HOMES AND HAUNTS OF THE MOST EMINENT BRITISH POETS. VOL. II.

HOMES AND HAUNTS

OF THE

MOST EMINENT BRITISH POETS.

BY

WILLIAM HOWITT.

The Illustrations Engraved by H. W. Hewet.

"An indissoluble sign of their existence has stamped itself on the abodes of all distinguished men, a sign which places all kindred spirits in communion with them."—The Citizen of Prague.

IN TWO VOLUMES.

VOL. II.

NEW YORK: HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS, 82 CLIFF STREET. 1847.

CONTENTS OF VOL. II.

Belvoir Castle

GEORGE CRABBE.

When a youth, with a voracious appetite for books, an old lady, who kindly supplied me with many, put one day into my hands Crabbe's Borough. It was my first acquaintance with him, and it occasioned me the most singular sensations imaginable. Intensely fond of poetry, I had read the great bulk of our older writers, and was enthusiastic in my admiration of the new ones who had appeared. The Pleasures of Hope, of Campbell, the West Indies and World before the Flood, of Montgomery, the first Metrical Romances of Scott, all had their due appreciation. The calm dignity of Wordsworth and the blaze of Byron had not yet fully appeared. Every thing, however, old or new, in poetry, had a certain elevation of subject and style which seemed absolutely necessary to give it the title of poetry. But here was a poem by a country parson; the description of a sea-port town, so full of real life, yet so homely and often prosaic, that its effect on me was confounding. Why, it is not poetry, and yet how clever! Why, there is certainly a resemblance to the style of Pope, yet what subjects,

what characters, what ordinary phraseology! The country parson, certainly, is a great reader of Pope, but how unlike Pope's is the music of the rhythm—if music there be! What an opening for a poem in four-and-twenty Books!

No, good parson! how should you? I exclaimed to myself. You see the absurdity of your subject, and yet you rush into it. He who sung of the Greek Fleet certainly would never have thought of singing of Alley, Lane, or Street! What a difference from

Or—

What a difference from—

Or from the grandeur of that exordium:—

With this glorious sound in my ears, like the opening hymn of an archangel—language in which more music and more dignity were united than in any composition of mere mortal man, and which heralded in the universe, God and man, perdition and salvation, creation and the great sum total of the human destinies,—what a fall was there to those astounding words—

"Describe the Borough!"

It was a shock to every thing of the ideal great and poetical in the young and sensitive mind, attuned to the harmonies of a thousand great lays of the by-gone times, that was never to be forgotten. Are we then come to this? I asked. Is this the scale of topic, and is this the tone to which we are reduced in this generation? Turning over the heads of the different Books did not much tend to remove this feeling. The Church, Sects, the Election, Law, Physic, Trades, Clubs and Social Meetings, Players, Almshouse and Trustees, Peter Grimes and Prisons! What, in heaven's name, were the whole nine Muses to do with such a set of themes! And then the actors! See a set of drunken sailors in their ale-house:—

But, spite of all, a book was a book, and therefore it was read. At every page the same struggle went on in the mind between all the old notions of poetry, and the vivid pictures of actual life which it unfolded. When I had read it once, I told the lender that it was the strangest, cleverest, and most absorbing book I had ever read, but that it was no poem. It was only by a second and a third perusal that the first surprise subsided; the first shock gone by, the poem began to rise out of the novel composition. The deep and experienced knowledge of human life, the sound sense, the quiet satire, there was no overlooking from the first; and soon the warm sympathy with poverty and suffering, the boldness to display them as they existed, and to suffer no longer poetry to wrap her golden haze round human life, and to conceal all that ought to be known, because it must be known before it could be removed; the tender pathos, and the true feeling for nature, grew every hour on the mind. It was not long before George Crabbe became as firmly fixed in my bosom as a great and genuine poet,

as Rembrandt, or Collins, or Edwin Landseer are as genuine painters.

Crabbe saw plainly what was become the great disease of our literature. It was a departure from actual life and nature.

To these home-truths, succeeds that admirable satirical description of our novel literature, which introduces the sad story of Ellen Orford. My space is little, but I must give a specimen of the manner in which the Cervantes of England strips away the sublime fooleries of our literary knight-errantry.

From all this false sublime, Crabbe was the first to free us, and to lead us into the true sublime of genuine human life. How novel at that time, and yet how thrilling, was the incident of the sea-side visitors surprised out on the sands by the rise of the tide. Here was real sublimity of distress, real display of human passion. The lady, with her children in her hand, wandering from the tea-table which had been spread on the sands, sees the boatmen asleep, the boat adrift, and the tide advancing:—

It has been said that Crabbe's poetry is mere description, however accurate, and that he has not a spark of imagination. The charge arises from a false view of the man and his objects. He saw that the world was well supplied with what are poems of the creative faculty, that it was just as destitute of the poetry of truth and reality. He saw human life lie like waste land, as worthless of notice, while our poets and romancers

"In trim gardens took their pleasure."

He saw the vice, the ignorance, the misery, and he lifted the veil and cried—"Behold your fellow-men! Such are the multitude of your fellow-creatures, among whom you live and move. Do you want to weep over distress? Behold it there, huge, dismal, and excruciating! Do you wish for a sensation? Find it there! Follow the ruined gentleman from his gaming and his dissipation, to his squalid den and his death. Follow the grim savage, who murders his shrieking boy at sea. Follow the poor maiden to her ruin, and the parent weeping and withering under the curse of a depraved child. Go down into the abodes of ignorance, of swarming vice, of folly, and madness—and if you want a lesson, or a moral, there they are by thousands."

Crabbe knew that the true imaginative faculty had a great and comprehensive task, to dive into the depths of the human heart, to fathom the recesses and the springs of the mind, and to display all their movements under the various excitements of various passions, with the hand of a master. He has done this, and done it with unrivaled tact and vigor. Out of the scum and chaos of lowest life, he has evoked the true sublime. He has taught us that men are our proper objects of display, and that the multitude has claims on our sympathies that duty as well as taste demand obedience to. He was the first to dare these desperate and deserted walks of humanity, and prove to us that still it was humanity. At every step he revealed scenes of the truest pathos, of the profoundest interest, and gave instances of the most generous sacrifices, the most patient love, the most heroic duty, in the very abodes of unvisited wretchedness. He made us feel that these beings were men! There is no picture so touching in all the million volumes of romance, as that of the dying

sailor and his sweetheart. What hero ever breathed a more beautiful devotion, or clothed it in more exquisite language, than this poor sailor youth, when believing himself dying at sea:—

It was by these genuine vindications of our entire humanity, that Crabbe, by casting the full blaze of the sunshine of truth and genius on the real condition of the laboring population of these kingdoms, laid the foundations of that great popular feeling which prevails at the present day. Patriots and patrons of the people are now plentiful enough, but in Crabbe's day the work had to be begun; the swinish multitude had yet to be visited in their sties; and the Circe of the modern sorceries of degradation, to feel the hand of a hero upon her, compelling her to restore the swine to their human form. George Crabbe was not merely a poet, but the poet who had the sagacity to see into the real state of things, and the heart to do his duty—the great marks of the true poet, who is necessarily a true and feeling man. To him popular education, popular freedom, popular advance into knowledge and power, owe a debt which futurity will gratefully acknowledge, but no time can cancel.

George Crabbe was born on the borders of that element which he so greatly loved, and which he has so powerfully described in the first chapter of the Borough. He has had the good-fortune to have in his son George a biographer such as every good man would desire. The life written by him is full of the veneration of the son, yet of the candor of the historian; and is at once one of the most graphic and charming of books.

From this volume we learn that the poet was born at Aldborough, in Suffolk, on the Christmas-eve of 1754. His birthplace was an old house in that range of buildings which the sea has now almost demolished. The chamber projected far over the ground-floor; and the windows were small, with diamond panes almost impervious to the light. A view of it by Stanfield forms the vignette to the biography.

The father as well as grandfather of Crabbe bore the name of George, as well as himself. The grandfather, a burgess of Aldborough, and collector of customs there, yet died poor. The father, originally educated for trade, had been in early life the keeper of a parochial school in the porch of the church at Orford. He afterward became schoolmaster and parish clerk at Norton, near Loddon, in Norfolk, and finally, returning to his native Aldborough, rose to the collection of the salt duties, as Salt-master. He was a stern, but able man, and with all his sternness not destitute of good qualities. The mother of Crabbe was an excellent and pious woman. Beside himself there were five other children, all of whom, except one girl, lived to mature years. His next brother, Robert, was a glazier, who retired from business at Southwold. John Crabbe, the third son, was a captain of a Liverpool slave-ship, who perished by an insurrection of the slaves. The fourth brother, William, also a seafaring man, was carried prisoner by the Spaniards into Mexico, and was once seen by an

Aldborough sailor on the coast of Honduras, but never heard of again. This sailor brother, in his inquiries after all at home, had expressed much astonishment to find that George was become a clergyman, when he left him a doctor; and on this incident Crabbe afterward founded the sailor's story in The Parting Hour. His only surviving sister married a Mr. Sparkes, a builder of Aldborough, and died in 1827. Such were Crabbe's family. The scenery among which he spent his boyhood has been frequently described in his poetry, especially in the opening letter of his Borough. It is here equally livingly given in his son's prose.

"Aldborough, or, as it is more correctly written, Alderburgh, was, in those days, a poor and wretched place, with nothing of the elegance and gayety which have since sprung up about it, in consequence of the resort of watering-parties. The town lies between a low hill or cliff, on which only the old church and a few better houses were then situated, and the beach of the German ocean. It consisted of two parallel and unpaved streets, running between mean and scrambling houses, the abodes of seafaring men, pilots, and fishers. The range of houses nearest to the sea had suffered so much from repeated invasions of the waves, that only a few scattered tenements appeared erect among the desolation. I have often heard my father describe a tremendous spring-tide of, I think, the 17th of January, 1779, when eleven houses here were at once demolished; and he saw the breakers dash over the roofs, and round the walls, and crush all to ruin. The beach consists of successive ridges—large rolled stones, then loose shingles, and, at the fall of the tide, a stripe of fine, hard sand. Vessels of all

sorts, from the large, heavy troll-boat, to the yawl and pram, drawn up along the shore—fishermen preparing their tackle, or sorting their spoil—and, nearer, the gloomy, old town-hall, the only indication of municipal dignity, a few groups of mariners, chiefly pilots, taking their quick, short walks backward and forward, every eye watchful of the signal from the offing—such was the squalid scene which first opened on the author of The Village!

"Nor was the landscape in the vicinity of a more engaging aspect: open commons and sterile farms, the soil, poor and sandy, the herbage, bare and rushy, the trees, 'few and far between,' and withered and stunted by the bleak breezes of the sea. The opening picture of The Village was copied, in every touch, from the scene of the poet's nativity and boyish days:—

'Lo! where the heath, with withering brake grown o'er, Lends the light turf that warms the neighboring poor; From thence a length of burning sand appears, Where the thin harvest waves its withered ears; Rank weeds, that every art and care defy, Reign o'er the land, and rob the blighted rye; There thistles spread their prickly arms afar, And to the ragged infants threaten war.'

"The broad river, called the Ald, approaches the sea close to Aldborough, within a few hundred yards, and then turning abruptly, continues to run for about ten miles parallel to the beach, from which a dreary stripe of marsh and waste alone divides it, until it at length finds its embouchure at Orford. The scenery of this river has been celebrated as lovely and delightful, in a poem called Slaughden Vale, written by Mr. James Bird, a friend of my father's; and old Camden talks of 'the beautiful vale of Slaughden.' I confess, however, that though I have ever found an indescribable charm in the very weeds of the place, I never could perceive its claims to beauty. Such as it is, it has furnished Mr. Crabbe with many of his happiest and most graphical descriptions; and the same may be said of the whole line of coast from Orford to Dunwich, every feature of which has, somewhere or other, been reproduced in his writings. The quay of Slaughden, in particular, has been painted with all the minuteness of a Dutch landscape:—

"For one destined to distinction as a portrayer of character," continues his son, "few scenes could have been more favorable than that of his infancy and boyhood. He was cradled among the rough sons of the ocean—a daily witness of unbridled passions, and of manners remote from the sameness and artificial smoothness of polished society. At home, as has already been hinted, he was subject to the caprices of a stern and imperious, though not unkindly nature; and probably few whom he could familiarly approach but had passed through some of those dark tragedies in which his future strength was to be exhibited. The common people of Aldborough in those days are described as—

Crabbe, though imbibing every thing relating to the sea, and sailors, and fishermen, was by no means disposed to be one of this class himself. He early exhibited a bookish turn, and was reckoned effeminate; but his father saw his talent, and gave him a good education. He was then put apprentice to a surgeon, who was also a farmer, and George alternately pounded the pestle and worked in the fields, till he was removed to another surgeon at Woodbridge. Here he became a member of a small literary club, which gave a new stimulus to his love of poetry, already sufficiently strong, and in his eighteenth year he fell in love with the young lady who was destined to be his wife. Before the expiration of his apprenticeship he had published a volume of poems. His apprenticeship terminated, he set out for London; but unfurnished with money to attend the hospitals, he remained awhile in mean lodgings in Whitechapel, and then returned to Aldborough, and after engaging himself as an assistant for a short time, commenced practice for himself. It would not do, however, his practice was

profitless; and as he filled up his leisure time by botanizing in the country, the people got a notion that he gathered his medicine out of the ditches. At length, starved out, he resolved to return to London as a literary adventurer. With £5 in his pocket, a present for the purpose, from Dudley North, brother to the candidate for Aldborough, he took his passage in a sloop for town.

In thinking of Crabbe, we generally picture him to ourselves as the well-to-do clergyman, comfortably inditing his verse in a goodly parsonage; but Crabbe commenced as a regular hack-author about town, and went through all the racking distress of that terrible life, utterly without funds, without patrons, or connections. Chatterton had perished in the desperate undertaking just before, and it appeared likely enough for a long time that Crabbe might perish too. In vain he wrote, nobody would publish; in vain he addressed ministers of state in verse and prose, nobody would hear him. He maintained this fearful struggle for twelve months. He had lodgings at a Mr. Vickery's, a hairdresser, near the Exchange, who afterward removed to Bishopsgate-street, whither he accompanied them. The people appeared to behave well to him, and gave him more trust than is usual with such people, though at length even their patience seems to have been exhausted, and he was threatened with a prison.

While he resided there he often spent his evenings at a small coffee-house near the Exchange, where he became acquainted with several clever young men, then beginning the world like himself. One of these was Bonnycastle, afterward master of the military academy at Woolwich; another was Isaac Dalby, afterward professor of mathematics in the military college of Marlowe; and a third, Reuben Burrow, who rose to high distinction in the service of the East India Company, and died in Bengal. To obtain healthy exercise, he used to walk much in the daytime; and would accompany Mr. Bonnycastle on his visits to different schools in the suburbs; but more frequently stole off alone into the country, with a small edition of Ovid, Horace, or Catullus, in his pocket. Two or three of these little volumes remained in his possession in later days, and he set a high value on them, saying they were his companions in his adversity. His favorite haunt was Hornsey wood, where he sought for plants and insects. On one occasion he had strolled too far from town to return, and having no money he was

compelled to lodge on a mow of hay, beguiling the time while it was light with reading Tibullus, and in the morning returned to town.

Of the depth of distress to which Crabbe was reduced, his journal, kept through that dark time, testified, but nothing more so than this prayer:—

"My God, my God, I put my trust in thee; my troubles increase, my soul is dismayed; I am heavy and in distress; all day long I call upon thee; O be thou my helper in the needful time of trouble.

"Why art thou so far from me, O my Lord? why hidest thou thy face? I am cast down; I am in poverty and affliction; be thou with me, O my God; let me not be wholly forsaken, O my Redeemer!

"Behold, I trust in thee, blessed Lord. Guide me, and govern me unto the end. O Lord, my salvation, be thou ever with me. Amen."