United States or Samoa ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
You may see my special favourites, bound up, on the shelf in my bedroom. Crabbe's Tales, Frank, the Parent's Assistant, and later, Croker's Tales from English History, Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare, Tales of a Grandfather, and the Rival Crusoes stand pre-eminent also Mrs. Leicester's School, with the ghost story cut out. Fairies and ghosts were prohibited as unwholesome, and not unwisely.
Owing to the length and uniformity of Crabbe's verse, what was ordinarily called an "anthology" was out of the question. FitzGerald was restricted to a single method. He found that readers were impatient of Crabbe's longueurs. It occurred to him that while making large omissions he might preserve the story in each case, by substituting brief prose abstracts of the portions omitted.
Elmy's share of the estate would come to her children, and as the unmarried sister died not long after, leaving her portion in the same direction, Crabbe's anxiety for the pecuniary future of his family was at an end.
The neighbourhood of this old Hall, and the luxuriant beauty of the inland village, so refreshing a contrast to the barrenness and ugliness of the country round his native town, enriched Crabbe's mind with many memories that served him well in his later poetry. In the meantime he was practising verse, though as yet showing little individuality.
Of seats they tell, where priests, 'mid tapers dim, Breathed the warm prayer, or tuned the midnight hymn To scenes like these the fainting soul retired; Revenge and Anger in these cells expired: By Pity soothed, Remorse lost half her fears, And softened Pride dropped penitential tears. Crabbe's Borough.
She recognized the truth of Crabbe's candid statement how could she do the young man such an injustice as to marry him! "Two passions both degenerate, for they both Began in honour, ..." The scene in the kitchen of the Manor House presented a forcible contrast to the wild world without.
Other poets, with other and more purely poetical gifts, arose to claim men's attention. Besides Wordsworth, as already pointed out, Scott, Byron, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley had found their various admirers, and drawn Crabbe's old public from him.
James' Square, or at Rev. G. Crabbe's, Bredfield, Woodbridge. Either way the letter will soon reach me. Write soon, Frederic, and let me hear how you and yours are: and don't wait, as you usually do, for some inundation of the Arno to set your pen agoing. Write ever so shortly and whatever-about-ly. I have no news to tell you of Friends.
And there was little beyond this in Crabbe's moralisings on the respective functions of theology, history, poetry, and the rest, as represented on the shelves of a library, and on the blessings of literature to the heart when wearied with business and the cares of life. Crabbe's verses on such topics are by no means ineffective. He had caught perfectly the trick of the school so soon to pass away.
His poem for this year, 1809, is printed at length in the Gentleman's Magazine for April and also Crabbe's, recited at the same dinner. Crabbe seems to have composed it for the occasion, but with the intention of ultimately weaving it into the poem on which he was then engaged. A paragraph prefixed to the lines also shows that Crabbe had a further object in view.
Word Of The Day