Part 18 (2/2)
”Variety's the very spice of life That gives it all its flavour.”
”The heart May give a useful lesson to the head, And Learning wiser grow without his books.”
”Beware of desperate steps. The darkest day, Live till to-morrow, will have pa.s.sed away.”
13. GEORGE CRABBE (+1754-1832+), the poet of the poor, was born at Aldborough, in Suffolk, on Christmas Eve of the year 1754. He stands thus midway between Goldsmith and Wordsworth-- midway between the old and the new school of poetry. His father was salt-master-- or collector of salt duties-- at the little seaport. After being taught a little at several schools, it was agreed that George should be made a surgeon. He was accordingly apprenticed; but he was fonder of writing verses than of attending cases. His memory for poetry was astonis.h.i.+ng; he had begun to write verses at the age of fourteen; and he filled the drawers of the surgery with his poetical attempts. After a time he set up for himself in practice at Aldborough; but most of his patients were poor people and poor relations, who paid him neither for his physic nor his advice. In 1779 he resolved ”to go to London and venture all.” Accordingly, he took a berth on board of a sailing-packet, carrying with him a little money and a number of ma.n.u.script poems. But nothing succeeded with him; he was reduced to his last eightpence. In this strait, he wrote to the great statesman, Edmund Burke; and, while the answer was coming, he walked all night up and down Westminster Bridge. Burke took him in to his own house and found a publisher for his poems.
14. In 1781 +The Library+ appeared; and in the same year Crabbe entered the Church. In 1783 he published +The Village+-- a poem which Dr Johnson revised for him. This work won for him an established reputation; but, for twenty-four years after, Crabbe gave himself up entirely to the care of his parish, and published only one poem-- +The Newspaper+. In 1807 appeared +The Parish Register+; in 1810, +The Borough+; in 1812, +Tales in Verse+; and, in 1819, his last poetical work, +Tales of the Hall+.
From this time, till his death in 1832-- thirteen years after-- he produced no other poem. Personally, he was one of the n.o.blest and kindest of men; he was known as ”the gentleman with the sour name and the sweet countenance;” and he spent most of his income on the wants of others.
15. Crabbe's poetical work forms a prominent landmark in English literature. His style is the style of the eighteenth century-- with a strong admixture of his own; his way of thinking, and the objects he selects for description, belong to the nineteenth. While Pope depicted ”the town,” politics, and abstract moralities, Crabbe describes the country and the country poor, social matters, real life-- the lowest and poorest life, and more especially, the intense misery of the village population of his time in the eastern counties--
”the wild amphibious race With sullen woe displayed in every face.”
He does not paint the lot of the poor with the rose-coloured tints used by Goldsmith; he boldly denies the existence of such a village as Auburn; he groups such places with Eden, and says--
”Auburn and Eden can be found no more;”
he shows the gloomy, hard, despairing side of English country life. He has been called a ”Pope in worsted stockings,” and ”the Hogarth, of song.” Byron describes him as
”Nature's sternest painter, yet the best.”
Now and then his style is flat, and even coa.r.s.e; but there is everywhere a genuine power of strong and bold painting. He is also an excellent master of easy dialogue.
All of his poems are written in the Popian couplet of two ten-syllabled lines.
16. ROBERT BURNS (+1759-1796+), the greatest poet of Scotland, was born in Ayrs.h.i.+re, two miles from the town of Ayr, in 1759. The only education he received from his father was the schooling of a few months; but the family were fond of reading, and Robert was the most enthusiastic reader of them all. Every spare moment he could find-- and they were not many-- he gave to reading; he sat at meals ”with a book in one hand and a spoon in the other;” and in this way he read most of the great English poets and prose-writers. This was an excellent education-- one a great deal better than most people receive; and some of our greatest men have had no better. But, up to the age of sixteen, he had to toil on his father's farm from early morning till late at night. In the intervals of his work he contrived, by dint of thrift and industry, to learn French, mathematics, and a little Latin. On the death of his father, he took a small farm, but did not succeed. He was on the point of embarking for Jamaica, where a post had been found for him, when the news of the successful sale of a small volume of his poems reached him; and he at once changed his mind, and gave up all idea of emigrating. His friends obtained for him a post as exciseman, in which his duty was to gauge the quant.i.ty and quality of ardent spirits-- a post full of dangers to a man of his excitable and emotional temperament. He went a great deal into what was called society, formed the acquaintance of many boon companions, acquired habits of intemperance that he could not shake off, and died at Dumfries in 1796, in his thirty-seventh year.
17. His best poems are lyrical, and he is himself one of the foremost lyrical poets in the world. His songs have probably been more sung, and in more parts of the globe, than the songs of any other writer that ever lived. They are of every kind-- songs of love, war, mirth, sorrow, labour, and social gatherings. Professor Craik says: ”One characteristic that belongs to whatever Burns has written is that, of its kind and in its own way, it is a perfect production. His poetry is, throughout, real emotion melodiously uttered, instinct with pa.s.sion, but not less so with power of thought,-- full of light as well as of fire.” Most of his poems are written in the North-English, or Lowland-Scottish, dialect. The most elevated of his poems is +The Vision+, in which he relates how the Scottish Muse found him at the plough, and crowned him with a wreath of holly. One of his longest, as well as finest poems, is +The Cottar's Sat.u.r.day Night+, which is written in the Spenserian stanza. Perhaps his most pathetic poem is that ent.i.tled +To Mary in Heaven+. It is of a singular eloquence, elevation, and sweetness. The first verse runs thus--
”Thou lingering star, with lessening ray, That lov'st to greet the early morn, Again thou usher'st in the day My Mary from my soul was torn.
O Mary! dear departed shade!
Where is thy place of blissful rest?
See'st thou thy lover lowly laid?
Hear'st thou the groans that rend his breast?”
He is, as his latest critic says, ”the poet of homely human nature;” and his genius shows the beautiful elements in this homeliness; and that what is homely need not therefore be dull and prosaic.
18. THOMAS CHATTERTON and WILLIAM BLAKE are two minor poets, of whom little is known and less said, but whose work is of the most poetical and genuine kind. --Chatterton was born at Bristol in the year 1752. He was the son of a schoolmaster, who died before he was born. He was educated at Colston's Blue-Coat School in Bristol; and, while at school, read his way steadily through every book in three circulating libraries.
He began to write verses at the age of fifteen, and in two years had produced a large number of poems-- some of them of the highest value. In 1770, he came up to London, with something under five pounds in his pocket, and his mind made up to try his fortune as a literary man, resolved, though he was only a boy of seventeen, to live by literature or to die. Accordingly, he set to work and wrote every kind of productions-- poems, essays, stories, political articles, songs for public singers; and all the time he was half starving. A loaf of bread lasted him a week; and it was ”bought stale to make it last longer.” He had made a friend of the Lord Mayor, Beckford; but before he had time to hold out a hand to the struggling boy, Beckford died. The struggle became harder and harder-- more and more hopeless; his neighbours offered a little help-- a small coin or a meal-- he rejected all; and at length, on the evening of the 24th August 1770, he went up to his garret, locked himself in, tore up all his ma.n.u.scripts, took poison, and died. He was only seventeen.
19. Wordsworth and Coleridge spoke with awe of his genius; Keats dedicated one of his poems to his memory; and Coleridge copied some of his rhythms. One of his best poems is the +Minstrel's Roundelay+--
”O sing unto my roundelay, O drop the briny tear with me, Dance no more on holy-day, Like a running river be.
My love is dead, Gone to his death-bed All under the willow-tree.
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