"Is Crabbe then, whatever shape he may take, worth
making room for in our over-crowded heads and libraries?
If the verdict of such critics as Jeffrey and Wilson be set
down to contemporary partiality or inferior 'culture,' there is
Miss Austen, who is now so great an authority in the representation
of genteel humanity, so unaccountably smitten with
Crabbe in his worsted hose that she is said to have pleasantly
declared he was the only man whom she would care to marry.
If Sir Walter Scott and Byron are but unaesthetic judges of the
poet, there is Wordsworth who was sufficiently exclusive in
admitting any to the sacred brotherhood in which he still
reigns, and far too honest to make any exception out of
compliment to any one on any occasion--he did nevertheless
thus write to the poet's son and biographer in 1834: 'Any
testimony to the merit of your revered father's works would,
I feel, be superfluous, if not impertinent. They will last
from their combined merits as poetry and truth, full as long
as anything that has been expressed in verse since they first
made their appearance'--a period which, be it noted, includes
all Wordsworth's own volumes except _Yarrow Revisited_, _The
Prelude_, and _The Borderers_. And Wordsworth's living successor
to the laurel no less participates with him in his
appreciation of their forgotten brother. Almost the last time
I met him he was quoting from memory that fine passage in
_Delay has Danger_, where the late autumn landscape seems to
borrow from the conscience-stricken lover who gazes on it the
gloom which it reflects upon him; and in the course of further
conversation on the subject Mr. Tennyson added, 'Crabbe has
a world of his own'; by virtue of that original genius, I
suppose, which is said to entitle and carry the possessor to