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
"wedding-garment." On his arrival, however, the sun fades suddenly from
the landscape. The lady is from home: gone to visit a friend a few miles
distant, not so far but that her lover can follow,--but the slight, real
or imaginary, probably the latter, comes as such a rebuff, that during
the "little more--how far away!" that he travels, the country, though
now richer and lovelier, seems to him (as once to Hamlet) a mere
"pestilent congregation of vapours." But in the end he finds his
mistress and learns that she had gone on duty, not for pleasure,--and
they return happy again, and so happy indeed, that he has neither eyes
nor thoughts for any of nature's fertilities or barrennesses--only for
the dear one at his side.

I have already had occasion to quote a few lines from this beautiful
poem, to show Crabbe's minute observation--in his time so rare--of
flowers and birds and all that makes the charm of rural scenery--but I
must quote some more: