"Upon the billows rising--all the deep Is restless change: the waves so swelled and steep, Breaking and sinking, and the sunken swells Nor one, one moment, in its station dwells. * * * * * Curled as they come, they strike with furious force, And then, renewing, take their grating course, Raking the rounded flints, which ages past Rolled by their rage, and shall to ages last. * * * * * In shore, their passage tribes of sea-gulls urge, And drop for prey within the sweeping surge, Oft in the rough opposing blast they fly Far back, then turn and all their force apply, While to the storm they give their weak complaining cry, Or clap the sleek white pinion on the breast, And in the restless ocean dip for rest." {234} Fashions of poets and of poetry may go by, but such scenes on those North Sea shores will never go by. Crabbe was son of a customs' man, of small, turbulent character, and the boy had starveling education; he picked up so much as qualified him at length for surgeon (or doctor, as we say) in that small shore town, but gained little: so, threw all behind him--a girl he loved, and a town he did not love--and with three guineas in his pocket, and a few manuscript poems, set off for London. He was there, indeed, in the very times we have talked of; when wits met at the Turk's Head, when Fox thundered in Parliament, when Sterne was just dead; but who should care for this stout young fellow from the shore? One man--one only, does care; it is the warm Irish-hearted Edmund Burke, who being appealed to and having read the verses which the adventurer brought to his notice, befriends him, takes him to his house, makes him know old Dr. Johnson; and his first book is launched and talked of under their patronage. Then this great friend Burke conspires religiously with the Bishop of Norwich to plant the poet in the Church. Why not? He has some Latin; he {235} means well, and can write a sermon. So we find him returned to that wild North Sea shore with a little church to feed, and the church people, in their turn, to feed him. But the arrangement does not run smoothly; those verses of his, unlike most rural verse, have shown all the darker colors of peasant life; if full of sympathy, they were full of bitter, homely truth. The muck, the mire, the griefs, the crimes, the unthrift, the desolation, have given sombre tint to his village pictures; perhaps those shore people resent it; perhaps he is incapable of the cheeriness which should brighten charity; at any rate he goes away under private preferment to a private chaplaincy at Belvoir Castle, the seat of the Duke of Rutland.