es merely prosaic and
often nearly so. His conception of life is anti-idealist almost to
pessimism, and he has no fancy. The "jewels five words long" are not
his: indeed there clung to him a certain obscurity of expression which
Johnson is said to have good-naturedly smoothed out in his first work to
some extent, but from which he never got quite free. The extravagances
as well as the graces of the new poetry were quite alien from him; its
exotic tastes touched him not; its love for antiquity (though he knew
old English poetry by no means ill) seems to have left him wholly cold.
The anxieties and sufferings of lower and middle-class life, the
"natural death of love" (which, there seems some reason to fear, he had
experienced), the common English country scenery and society of his
time--these were his subjects, and he dealt with them in a fashion the
mastery of which is to this day a joy to all competent readers. No
writer of his time had an influence which so made for truth pure and
simple, yet not untouched by the necessary "disprosing" processes of
art. For Crabbe is not a mere realist; and whoso considers him as such
has not apprehended him. But he was a realist to this extent, that he
always went to the model and never to the pattern-drawing on the Academy
walls. And that was what his time needed. His general characteristics
are extremely uniform: even the external shape and internal
subject-matter of his poems are almost confined to the shape and matter
of the verse-tale. He need not, and indeed cannot, in a book like this,
be dealt with at much length. But he is a very great writer, and a most
important figure at this turning-point of English literature.

Yet, however one may sympathise with Cowper, however much one may admire
Crabbe, it is difficult for any true lover of poetry not to feel the
sense of a "Pisgah sight," and something more, of the promised land of
poetry, in passing from these writers to William Blake and Robert Burns.
Here there is no more allowance necessary, except in the first case for
imperfection of accomplishment, in the second for shortness of life and
comparative narrowness of range. The quality and opportuneness of poetry
are in each case undeniable. Since the deaths of Herrick and Vaughan,
England had not seen any one who had the finer lyrical gifts of the poet
as Blake had them. Since the death of Dunbar, Scotland had not seen such
strength and intensity of poetic genius (joined in this