e _The
Library_ and _The Village._ Crabbe afterwards learned that the lines
which first convinced Burke that a new and genuine poet had arisen were
the following from _The Village,_ in which the author told of his
resolution to leave the home of his birth and try his fortune in the
city of wits and scholars--

"As on their neighbouring beach yon swallows stand
And wait for favouring winds to leave the land;
While still for flight the ready wing is spread:
So waited I the favouring hour, and fled;
Fled from those shores where guilt and famine reign,
And cried, 'Ah! hapless they who still remain--
Who still remain to hear the ocean roar;
Whose greedy waves devour the lessening shore;
Till some fierce tide, with more imperious sway,
Sweeps the low hut and all it holds away;
When the sad tenant weeps from door to door,
And begs a poor protection from the poor!"

Burke might well have been impressed by such a passage. In some other
specimens of Crabbe's verse, submitted at the same time to his judgment,
the note of a very different school was dominant. But here for the
moment appears a fresher key and a later model. In the lines just quoted
the feeling and the cadence of _The Traveller_ and _The Deserted
Village_ are unmistakable. But if they suggest comparison with the
exquisite passage in the latter beginning--

"And as the hare, whom hounds and horns pursue,
Pants to the place from which it first she flew,"

they also suggest a contrast. Burke's experienced eye would detect that
if there was something in Crabbe's more Pope-like couplets that was not
found in Pope, so there was something here more poignant than even in
Goldsmith.

Crabbe's son reflected with just pride that there must have been
something in his father's manners and bearing that at the outset invited
Burke's confidence and made intimacy at once possible, although Crabbe's
previous associates had been so different from the educated gentry of
London. In telling of his now-found poet a few days afterwards to Sir
Joshua Reynolds, Burke said that he had "the mind and feelings of a
gentleman." And he acted boldly on this assurance by at once placing
Crabbe on the footing of a friend, and admitting him to his family
circle. "He was invited to Beaconsfield," Crabbe wrote in his short
autobiographical sketch, "the seat of his protector, and was there
placed in a convenient apartment, supplied with books for his
information and a