"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 what we call immortality." Besides the stories selected for abridgment in the volume there were passages, from Tales not there included, which FitzGerald was never weary of citing in his letters, to show his friends how true a poet was lying neglected of men. One he specially loved is the description of an autumn day in _The Maid's Story_:-- "There was a day, ere yet the autumn closed, When, ere her wintry wars, the earth reposed; When from the yellow weed the feathery crown, Light as the curling smoke, fell slowly down; When the winged insect settled in our sight, And waited wind to recommence her flight; When the wide river was a silver sheet, And on the ocean slept th' unanchor'd fleet, When from our garden, as we looked above, There was no cloud, and nothing seemed to move." Another passage, also in Crabbe's sweeter vein, forms the conclusion of the whole poem. It is where the elder brother hands over to the younger the country house that is to form the future home of his wife and children:--