LONG time his pulse hath ceased to beat,
But benefits, his gift, we trace
Expressed in every eye we meet
Round this dear Vale, his native place. 60

To stately Hall and Cottage rude
Flowed from his life what still they hold,
Light pleasures, every day, renewed;
And blessings half a century old.

Oh true of heart, of spirit gay,
Thy faults, where not already gone
From memory, prolong their stay
For charity's sweet sake alone.

Such solace find we for our loss;

And what beyond this thought we crave 70 Comes in the promise from the Cross, Shining upon thy happy grave.

MATTHEW

1799. 1800

In the School of is a tablet, on which are inscribed, in gilt letters, the Names of the several persons who have been Schoolmasters there since the foundation of the School, with the time at which they entered upon and quitted their office. Opposite to one of those names the Author wrote the following lines.

Such a Tablet as is here spoken of continued to be preserved in Hawkshead School, though the inscriptions were not brought down to our time. This and other poems connected with Matthew would not gain by a literal detail of

facts. Like the Wanderer in "The Excursion," this Schoolmaster was made up of several both of his class and men of other occupations. I do not ask pardon for what there is of untruth in such verses, considered strictly as matters of fact. It is enough if, being true and consistent in spirit, they move and teach in a manner not unworthy of a Poet's calling.

IF Nature, for a favourite child,
In thee hath tempered so her clay,
That every hour thy heart runs wild,
Yet never once doth go astray,

Read o'er these lines; and then review
This tablet, that thus humbly rears
In such diversity of hue

Its history of two hundred years.

Mark the spot to which I point!
From this platform, eight feet square,
Take not even a finger-joint:
Andrew's whole fire-side is there.
Here, alone, before thine eyes,
Simon's sickly daughter lies,

From weakness now, and pain defended,
Whom he twenty winters tended.

Look but at the gardener's pride
How he glories, when he sees
Roses, lilies, side by side,

Violets in families!

By the heart of Man, his tears,
By his hopes and by his fears,

Thou, too heedless, art the Warden
Of a far superior garden.

Thus then, each to other dear, Let them all in quiet lie, Andrew there, and Susan here, Neighbours in mortality.

10

20

And, should I live through sun and rain
Seven widowed years without my Jane, 30
O Sexton, do not then remove her,
Let one grave hold the Loved and Lover!

THE DANISH BOY

A FRAGMENT

1799. 1800

Written in Germany. It was entirely a fancy; but intended as a prelude to a ballad poem never written.

I

BETWEEN two sister moorland rills There is a spot that seems to lie

About the crazy old church-clock,

And the bewildered chimes.

Sacred to flowerets of the hills, And sacred to the sky.

From bloody deeds his thoughts are far;
And yet he warbles songs of war,
That seem like songs of love,

For calm and gentle is his mien;

Like a dead Boy he is serene.

LUCY GRAY

OR, SOLITUDE

1799. 1800

Written at Goslar in Germany. It was founded on a circumstance told me by my Sister, of a little girl who, not far from Halifax in Yorkshire, was bewildered in a snow-storm. Her footsteps were traced by her parents to the middle of the lock of a canal, and no other vestige of her, backward or forward, could be traced. The body however was found in the canal. The way in which the incident was treated and the spiritualising of the character might furnish hints for contrasting the imaginative influences which I have endeavoured to throw over common life with Crabbe's matter of fact style of treating subjects of the same kind. This is not spoken to his disparagement, far from it, but to direct the attention of thoughtful readers, into whose hands these notes may fall, to a comparison that may both enlarge the circle of their sensibilities, and tend to produce in them a catholic judgment.

OFT I had heard of Lucy Gray:
And, when I crossed the wild,
I chanced to see at break of day
The solitary child.

No mate, no comrade Lucy knew;
She dwelt on a wide moor,

The sweetest thing that ever grew
Beside a human door!