ouded by the real love he feels for the Spanish wife and children from
whom he had been torn, and who are continually present to him in his
dreams.

Nor is the treatment inadequate. It is at once discernible how much
Crabbe had already gained by the necessity for concentration upon the
development of a story instead of on the mere analysis of character. The
style, moreover, has clarified and gained in dignity: there are few, if
any, relapses into the homelier style on which the parodist could try
his hand. Had the author of _Enoch Arden_ treated the same theme in
blank-verse, the workmanship would have been finer, but he could hardly
have sounded a truer note of unexaggerated pathos.

The same may be said of the beautiful tale of _The Lover's Journey_.
Here again is the product of an experience belonging to Crabbe's
personal history. In his early Aldeburgh days, when he was engaged to
Sarah Elmy with but faint hope of ever being able to marry, it was one
of the rare alleviations of his distressed condition to walk over from
Aldeburgh to Beccles (some twenty miles distant), where his betrothed
was occasionally a visitor to her mother and sisters. "It was in his
walks," writes the son, "between Aldeburgh and Beccles that Mr. Crabbe
passed through the very scenery described in the first part of _The
Lover's Journey_; while near Beccles, in another direction, he found the
contrast of rich vegetation introduced in the latter part of that tale;
nor have I any doubt that the _disappointment_ of the story figures out
something that, on one of these visits, befell himself, and the feelings
with which he received it.

"Gone to a friend, she tells me;--I commend
Her purpose: means she to a female friend?"

"For truth compels me to say, that he was by no means free from the less
amiable sign of a strong attachment--jealousy." The story is of the
slightest--an incident rather than a story. The lover, joyous and
buoyant, traverses the dreary coast scenery of Suffolk, and because he
is happy, finds beauty and charm in the commonest and most familiar
sights and sounds of nature: every single hedge-row blossom, every group
of children at their play. The poem is indeed an illustration of
Coleridge's lines in his ode _Dejection_:

"O Lady, we receive but what we give,
And in our life alone does Nature live,--
Ours is her wedding-garment, ours her shroud."

All along the road to his beloved's house, nature wears this
"we