1/25 Not happy hour." The poet's comment may have meant something more than that so many of his Tales dealt with sad instances of human frailty. At that moment, and for three years longer, there hung over Crabbe's family life a cloud that never lifted--the hopeless illness of his wife. Two years before, Southey, in answer to a friend who had made some reference to Crabbe and his poetry, writes: "With Crabbe's poems I have been acquainted for about twenty years, having read them when a schoolboy on their first publication, and, by the help of _Elegant Extracts_, remembered from that time what was best worth remembering. |