In the letter to Mrs. Leadbeater already cited Crabbe writes as to his forthcoming collection of Tales:  “I do not know, on a general view, whether my tragic or lighter Tales, etc., are most in number.  Of those equally well executed the tragic will, I suppose, make the greater impression.”  Crabbe was right in this forecast.  Whether more or less in number, the “tragic” Tales far surpass the “lighter” in their effect on the reader, in the intensity of their gloom.  Such stories as that of Lady Barbara, Delay has Danger, The Sisters, Ellen, Smugglers and Poachers, Richard’s story of Ruth, and the elder brother’s account of his own early attachment, with its miserable sequel—­all these are of a poignant painfulness.  Human crime, error, or selfishness working life-long misery to others—­this is the theme to which Crabbe turns again and again, and on which he bestows a really marvellous power of analysis.  There is never wanting, side by side with these, what Crabbe doubtless believed to be the compensating presence of much that is lovable in human character, patience, resignation, forgiveness.  But the resultant effect, it must be confessed, is often the reverse of cheering.  The fine lines of Wordsworth as to

  “Sorrow that is not sorrow, but delight;
  And miserable love, that is not pain
  To hear of, for the glory that redounds
  Therefrom to human kind, and what we are,”

fail to console us as we read these later stories of Crabbe.  We part from too many of them not, on the whole, with a livelier faith in human nature.  We are crushed by the exhibition of so much that is abnormally base and sordid.

The Tales of the Hall are full of surprises even to those familiar with Crabbe’s earlier poems.  He can still allow couplets to stand which are perilously near to doggerel; and, on the other hand, when his deepest interest in the fortunes of his characters is aroused, he rises at times to real eloquence, if never to poetry’s supremest heights.  Moreover, the poems contain passages of description which, for truth to Nature, touched by real imagination, are finer than anything he had yet achieved.  The story entitled Delay has Danger contains the fine picture of an autumn landscape seen through the eyes of the miserable lover—­the picture which dwelt so firmly in the memory of Tennyson: 

  “That evening all in fond discourse was spent,
  When the sad lover to his chamber went,
  To think on what had pass’d, to grieve, and to repent: 
  Early he rose, and looked with many a sigh
  On the red light that fill’d the eastern sky: 
  Oft had he stood before, alert and gay,
  To hail the glories of the new-born day;
  But now dejected, languid, listless, low,
  He saw the wind upon the water blow,
  And the cold stream curl’d onward as the gale
  From the pine-hill blew harshly down the dale;
  On the right side the youth a wood survey’d,