All along the road to his beloved’s house, nature wears this “wedding-garment.”  On his arrival, however, the sun fades suddenly from the landscape.  The lady is from home:  gone to visit a friend a few miles distant, not so far but that her lover can follow,—­but the slight, real or imaginary, probably the latter, comes as such a rebuff, that during the “little more—­how far away!” that he travels, the country, though now richer and lovelier, seems to him (as once to Hamlet) a mere “pestilent congregation of vapours.”  But in the end he finds his mistress and learns that she had gone on duty, not for pleasure,—­and they return happy again, and so happy indeed, that he has neither eyes nor thoughts for any of nature’s fertilities or barrennesses—­only for the dear one at his side.

I have already had occasion to quote a few lines from this beautiful poem, to show Crabbe’s minute observation—­in his time so rare—­of flowers and birds and all that makes the charm of rural scenery—­but I must quote some more: 

  “‘Various as beauteous, Nature, is thy face,’
  Exclaim’d Orlando:  ’all that grows has grace: 
  All are appropriate—­bog, and marsh, and fen,
  Are only poor to undiscerning men;
  Here may the nice and curious eye explore
  How Nature’s hand adorns the rushy moor,
  Here the rare moss in secret shade is found,
  Here the sweet myrtle of the shaking ground;
  Beauties are these that from the view retire,
  But well repay th’ attention they require;
  For these my Laura will her home forsake,
  And all the pleasures they afford, partake.’”

And then follows a masterly description of a gipsy encampment on which the lover suddenly comes in his travels.  Crabbe’s treatment of peasant life has often been compared to that of divers painters—­the Dutch school, Hogarth, Wilkie, and others—­and the following curiously suggests Frederick Walker’s fine drawing, The Vagrants: 

  “Again, the country was enclosed, a wide
  And sandy road has banks on either side;
  Where, lo! a hollow on the left appear’d,
  And there a gipsy tribe their tent had rear’d;
  ’Twas open spread, to catch the morning sun,
  And they had now their early meal begun,
  When two brown boys just left their grassy seat,
  The early Trav’ller with their prayers to greet: 
  While yet Orlando held his pence in hand,
  He saw their sister on her duty stand;
  Some twelve years old, demure, affected, sly,
  Prepared the force of early powers to try;
  Sudden a look of languor he descries,
  And well-feigned apprehension in her eyes;
  Train’d but yet savage in her speaking face,
  He mark’d the features of her vagrant race;
  When a light laugh and roguish leer express’d
  The vice implanted in her youthful breast: 
  Forth from the tent her elder brother came,
  Who seem’d offended, yet forbore to blame
  The young designer, but could only trace