastoral poetry. Of these conditions of taste Crabbe dexterously availed himself. He saw that the questions which were becoming of paramount interest in men's minds were no longer political but social. Himself born and bred among the poor, he knew that there was a vast range of human interest in the actions, passions, and manners of common life, of which the general reader, though they lay immediately under his eyes, was completely ignorant. At the same time his knowledge of English literature enabled him to perceive how effective a contrast might be drawn between rural life as it was conventionally described by poets, and as it existed in reality. On this principle he designed and executed The Village. Beginning with a brief but telling allusion to the fiction of the Golden |