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:—­

  “It is thy wife’s, and will thy children’s be,
  Earth, wood, and water! all for thine and thee.
       * * * * *
  There wilt thou soon thy own Matilda view,
  She knows our deed, and she approves it too;
  Before her all our views and plans were laid,
  And Jacques was there to explain and to persuade. 
  Here on this lawn thy boys and girls shall run,
  And play their gambols when their tasks are done,
  There, from that window shall their mother view
  The happy tribe, and smile at all they do;
  While thou, more gravely, hiding thy delight
  Shalt cry, ‘O! childish!’ and enjoy the sight.”

FitzGerald’s selections are made with the skill and judgment we should expect from a critic of so fine a taste, but it may be doubted whether any degree of skill could have quite atoned for one radical flaw in his method.  He seems to have had his own misgivings as to whether he was not, by that method, giving up one real secret of Crabbe’s power.  After quoting Sir Leslie Stephen’s most true remark that “with all its short-and long-comings Crabbe’s better work leaves its mark on the reader’s mind and memory as only the work of genius can, while so many a more splendid vision of the fancy slips away, leaving scarce a mark behind.”  FitzGerald adds:  “If this abiding impression result (as perhaps in the case of Richardson or Wordsworth) from being, as it were, soaked in through the longer process by which the man’s peculiar genius works, any abridgement, whether of omission or epitome, will diminish from the effect of the whole.”  FitzGerald is unquestionably in sight of a truth here.  The parallel with Wordsworth is indeed not exact, for