ndent results as in former periods. And one reason appears to be,
that though such persons, from whom we might at first expect a
restoration of the good old times of poetry, are not encumbered and
enfeebled by the trammels of custom, and the dull weight of other men's
ideas; yet they are oppressed by the consciousness of a want of the
common advantages which others have; are looking at the tinsel finery of
the age, while they neglect the rich unexplored mine in their own
breasts; and instead of setting an example for the world to follow,
spend their lives in aping, or in the despair of aping, the hackneyed
accomplishments of their inferiors. Another cause may be, that original
genius alone is not sufficient to produce the highest excellence,
without a corresponding state of manners, passions, and religious
belief: that no single mind can move in direct opposition to the vast
machine of the world around it; that the poet can do no more than stamp
the mind of his age upon his works; and that all that the ambition of
the highest genius can hope to arrive at, after the lapse of one or two
generations, is the perfection of that more refined and effeminate style
of studied elegance and adventitious ornament, which is the result, not
of nature, but of art. In fact, no other style of poetry has succeeded,
or seems likely to succeed, in the present day. The public taste hangs
like a millstone round the neck of all original genius that does not
conform to established and exclusive models. The writer is not only
without popular sympathy, but without a rich and varied mass of
materials for his mind to work upon and assimilate unconsciously to
itself; his attempts at originality are looked upon as affectation, and
in the end, degenerate into it from the natural spirit of contradiction,
and the constant uneasy sense of disappointment and undeserved ridicule.
But to return.

Crabbe is, if not the most natural, the most literal of our descriptive
poets. He exhibits the smallest circumstances of the smallest
things. He gives the very costume of meanness; the nonessentials
of every trifling incident. He is his own landscape-painter,
and engraver too. His pastoral scenes seem pricked on paper
in little dotted lines. He describes the interior of a cottage
like a person sent there to distrain for rent. He has an eye to the
number of arms in an old worm-eaten chair, and takes care to inform
himself and the reader whether a joint-s