Then silent groves denote the dying year,
The morning frost, and noon-tide gos-

samer;

And all be silent in the scene around,
All save the distant sea's uncertain sound,
Or here and there the gun whose loud report
Proclaims to man that Death is but his
sport:

And then the wintry winds begin to blow,
Then fall the flaky stars of gathering
snow,

When on the thorn the ripening sloe, yet blue,

Takes the bright varnish of the morning
dew;

The aged moss grows brittle on the pale,
The dry boughs splinter in the windy gale,
And every changing season of the year
Stamps on the scene its English character.
'Farewell! a prouder Mansion I may see,
But much must meet in that which equals
thee !'
pp. 160-162.

We must not follow the good lady and Jacob to their long home, but take these fine lines on the ancient mansion's altered aspect when the poet revisits it :

:

That in the wild-wood maze I as of old
might stray.
The things themselves are pleasant to be-
hold,

A blind old man, and she a fair young maid,

Listening in love to what her grandsire said.

'And thus with gentle voice he spoke"Come lead me, lassie, to the shade, Where willows grow beside the brook;

For well I know the sound it made,
When, dashing o'er the stony rill,
It murmur'd to St. Osyth's Mill."
The lass replied-"The trees are fled,
They've cut the brook a straighter bed:
No shades the present lords allow,
The miller only murmurs now;
The waters now his mill forsake,
And form a pond they call a lake."
"Then, lassie, lead thy grandsire on,
And to the holy water bring;
cup is fasten'd to the stone,
And I would taste the healing spring,
That soon its rocky cist forsakes,
And green its mossy passage makes.”
The rock is gone, the stream is dried;
"The holy spring is turn'd aside,
The plough has levell'd all around,
And here is now no holy ground."

A

6

pp. 163-165.

But not like those which we beheld of old; We wish we could afford to give the rest of these sweet stanzas. In a very different style is the next tale-that of the Wealthy Merchant'-proud, haughty, ostentatious, the great man of Slaughden Quay, whom the poor poet, when piling up butter and cheese there in his corduroy jacket, durst hardly look in the face-but

!

who,

who, when the twenty years have flown, is found in the almshouses. This sketch of his wife in her splendid days going a marketing is capital:

him go.

Then what a failure !-not a paltry sum,
Like a mean trader, but for half a plum;
His lady's wardrobe was appraised so high,
At his own sale, that nobody would buy!
“But she is gone," he cries, “and never

saw

The spoil and havoc of our cruel law.
I, who have raised the credit of the town,
And gave it, thankless as it is, renown--
Deprived of all-my wife, my wealth, my

vote

And in this blue defilement

Coat!""

-Curse the

pp. 173, 174.

Now to the paupers who about him stand, He tells of wonders by his bounty plann'd, Tells of his traffic, where his vessels sail'd, 'The Dean's Lady' exhibits another of these sad chances and changes of life. In the earlier stage, Crabbe suffers under her domineering blue-stockingship :'Miranda sees her morning levee fill'd With men in every art and science skill'd, Men who have gain'd a name, whom she invites,

Because in men of genius she delights.
To these she puts her questions, that pro-
duce

Discussion vivid, and discourse abstruse;
She no opinion for its boldness spares,
But loves to show her audience what she
dares ;

'Her noble mind, with independent
force,

Her rector questions on his late discourse;
Perplex'd and pain'd, he wishes to retire
From one whom critics, nay, whom crowds,
admire-

From her whose faith on no man's dictate
leans,

Who her large creed from many a teacher
gleans;

Who for herself will judge, debate, decide,
And be her own "philosopher and guide."
P. 186.

The creeds of all men she takes leave to sift,
And, quite impartial, turns her own adrift.
She is a metaphysician, too, an economist, and, to crown all, a
geologist :-

subject

'Her hungry mind on every feeds; She Adam Smith and Dugald Stewart reads; Locke

Locke entertains her, and she wonders why
His famous Essay is considered dry.
For her amusement in her vacant hours,
Are earths and rocks, and animals and
flowers:
She

She could the farmer at his work assist Her mathematic studies she resign'd-
A systematic agriculturist.
They did not suit the genius of her

Miranda deems all knowledge might be gain'd

lime,

But then they took a monstrous deal of

time!"'

p. 188.

"But she is idle, nor has much attain'd; Men are in her deceived: she knows at most A few light matters, for she scorns to boast. She appears to be a reviewer, too, and dabbles considerably in the magazines; but we must hasten to the conclusion :

'Once from her lips came wisdom ;when she spoke,

Her friends in transport or amazement broke.

Yet holds in scorn the fame no more in view,

And flies the glory that would not pursue To yon small cot, a poorly jointured Blue.' pp. 189, 190. We pass the Brother Burgesses,' The Dealer and Clerk,' 'Gentle Jane,' and 'The Wife and Widow,' and reach, in Belinda Waters,' a most Crabbish portraiture of a fine dainty miss :

'She sees her father oft engross'd by cares,

And therefore hates to hear of men's
affairs:

An active mother in the household reigns,
And spares Belinda all domestic pains.
Of food she knows but this-that we are

fed:

:

Though, duly taught, she prays for daily bread,

Yet whence it comes, of hers is no con

cern

'She on the table sees the common fare, But how provided is beneath her care.

And what came of this delicate beauty?—

'she took a surgeon's mate

'With his half-pay, which was his whole estate."'

p. 204.

And how does she relish a scanty establishment, a housefull of bawling children, and the weekly accounts?

Her husband loves her, and in accent mild

Answers, and treats her like a fretted child;

But when he, ruffled, makes severe replies,

And seems unhappy-then she pouts, and cries,

"She wonders when she'll die!". faints, but never dies.

She

'The Will' and 'The Cousins' are among the most powerful of these tales; and The Boat Race,''Master William, or Lad's Love,' 'Danvers and Rayner,' Preaching and Practice'-in short, almost every piece in the volume-might furnish us with some extract, grave or gay, which would much adorn our pages. But we believe we have already quoted quite enough to convey a fáir notion of what this legacy amounts to. It is on the whole decidedly inferior, in most respects, to any other volume of the author's poetry; but still it is perhaps more amusing than any of the rest of them: it is full of playfulness and good-humour, and the stories are, with hardly an exception, such as we can fancy the good old man to have taken delight in telling to his grandchildren, when the curtains were drawn down and the fire burnt bright on a winter's evening, in the rectory parlour of Trowbridge. Why, sir,' said Johnson at Dunvegan-(anno ætat. 64)- a man grows better-humoured as he grows older. He improves by experience.' It is pleasing to trace the gradually-increasing prevalence of the softer feelings in the heart of Crabbe, when removed from the stern influences of his early distress. Requiescat in pace! We hope his Sermons may be found worthy of the high reputation which this volume will neither increase nor disturb.

ART. IX.-1. Belgium and Western Germany in 1833.
Mrs. Trollope. 2 vols. 12mo. London. 1834.

By

2. Visit to Germany and the Low Countries. By Sir Arthur Brooke Faulkner. 2 vols. 8vo. London. 1833.

MRS.

RS. TROLLOPE is, we think, extremely well adapted to the task of planning and executing a pleasure tour,' (as the Germans call it,) and giving a correct and spirited report of her seeings and hearings, for the benefit of us home voyageurs autour de nos chambres. With the tact and quick observation of a woman, and much of the unpretending good sense of an Englishwoman, she unites great activity, bodily as well as mental, sound views on most topics, political and religious, a lively style, good feeling and good spirits, and much unprejudiced fairness in her judg

ments

ments on men and manners. If she has but little learning,' her good sense prevents its being a dangerous thing;' and every reader of any taste must like her and her work all the better for the absence of all pretension to more than she possesses. We verily believe she started to write a tour in Germany, with scarcely any other apparatus than a common guide-book, and a passport duly vised without having got up, more solito, Madame de Staël's 'Allemagne,' or dipped into Frederic of Prussia's Correspondence, or marked quotations (like Sir A. B. Faulkner) in the first chapter of Tacitus de Moribus Germanorum. Then, although she follows Lord Bacon's advice, and diets in such places where there is good company,' she neither engages, nor prates about, Italian couriers, and britschkas and extra post horses; she can breathe in a lohn kutsch, and make her observations very shrewdly and like a lady in the eilwagen and the wasser diligenz; and she rationally prefers the lively table d'hôte to expensive and uninforming repasts in her bed-room. The result is, she has produced two very agreeable and companionable volumes upon Belgium and Rhenish Germany, full of animated description and natural observation, free from conventional rhapsodies and second-hand criticism, -never dogmatizing, and seldom theorizing, and strictly following (though not citing) Horace's golden rule,

6

• Quod

Desperat tractata nitescere posse, relinquit.' Though she spends some days at the Universities of Bonn and Heidelberg, she is not drawn into sublime disquisitions about Kant's philosophy, or transcendental raptures upon Goethe and Schlegel. She describes the castles on the Rhine without swelling her volumes with every legend appurtenant to them from Schreiber or Gottschalk; and she clearly states what she sees in the vaults of the supposed secret tribunal at Baden, without extracting an elaborate history from Sir Francis Palgrave, or bewildering herself in the controversy as to its constitution and fall; nor does she reproduce, from a thumbed copy of Childe Harold,' Byron's noble but hackneyed descriptions of the river and the castles where ruin greenly dwells;' nay, her chapters are headed by plain prose tables of contents, instead of useless and sentimental mottoes-in the reciprocation of which we observe a considerable traffic among the poetasters and standard novelists' of this age of puffing.

Let us not be supposed for a moment to undervalue the travels of persons of real science, and of historical and antiquarian knowledge. We know hardly any works more delightful than Saussure's Travels in the Alps and Humboldt's in South America, for their union of scientific observation with glowing and animated description;