with poplars, at whose foot ran the Ouse, that I used to account a little paradise; but the poplars have been felled, and the scene has suffered so much by the loss that, though still in point of prospect beautiful, it has not charm sufficient to attract me now." This forms the subject of one of the most charming of his poems, The Poplar Field:

The poplars are felled ;-farewell to the shade,
And the whispering sound of the cool colonnade;
The winds play no longer and sing in the leaves,
Nor Ouse on his bosom their image receives.

Twelve years have elapsed, since I last took a view
Of my favourite field, and the bank where they grew;
And now in the grass behold they are laid,

And the tree is my seat, that once lent me a shade.

The blackbird is fled to another retreat,

Where the hazels afford him a screen from the heat,
And the scene, where his melody charm'd me before,
Resounds with his sweet-flowing ditty no more.

My fugitive years are all hasting away,
And I must ere long lie as lowly as they,

With a turf on my breast, and a stone at my head,
Ere another such grove shall arise in its stead.

At the beautiful old mansion of Gayhurst, so intimately associated with the Gunpowder Plot conspiracy, he was a frequent visitor. Under its then owner, a Mr. Wrighte, it was celebrated for its pineapples, a present of which inspired Cowper's graceful little apologue, The Pineapple and the Bee.

It must certainly remain matter for congratulation that there still remain, in these all-transforming times, scenes which recall so exactly a world long passed away -a world consecrated by a poet who for a poet who for very many of his fellow-men can never lose his charm. No one can traverse them with his poems in their hands without the liveliest admiration for the studious and happy fidelity with which he painted what he saw. As minutely and scrupulously truthful as Gilbert White, he has done for Olney and Weston what White did for Selborne; but, a true poet, he has done incomparably more he has consecrated as well as described.

CRABBE AND ALDBOROUGH

WHAT Stoke Pogis and its neighbourhood was to Gray, what Olney and Weston were to Cowper, that is Aldborough to Crabbe. Crabbe's descriptive poetry is essentially local, its source was always from what surrounded him and daily met his eyes. He was associated with other places besides Aldborough-with Woodbridge, with Stathern in Rutlandshire, with Muston in Leicestershire, with Parham, Glemham, and Rendham in Suffolk, and lastly with Trowbridge in Wiltshire, where he lived for the last eighteen years of his life. And the scenery of most of these places and of those in the neighbourhood may be traced occasionally in his poetry. But more than two-thirds of what he has described centres round Aldborough. Here in humble life, the son of one of the collectors of the salt-duties, in the town, he was born on Christmas Eve in 1754. Here he lived till his eighteenth year in the heart of its marine life, with every nook and cranny of it familiar to him— the sea in all its moods and aspects, the dreary marsh wastes, the river, the mud-banks, the shingly beach, the arid sand tracks, and "the wild amphibious race

which people its fishing-smacks and its hovels. Here, after walking the hospitals in London, he set up in practice, dismally to fail; and here too, after starvation, literally staring him in the face, had driven him to exchange Medicine for the Church, he had his first curacy. It was thus associated with the most impressionable and the most momentous period of his whole life, and indeed his work generally as a poet took its ply and its colour from these early associations.

Beyond the general features of its sea and background, there is nothing in the Aldborough of to-day which reminds us of the Aldborough of Crabbe's photographs. In his time it consisted of two parallel and unpaved streets running between mean and scrambling cabins occupied by seafaring men, fishermen, and pilots. "The beach "-let me borrow the description given by Crabbe's son in his admirable biography of his father-" consists of successive ridges, large rolled stones, then loose shingles, and at the fall of the tide a strip of fine hard sand. . . . The broad river called the Ald approaches the sea close to Aldborough within a few hundred yards, and then turning abruptly continues to run about ten miles parallel with the beach, from which, for the most part, a dreary strip of marsh and waste alone divides it, until it at length finds its embouchure at Orford." Crabbe has given us pictures of the whole line of the coast from Orford to Dunwick, Slaughden Quay in particular being elaborated, as

his son says, with all the minuteness of a Dutch landscape.

With ceaseless motion comes and goes the tide,
Flowing, it fills the channel vast and wide;
Then back to sea, with strong majestic sweep

It rolls, in ebb yet terrible and deep;

Here Samphire-banks and Saltwort bound the flood,
There stakes and sea-weeds withering on the mud;
And higher up, a ridge of all things base,

Which some strong tide has roll'd upon the place.

The Borough, Letter 1.

In the Twenty-Second Letter of the same poem is painted this scene on the River Ald as it flows past Slaughden Quay :

At the same time the same dull views to see,
The bounding marsh-bank and the blighted tree;
The water only, when the tides were high,
When low, the mud half-cover'd and half-dry;
The sunburnt tar that blisters on the planks,
And bank-side stakes in their uneven ranks;
Heaps of entangled weeds that slowly float,
As the tide rolls by the impeded boat.

When tides were neap, and, in the sultry day,
Through the tall bounding mud-banks made their way,
Which on each side rose swelling, and below
The dark, warm flood ran silently and slow;
There anchoring, Peter chose from man to hide,
There hang his head, and view the lazy tide
In its hot, slimy channel slowly glide;
Where the small eels that left the deeper way
For the warm shore, within the shallows play;
Where gaping muscles, left upon the mud,
Slope their slow passage to the fallen flood:-
Here, dull and hopeless, he'd lie down and trace
How sidelong crabs had scrawl'd their crooked race,

R