criptions,
when once he found where his true strength lay, owed a charm for which
readers of poetry had long been hungering. The floral outfit of pastoral
poets, when Crabbe began to write, was a _hortus siccus_ indeed.
Distinctness in painting the common growth of field and hedgerow may be
said to have had its origin with Crabbe. Gray and Goldsmith had their
own rare and special gifts to which Crabbe could lay no claim. But
neither these poets nor even Thomson, whose avowed purpose was to depict
nature, are Crabbe's rivals in this respect. Byron in the most
hackneyed of all eulogies upon Crabbe defined him as "Nature's sternest
painter yet the best." The criticism would have been juster had he
written that Crabbe was the truest painter of Nature in her less lovely
phases. Crabbe was not stern in his attitude either to his fellow-men,
or to the varying aspects of Nature, although for the first years of his
life he was in habitual contact with the less alluring side of both.

But it was not only through a closer intimacy with Nature that Crabbe
was being unconsciously prepared for high poetic service. Hope deferred
and disappointments, poverty and anxiety, were doing their beneficent
work. Notwithstanding certain early dissipations and escapades which his
fellow-townsmen did not fail to remember against him in the later days
of his success, Crabbe was of a genuinely religious temperament, and had
been trained by a devout mother. Moreover, through a nearer and more
sympathetic contact with the lives and sorrows of the poor suffering, he
was storing experience full of value for the future, though he was still
and for some time longer under the spell of the dominant poetic fashion,
and still hesitated to "look into his heart and write."

But the time was bound to come when he must put his poetic quality to a
final test. In London only could he hope to prove whether the verse, of
which he was accumulating a store, was of a kind that men would care
for. He must discover, and speedily, whether he was to take a modest
place in the ranks of literature, or one even more humble in the shop of
an apothecary. After weighing his chances and his risks for many a weary
day he took the final resolution, and his son has told us the
circumstances:--

"One gloomy day towards the close of the year 1779, he had strolled to
a bleak and cheerless part of the cliff above Aldeburgh, called The
Marsh Hill, brooding as he went over the humiliati