With all its dark intensity of shade;
  Where the rough wind alone was heard to move,
  In this, the pause of nature and of love,
  When now the young are rear’d, and when the old,
  Lost to the tie, grow negligent and cold—­
  Far to the left he saw the huts of men,
  Half hid in mist that hung upon the fen;
  Before him swallows, gathering for the sea,
  Took their short flights, and twitter’d on the lea;
  And near the bean-sheaf stood, the harvest done,
  And slowly blacken’d in the sickly sun;
  All these were sad in nature, or they took
  Sadness from him, the likeness of his look,
  And of his mind—­he ponder’d for a while,
  Then met his Fanny with a borrow’d smile.”

The entire story, from which this is an extract, is finely told, and the fitness of the passage is beyond dispute.  At other times the description is either so much above the level of the narrative, or below it, as to be almost startling.  In the very first pages of Tales of the Hall, in the account of the elder brother’s early retirement from business, occur the following musical lines: 

  “He chose his native village, and the hill
  He climb’d a boy had its attraction still;
  With that small brook beneath, where he would stand
  And stooping fill the hollow of his hand
  To quench th’ impatient thirst—­then stop awhile
  To see the sun upon the waters smile,
  In that sweet weariness, when, long denied,
  We drink and view the fountain that supplied
  The sparkling bliss—­and feel, if not express,
  Our perfect ease in that sweet weariness.”

Yet it is only a hundred lines further on that, to indicate the elder brother’s increasing interest in the graver concerns of human thought, Crabbe can write: 

  “He then proceeded, not so much intent,
  But still in earnest, and to church he went
  Although they found some difference in their creed,
  He and his pastor cordially agreed;
  Convinced that they who would the truth obtain
  By disputation, find their efforts vain;
  The church he view’d as liberal minds will view,
  And there he fix’d his principles and pew.”

Among those surprises to which I have referred is the apparently recent development in the poet of a lyrical gift, the like of which he had not exhibited before.  Crabbe had already written two notable poems in stanzas, Sir Eustace Grey and that other painful but exceedingly powerful drama in monologue, The Hall of Justice.  But since the appearance of his last volumes, Crabbe had formed some quite novel poetical friendships, and it would seem likely that association with Rogers, though he saw and felt that elegant poet’s deficiencies as a painter of human life, had encouraged him to try an experiment in his friend’s special vein.  One of the most depressing stories in the series is that of the elder brother’s ill-fated passion for a beautiful