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wants?" "Forgiveness," whispered the spirit, " pity, charity that is love." And her soul above its wreck of life cried for help that it might still have strength to aid another whose ruin was more utter than her own.

As if help could come down to her from out the vastness of the spheres, she drew her curtain and pressed her face against the pane to look up into the night. Lo! The great hollow of the firmament was ablaze with red, fleecy flame. The curtain of gray was withdrawn from the immaculate earth, and its inviolate snows throbbed and blushed rose-red beneath the coruscating glow of the overhanging heaven. Above, on a field of molten white, advanced and retreated the auroral hosts. Armies gleaming in prismatic hues, with streamers of green and rose, violet and gold, far afloat, were marshalling toward the zenith. Giant figures rushed onward like clouds driven before the wind, yet only to disperse and to fly back with trackless speed and banners amain into the infinite azure from whence they came. Through the ever-shifting phantasmagoria shone the steadfast stars. Ariadne's Crown was set in silver nimbus; Cassiopea's Chair was panoplied with violet lights; Capella, red and lurid, looked forth from a yellow aureola; spears of fire shot through and through the "mild influence" of the Pleiades; while the blazing arch of the zenith cast its projecting splendor southward till it spread like a veil of enchantment before the eyes of Orion.

"And

Was this phantasmal commotion but the outermost throb of an omnipotent solar storm that moment raging more than ninety millions of miles away? Did it flash from that central sphere to her vibrating sight in the twinkling of her eyelid? Then it was not difficult to discern in matter "the promise and potency of all terrestrial life," in matter thus quickened, poised, and upheld by unerring law and omnipotent Love! what are we?" she asked, looking inward upon the sleeping women on the bed. "What are we but atoms of that matter kindled by a spark of the Divine Flame? held by immutable law, and saved by illimitable Love!" And human passion, human sorrow, even the mighty ache of a human heart, seemed to dwindle before the significant blaze of elemental splendor. No less the morning dawned low and gray. There was the opaque sky. There was the wintry earth. There was the leaden atmosphere. There was the racking cough. There was life, - -as it is, and there, waiting but a little farther on, was Death.

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Why did I run the fearful risk of such a journey now?" repeated Linda in the comparative respite of one easy hour, as folded in a soft flannel wrapper of Agnes', wrapped in shawls and propped by pillows, she leaned back into the pale sunshine which later in the day stole into Evelyn's little front window. "I knew I must come now, or never. I had just learned where I knew I should not live to see another winter; no, nor through another spring." "Don't say so," said Agnes from the depths of her pitying heart. "The journey in such weather was enough to kill you. But you have survived it, and now when the south wind comes, the sunshine, and the wood flowers".

you were.

it.

"I shall go," said Linda without emotion. "I know Now I am here I can say I wish it. Not but what life looks pleasanter to me than it has". since I lost him, and knew it, she thought; but she said "since you went away. But I am done with it, done; I know

it."

"What made you come, Linda ?" "Remorse."

"Oh, Linda!"

"Remorse, remorse, remorse!

Do you know what

it is like? It"-bending forward with a hissing whisper "it is hell! There is no other hell. I am sure of it. I don't know where it ends, but it begins here," and she struck her heart.

"Linda," said Agnes calmly and earnestly," you are not strong enough to bear any excitement of feeling, The slightest will bring on that dreadful cough. Let the past go! Let it all go," she said with visible emotion. "We cannot bring it back, we cannot change it, we cannot ever forget it. But we can forgive it. We can forgive it, Linda." "Can you forgive it?"

"Yes. Now I can say yes with my heart and soul. I am not sure, not sure that even yesterday I could have said so without a single pang of reservation. I am so human, I—I loved him so much, Linda. But now that I see you, I forgive everything, everything; and if I have ever wronged you by even a thought, may you forgive me, and may God. But we must not talk about it. Even I am not strong enough for thatand you, it will kill you. You must not."

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"I will," and the thin lips closed tight as of old. "I came here to talk. If it kills me, let it. It is the only chance of righteous death left to me. It's my last chance to cast off this load this awful load here; she again put her hand on her heart.

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"If you could know what I suffered when I did not know where you were, when I thought that I should never know, you would be glad now that I have this chance to cast my burden off."

"How did you find out, Linda?"

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By Mary Ben. And she would never have told me, for I had met her many times before and she gave no hint, - but she saw how I felt, how I looked; she knew it was my last chance, and told me. And Captain Ben brought me to Boston. It was a dreadful night; but the waves were smoother than the railroad. I thought the motion of the cars would kill me, but it did not. I was to live to reach here, and you. Why don't you ask me a single question?"

"I cannot think of one that is not too full of pain, Linda, to us both."

"Pain! I expect pain. What else have I ever had on earth? I like it, compared with remorse. You can never know how much I did to hurt you, to injure you. That's what I've come to tell, so I can die easy."

"Don't, Linda; I'm afraid to hear it. Perhaps, after all, I could not bear it. I might not be able to forgive you, Linda. Than that, I would rather never know what I had to forgive."

"If you know and don't forgive, the burden will be yours. Till I confess and ask forgiveness, 'tis mine. I can bear it no longer. I must roll it off. You must take it. You are full of life. I am almost dead."

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Forgive me, Linda! It is only when I think of him, that I fear I may not be strong enough to forgive."

"It is only when I think of him that I know I have sinned enough to curse my soul forever!"

"Oh, Linda, why didn't you leave us to each other? We were everything to each other at first! How could you come between us? He was all I had!" "How could you come between us? He was all I had, — all, all, all," and the sunken eyes flamed in their

sockets. "Didn't I nurse him when he was a baby? Didn't I beg food for him when he would have starved, else? Didn't I worship him as a god, and drudge for him like the slave that I was, only that you, with your soft eyes and soft voice and soft hands, when mine were as hard as horns, might lead him away from me into the moonlight under the maples at Ulm, while I sat and waited and waited alone, or followed you alone? How desolate I was. How I hated you. How I vowed that I would avenge my loss; that I would work your woe; that as you took him from me, so he should be taken from you; that if I had him not, neither should you."

"Was there no difference, Linda? He was like a brother to you. He was my husband. I loved him when I was a little girl. I never dreamed of taking him from you. I would have been willing, glad that he should be your devoted brother always." "Brother! You never knew, you never can know, what he was to me ! He was everything. I worshipped him. My life began in him and ended in him. I had no other thought. I was glad to be his slave. I would have done anything he told me to do, no matter how wicked because I loved him. I would do anything, be anything, but give him up. Yet I had to give him upat last. It killed me.

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"I did. I was given over to the devil. Where do you think I found them? Under the blotter, between it and his desk-cover. They were so thin, they made no perceptible rise in the thick paper, yet I felt them under my finger-ends. Of course I was searching. Something was going on, I knew, and I was determined to know just what it was for my own ends. She never could have married him if it had not been for me. I told her so. Her thanks were, when she got him, she turned me out of doors."

---

"Linda, do you realize the full import of what you are telling me-how it wrings my heart to sit here and listen to it?"

"Yes, I do. But I must tell it, and I must tell you. I can't die with it all in me, can I? I must confess. I am not a Catholic, to go to a priest. If I went to a thousand, I could not roll all the burden off till I came to you.

"I felt full of triumph when I saw you go down the lawn path with Vida that night. Of course I saw you. I put my poison on the bureau. I was not so stupid as not to watch the effect. I knew at tea that you had read the letters. How still Vida was, how softly you went out; but I heard you. I watched you till your figure was lost, down by the Sound."

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Did you feel no compunction, no pity, Linda?" "Not then. I was too busy securing my end; too hopeful of gaining it. Fool! In spite of her, I did not believe that he would marry. I thought that he never could; that the law would prevent. Her lover he might be, but I-I would be the mistress of his house, with the power I wanted over him. I soon discovered that if you staid away he could get a divorce in two years. Then I depended on her aversion to marriage. It didn't amount to a straw, in the end. It came that my last chance was to make peace with her. I told her about the letters, as if my only motive in doing it was to get you out of her way.

"He was never the same to me after you went, even before he married her. She would not have me in the house when she was married, but it was not all the thought of her that made him shrink from the sight of me. I made him think of you. I knew it. I wished him reminded of you when I saw what power she had gained. You were never a match for me, not in my way; she was. She could not conquer me, but she could kill me by inches. "Her power was not all of love. He loved you, I always knew it, loved you all that he could love any woman. He was fascinated by her. You know how vain he was. Think what it must have been to him to be so flattered and followed by such a woman- so pretty, so rich, so tempting every way. She beguiled him the more, because she was fascinated by him. I really think she was at first. She got over it; too late she thought, for she had married him, and you know she never intended to marry any man. But her power did not go with her fascination. She had too much money for that. Think what that money brought him! Everything that he wanted most that he had always wanted most. And with his temperament all that splendid ease was the dearer and the harder to give up because he was not born to it, and had wanted it all hisIt can't be helped, Linda,' he said. 'We are not deallife more than anything else. When he had to choose between me and his pleasures, he chose his pleasures. He would have been false to himself if he hadn't."

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I don't think that I understand you," said Agnes. "I never knew you to be in the way of his pleasures, Linda."

"Of course I never should have been if she had consented to live with me. But when she declared that I should not stay in any house where they were, he was compelled to choose between me and what she gave him. He knew very well that she would not continue to give it if he set his authority against her will. Authority! He never had any authority with her! I deserved better treatment of her. I sold my soul to work out her ends. I put those two letters on the bureau that made you go away!"

"Linda!"

"What do you think she said? She looked me steadily in the eyes and answered in the sweetest voice, I understand you perfectly. I read your face the first time I saw it. I felt sure that there was no end to the trouble you made, and always made, between Mr. and Mrs. King. Now I can find more agreeable employment than watching you. You know what I mean when I say that in the whole world there is not a house big enough to hold you and me. You must go. You shall have all the money that you need, but live where I am you cannot !'

"It was then he chose between me and his pleasure.

ing with Agnes now, but with a woman whose slightest wish has been a law ever since she was born.'

"I spurned her money- I hated it. And yet the time came at last when I could not live without it — or his; he took pity on me, and always sent it in his own name. I went back to Ulm to my trade; but at last I could not work. Yet it's not three months since I stopped."

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You were not able to work three months ago!" said Agnes with compassion.

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No, I was not able to work one year ago; but I did. The gnawing at my heart (I have a heart) was worse than all the pain in my lungs. I did not want to think of you. The more I tried to forget you the more distinctly you came back, till at last you staid with me all the time. If I shut my eyes, I saw you; if I opened them, I saw you. I saw you in the light, I saw

you in the dark. As I grew weaker I had one thought only, how I had tried to injure you."

"You tried to help me once, Linda. I should have died in that fearful sickness if it had not been for your nursing."

"Yes. But it was my instinct for nursing, rather than any desire that you should live, that made me do it. I brought you back to life about as a cat does a mouse, to have one chance more to maul it."

"Linda, you could not have been so deliberately cruel!"

"Yes, I was. Just as I loved him, I hated you. I wanted to harm you because you had taken him. If you had not, I should never have meddled with you. You'll never know in how many ways I harmed you. I used to give him false impressions about you. I knew just how to do it. I knew him better than he knew himself. I could touch a spring that would change the whole current of his thought and feeling, and he never dream what did it. So I harmed you all the time. You knew you were harmed, but in how many ways you never imagined. You would have had some trials, no doubt, if you had been left alone; any woman would, in being his wife; but it was I who destroyed your married life. It was I who prepared the way, and made triumph not only possible but easy to Circe Sutherland. I did it - I did it."

"I have prayed over and over that I might be shown wherein I erred, wherein I might have made all different," said Agnes. "Of some things I am certain. If I had been less sensitive to his careless moods, more sunny, less silent and sad, less severe in my mental judgment on him, things would have gone better with us, I feel sure now. Then I was too young, too weak to know."

"You were not perfect," said Linda. "You moped too much took everything too much to heart, that is certain; but if you hadn't—if you had been anything, everything that you were not, under the same conditions you would have been no match against such a nature, experience, and purpose as mine."

"What makes me sorriest is to have you say 'purpose,' Linda. The being overcome of evil I know all about; but the purpose, the fixed, cruel purpose to work another's harm I cannot understand. If you would only not say that, Linda."

"I must. Understand'? You will never understand! Can you understand a whole life that has been one long hunger for love never satisfied? What do you know about such a life? Nothing. Do you know what it is to long with the first longing of your childish heart for a home-a true home; to grow gray, to die, yet never to have one! Do you know what it is to cry in your inmost being for a child, your very own; cry to hear a baby voice say mother, to feel baby lips clinging to your own, to feel that there is something in the world bone of your bone, flesh of your flesh; to cry for this child in silent anguish to see it, all these, never, never yours?

another's

"Do you know what it is to love one with your first consciousness, to nurse him with almost holy hands, to go hungry for him, to slave for him, to bear poverty, ignominy for his sake, to sin for him, to live for him with no thought or desire in which he is not, only to see bim go farther and farther from you, till wholly lost? Only to see him possessed by another, living a life with her in which you have no share; to know that while he is all the world to you, you are next to nothing to

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him? Could you look upon her hour by hour, see her possessing all you desired, possessing your idol — the husband, the child, the home, all hers, while you stood without, tolerated, but not desired, endured, but not needed, and not feel your heart harden within you to hate? If I could have nothing, why should you have everything? You shall not,' I said. Would you not have said it? I said it, and I did it. And I have lived to repent, and am here. When I came to see her, to know her, then I realized how little you had been to blame for anything that I ever endured. Then I realized how cruel I had been to you how wicked. I have been a wicked woman; I know it; I might have been a better one if I had tried. I was too wretched to try. Life had wrought me a hideous wrong, I thought. I wreaked my injury upon the innocent. Think

life never,

"It was all for the want of a little love. what it would have been to you, in all your never to have been truly loved once. What would it have made you!" and the woman's voice went out in one long wail of anguish.

"I will love you, Linda, as long as you live," said Agnes, taking the white face within her tender hands, the tears from her tender eyes falling upon it as she bent and kissed the cold forehead and then the quivering lips.

"Vida!" she called; and the susceptible child, as she entered the room, feeling the atmosphere about these two women, and moved by the sight of their tears and especially by the attitude of her mother, went straight to them, and stretching her arms about both, said: "Dear mamma! dear Auntie Linda, I love you too." Thus the old life was buried beyond the possibility of resurrection.

Athel Dane found a new object of interest in the log-house beneath the Pinnacle, a woman sick unto death, who was yet unreconciled to fate, and who faced eternity with a stoical apathy more appalling

than fear.

"She has loved and suffered much, and has been most unhappy. Show her tenderly as you can the dawn of the Hereafter," said Agnes to him with a voice full of tears; and this was the only allusion that she ever made to Linda's past. Thus with gentle eyes and tender voice the rector of Dufferin, into whose breast it seemed had come the heart of a little child, talked with this unfortunate daughter of earth, of the final transition from death unto life which the Father grants his beloved children. He helped her to see that she "would not die in dying, any more than the plants die that wither in the later summer and shake out their seeds to send them flying on the wind, to light and spring and blossom again in the heart of another summer;" that God's Hereafter would be granted her for love and peace no less than his Now. If in solemn unction he intoned with her the church's prayers for the contrite, with enkindled vision he pointed out to her the promise of help, growth, and fruition whose harvest awaits the justified beyond the sowing of these brief and stormy earthly years.

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was something in their sympathy which she had never seen before, which made her heart beat faster.

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Agnes," said Linda, "I have told Mr. Dane the story of your past—all of it. He knows everything.

I have kept nothing back. My sin is ever before me -I have confessed my fault not to him, but to God. I want to drop all of my burden that I may, day by day, as I go on. It is but right that he should know how you have loved and suffered."

Athel Dane uttered not a word of sympathy. In that one swift, measureless glance his spirit told what no word could express. Mental communion, intellectual companionship, she had shared with him for months now. They had given a new value to her life. But this glance held something more the recognition in sympathy of an awakening human heart. What had not her life measured of weariness, loneliness, sorrow, since such a glance was hers! Now like dew from heaven it fell upon her soul. When she prayed that night, she thanked God for it as for a heavenly good.

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The swift glory of the Northern latter May burst in a single night upon the world. "Agnes," said Linda suddenly, as propped in her arm-chair she looked out upon the Pinnacle, a mountain of emerald transfigured in the gold of the setting sun, Agnes, you will see Cyril sometime, perhaps before very long. I know you will. You are his wife. When you do see him, try to tell him how I loved him. Because I loved him too much, I grew wicked, cruel. I feel now the meaning in the Litany of From all inordinate and sinful affections, good Lord, deliver us.' Inordinate, that expresses my love for him. Could I help it? I do not know. I do not know how to love him less, even now. I am happier because I see him in the face of his child. My heart cries now with the want that he should know how much I loved him. He was my all. Tell him, Agnes. I am glad I am going. If I lived, I might be just as wicked to you again. I do not know. I know I love you now. You are sure, quite sure, that you have forgiven everything?"

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Sure, Linda. You have grown very dear to me." Through our Lord, who giveth us the victory.' How strange, Agnes, that I should understand these words through my own heart at last.”

Vida came and laid her cheek against Linda's. golden head touched the head of snow.

"My darling, my own darling!"

adventure with less promising prospects. Any sensible adviser would have told him to prefer starvation in his native village to starvation in the back lanes of London. The adviser would, perhaps, have been vexed, but would not have been confuted by Crabbe's good fortune. We should still recommend a youth not to jump into a river, though, of a thousand who try the experiment one may happen to be rescued by a benevolent millionaire, and be put in the road to fortune. The chances against Crabbe were enormous. Literature, considered as a trade, is a

good deal better at the present day than it was towards the end of the last century, and yet any one who has an opportunity of comparing the failures to the successes, would be more apt to quote Chatterton than Crabbe as a precedent for youthful aspirants. Crabbe, indeed, might say for himself that literature was the only path open to him. His father was collector of salt duties at Aldborough, a position, as one may imagine, of no very great emolument. He had, however, given his son the chance of acquiring a smattering of "scholarship," in the sense in which that word is used by the less educated lower classes. To the slender store of learning acquired in a cheap country school, the lad managed to add such medical training as could be picked up during an apprenticeship in an apothecary's shop. With this provision of knowledge he tried to obtain practice in his native town. He failed to get any patients of the paying variety. Crabbe was clumsy and absent-minded to the end of his life. He had, moreover, a taste for botany, and the shrewd inhabitants of Aldborough, with that perverse tendency to draw inferences which is characteristic of people who can't reason, argued that as he picked up his samples in the ditches he ought to sell the medicines presumably compounded from them for nothing. In one way or other, poor Crabbe had sunk to the verge of distress. Of course, under these circumstances, he had fallen in love and engaged himself at the age of eighteen to a young lady, apparently as poor as himself. Of course, too, he called Miss Elmy "Mira," and addressed her in verses which occasionally appeared in the poet's corner of a certain Wheble's Magazine. My Mira, said the young surgeon in a style which must have been rather antiquated even in Aldborough

My Mira, shepherds, is as fair

As sylvan nymphs who haunt the vale; As sylphs who dwell in purest air,

As fays who skim the dusky dale.

Moreover he won a prize for a poem on Hope, and composed an "Allegorical Fable" and a piece called "The Atheist Reclaimed;" and, in short, added plentifully to the vast rubbish-heap old-world verses, now decayed beHer yond the industry of the most persevering of Dryasdusts. Nay, he even succeeded by some mysterious means in getting one of his poems published separately. It was called " Inebriety," and was an imitation of Pope. Here is a couplet by way of sample:

The after rays of the sun shot upward as at its rising. Wood, lake, Pinnacle -the new earth in the breathing freshness of its tender bloom, took on a swift overflowing radiance. Old things had passed away.

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Champagne the courtier drinks the spleen to chase, The colonel Burgundy and Port his Grace. from the satirical the poet diverges into the mock heroic :

See Inebriety! her wand she waves

And lo! her pale, and lo! her purple slaves.

The interstices of the box of clothing which went with him from Aldborough to London were doubtless crammed with much waste paper scribbled over with these feeble echoes of Pope's Satires, and with appeals to nymphs, muses, and shepherds. Crabbe was one of those men who are born a generation after their natural epoch, and was as little accessible to the change of fashion in poetry as in costume. When, therefore, he finally resolved to hazard his own fate and Mira's upon the results of his London adventure, the literary goods at his disposal were already somewhat musty in character. The year 1780, in which he reached London, marks the very nadir of English poetry. From the days of Elizabeth to our own there bas never been so absolutely barren a period. People had

become fairly tired of the jingle of Pope's imitators, and the new era had not dawned. Goldsmith and Gray, both recently dead, serve to illustrate the condition in which the most exquisite polish and refinement of language has been developed until there is a danger of sterility. The "Elegy " and the "Deserted Village" are inimitable poems: but we feel that the intellectual fibre of the poets has become dangerously delicate. The critical faculty could not be stimulated further without destroying all spontaneous impulse. The reaction to a more masculine and passionate school was imminent; and if the excellent Crabbe could have put into his box a few of Burns's lyrics, or even a copy of Cowper's "Task," one might have augured better for his prospects. But what chance was there for a man who could still be contentedly invoking the muse and stringing together mechanic echoes of Pope's couplets? How could he expect to charm the jaded faculties of a generation which was already beginning to heave and stir with a longing for some fresh excitement? For a year the fate which has overtaken so many rash literary adventurers seemed to be approaching steadily. One temporary gleam of good fortune cheered him for a time. He persuaded an enterprising publisher to bring out a poem called "The Candidate," which had some faint success, though ridiculed by the reviewers. Unluckily the publisher became bankrupt, and Crabbe was thrown upon his resources - the poor three pounds and box of surgical instruments aforesaid. How he managed to hold out for a year is a mystery. It was lucky for him, as he intimates, that he had never heard of the fate of Chatterton, who had poisoned himself just ten years before. A journal which he wrote for Mira is published in his life, and gives an account of his feelings during three months of his cruel probation. He applies for a situation as amanuensis offered in an advertisement, and comforts himself on failing with the reflection that the advertiser was probably a sharper. He writes piteous letters to publishers and gets, of course, the stereotyped reply with which the most amiable of publishers must damp the ardor of aspiring genius. The disappointment is not much softened by the publisher's statement that "he does not mean by this to insinuate any want of merit in the poem, but rather a want of attention in the public." Bit by bit his surgical instruments go to the pawnbroker. When one publisher sends his polite refusal poor Crabbe has only sixpence-farthing in the world, which, by the purchase of a pint of porter, is reduced to fourpence-halfpenny. The exchequer fills again by the disappearance of his wardrobe and his watch; but ebbs under a new temptation. He buys some odd volumes of Dryden for three-and-sixpence, and on coming home tears his only coat, which he manages to patch tolerably with a borrowed needle and thread, pretending, with a pathetic shi't, that they are required to stitch together manuscripts instead of broadcloth. And so for a year the wolf creeps nearer to the door, whilst Crabbe gallantly keeps up appearances and spirits. And yet he tries to preserve a show of good spirits in the Journal to Mira, and continues to labor at his verse-making. Perhaps, indeed, it may be regarded as a bad symptom that he is reduced to distracting his mind by making an analysis of a dull sermon. "There is nothing particular in it," he admits, but at least it is better, he thinks, to listen to a bad sermon than to the blasphemous rant of deistical societies. Indeed, Crabbe's spirit was totally unlike the desperate pride of Chatterton. He was of the patient enduring tribe, and comforts himself by religious meditations, which are, perhaps, rather commonplace in expression, but when read by the light of the distresses he was enduring, show a brave and unembittered spirit, not to be easily respected too highly. Starvation seemed to be approaching; or, at least, the only alternative was the abandonment of his ambition, and acceptance, if he could get it, of the post of druggist's assistant. He had but one resource left; and that not of the most promising kind. Crabbe, amongst his other old-fashioned notions, had a strong belief in the traditional patron. Johnson might have given him some hints upon the subject; but luckily, as it turned out, be

pursued what Chesterfield's correspondent would have thought the most hopeless of all courses. He wrote to Lord North, who was at that moment occupied in contemplating the final results of the ingenious policy by which America was lost to England, and probably consigned Crabbe's letter to the waste-paper basket. Then he tried the effect of a copy of verses, beginning:

Ah! Shelburne, blest with all that's good or great,
T'adorn a rich or save a sinking state.

He added a letter saying that as Lord North had not an swered him, Lord Shelburne would probably be glad to supply the needs of a starving apothecary turned poet. Another copy of verses was inclosed, pointing out that Shelburne's reputed liberality would be repaid in the usual coin:

Then shall my grateful strains his ear rejoice, His name harmonious thrilled on Mira's voice; Round the reviving bays new sweets shall spring, And Shelburne's fame through laughing valleys ring! Nobody can blame North and Shelburne for not acting the part of good Samaritans. He, at least, may throw the first stone who has always taken the trouble to sift the grain from the chaff amidst all the begging letters which he has received, and who has never lamented that his benevolence outran his discretion. But there was one man in

England at the time who had the rare union of qualities necessary for Crabbe's purpose. Burke is a name never to be mentioned without reverence; not only because Burke was incomparably the greatest of all English polit ical writers, and a standing refutation of the theory which couples rhetorical excellence with intellectual emptiness, but also because he was a man whose glowing hatred of all injustice and sympathy for all suffering never evaporated in empty words. His fine literary perception enabled him to detect the genuine excellence which underlay the superficial triviality of Crabbe's verses. He discovered the genius where men like North and Shelburne might excusably see nothing but the mendicant versifier; and a benevolence still rarer than his critical ability forbade him to satisfy his conscience by the sacrifice of a five-pound note. When, by the one happy thought of his life, Crabbe appealed to Burke's sympathy, the poet was desperately endeavoring to get a poem through the press. But he owed fourteen pounds, and every application to friends as poor as himself, and to patrons upon whom he had no claims, had been unsuccessful. Nothing but ruin was before him. After writing to Burke he spent the night in pacing Westminster Bridge. The letter on which his fate hung is the more pathetic because it is free from those questionable poetical flourishes which had failed to conciliate his former patrons. It tells his story frankly and forcibly. Burke, however, was not a rich man, and was at one of the most exciting periods of his political career. His party was at last fighting its way to power by means of the general resentment against the gross mismanagement of their antagonists. A perfunctory discharge of the duty of charity would have been pardonable; but from the moment when Crabbe addressed Burke the poor man's fortune was made. Burke's glory rests upon services of much more importance to the world at large than even the preservation to the country of a man of genuine power. Yet there are few actions on which he could reflect with more unalloyed satisfaction; and the case is not a solitary one in Burke's history. A political triumph may often be only hastened a year or two by the efforts of even a great leader; but the salvage of a genius which would otherwise have been hopelessly wrecked in the deep waters of poverty is so much clear gain to mankind. One circumstance may be added as oddly characteristic of Crabbe. He always spoke of his benefactor with becoming gratitude; and many years afterwards Moore and Rogers thought that they might extract some interesting anecdotes of the great author from the now celebrated poet. Burke, as we know, was a man whom you would discover to be remarkable if you stood with him for five minutes under a haystack in a shower. Crabbe stayed in his house for months

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