In the footsteps of Borrow & Fitzgerald . that lesser Suffolk poetRobert Bloomfield, suffered from intensephysical weakness, and the depressing influ-ence of his native heath made him wellnigha melancholian. He never either forgot orforgave his birthplace or its inhabitants. OfSlaughden—hateful name !—a part of Alde-burgh, where Crabbe worked as a quaylabourer, he paints a dismal picture :— Here samphire banks and saltwort bound the flood,There stakes and seaweed withering on the mud ;And higher up a ridge of all things base,Which some strong tide has rolld upon the place. The people are even
In the footsteps of Borrow & Fitzgerald . that lesser Suffolk poetRobert Bloomfield, suffered from intensephysical weakness, and the depressing influ-ence of his native heath made him wellnigha melancholian. He never either forgot orforgave his birthplace or its inhabitants. OfSlaughden—hateful name !—a part of Alde-burgh, where Crabbe worked as a quaylabourer, he paints a dismal picture :— Here samphire banks and saltwort bound the flood,There stakes and seaweed withering on the mud ;And higher up a ridge of all things base,Which some strong tide has rolld upon the place. The people are even worse than thedistrict :— Here joyless roam a wild, amphibious sullen woe displayed in every face,Who far from civil arts and social fly,And scowl at strangers with suspicious eye. Crabbe watches the swallows from thebeach, waiting for a favouring wind to leaveso dismal a place, and remarks that he, likethem, waited for a favourable time to fleefrom the shores where guilt and faminereign. The bold, artful, surly, savage. OF BORROW AND FITZGERALD 137 race are only skilled in fishing, or, asCrabbe quaintly puts it, to take the iinnytribe. Those who were not fishers werewreckers, or something akin to them, forthey bend their eager eye on the unfor-tunate vessel that is driven near the shoreto be either theirs or the oceans miserableprey. The description that Crabbe givesof Aldeburgh is as true to-day as it waswhen he wrote it. An almost noisomemelancholy hangs about Slaughden ; at lowtide a few fishing-boats lie drunk uponthe ooze ; on the bank of the river are severalold hulks, some of them turned into habita-tions for fisher-folk. These would tend tomake some places picturesque, but they onlyadd to Slaughdens unrelieved FitzGerald often sailed from Wood-bridge to Slaughden, and whilst viewing thedreary scene he says : The melancholy ofSlaughden last night, with the same sloopssticking sidelong in the mud as sixty yearsago ! But if the district h
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1900, bookdecade1910, bookpublisherlondo, bookyear1915
