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That man, immured in cities, still retains
His inborn, inextinguishable thirst
Of rural scenes, compensating his loss
By supplemental shifts, the best he may? 515
The most unfurnished with the means of
life,

And they that never pass their brick-wall bounds

To range the fields, and treat their lungs with air,

Yet feel the burning instinct: over-head Suspend their crazy boxes planted thick 520 And watered duly. There the pitcher stands A fragment, and the spoutless tea-pot there: Sad witnesses how close-pent man regrets

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The biscuit, or confectionary plum;
The fragrant waters on my cheek bestowed
By thy own hand, till fresh they shone and
glowed;

All this, and more endearing still than all, Thy constant flow of love, that knew no fall, 65

Ne'er roughened by those cataracts and brakes

That humor interposed too often makes;
All this still legible in memory's page,
And still to be so to my latest age,
Adds joy to duty, makes me glad to pay 70
Such honors to thee as my numbers may;
Perhaps a frail memorial, but sincere,
Not scorned in heaven, though little noticed
here.

Could Time, his flight reversed, restore the hours,

When, playing with thy vesture's tissued flowers,

The violet, the pink, and jassamine,

75

I pricked them into paper with a pin (And thou wast happier than myself the

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GEORGE CRABBE (1754-1832)

6

When Goldsmith sat down to sketch for all time the picture of his native village, it was after an absence of eighteen years and he saw it through a tinted haze of retrospect and soft sentimental reflection. Crabbe came to his task fresh from the hardships of his youth; he wrote with his eye on the object'; and he painted the cotas Truth will paint it and as Bards will not,' in all the reality of its hard and sordid detail. The Village was Aldborough, a rude fishing port on the frowning coast' of Suffolk. Here Crabbe was born, the eldest child of a collector of salt-duties. After a scattered education which consisted partly in loading butter and cheese in the neighboring port, he was apprenticed, at fourteen, to a surgeon near Bury St. Edmunds, who employed him in 'hoeing turnips.' After some years of study he set up as a surgeon in his native village; but his rewards were meager and he desired to marry. In the meantime, he had begun to cultivate the Muses and he resolved to try his lot in London. On the verge of starvation, he was taken up by Burke, who introduced him to his distinguished friends, aided the publication of his first successful poem, The Library (1781), and induced him to exchange the knife for the prayer-book. Returning to Aldborough as a curate, he became, shortly after, through Burke's introduction, a protégé of the Duke of Rutland, and was never again in want. His literary fame, during most of his life, was based on The Village, which he published in 1783 and followed with a silence of twenty-four years, broken only by the publication of a trifling poem, The Newspaper (1785). During these years he wrote and destroyed large quantities of verse and a treatise on botany and busied himself with domestic life, but was especially occupied in healing both the minds and bodies of the poor of his various parishes. His second period of publication, beginning with The Parish Register (1807), including The Borough (1810) and Tales in Verse (1812), and concluding with Tales of the Hall (1819), brought him into the world of Wordsworth, Byron, and Scott. He outlived the second and died in the same year with the last. Crabbe's powerful realism has been greatly admired by the men of his own craft. He has, as Tennyson said, a world of his own.' It is a far more populous world than that of Cowper or even of Wordsworth and it is not more unlovely than that of Burns; but he brought to its interpretation little of the tenderness of the first, the internal brightness' of the second, or the human tears and laughter of the third. We may be stunned or impressed by Crabbe's world, but we will never love it.

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