at reproduced an actual scene as perfectly
as do the following lines:--

"Lo! where the heath, with withering brake grown o'er,
Lends the light turf that warms the neighbouring poor;
From thence a length of burning sand appears,
Where the thin harvest waves its withered ears;
Rank weeds, that every art and care defy,
Reign o'er the land, and rob the blighted rye:
There thistles stretch their prickly arms afar,
And to the ragged infant threaten war;
There poppies nodding, mock the hope of toil;
There the blue bugloss paints the sterile soil;
Hardy and high above the slender sheaf
The slimy mallow waves her silky leaf;
O'er the young shoot the charlock throws a shade,
And clasping tares cling round the sickly blade;
With mingled tints the rocky coasts abound,
And a sad splendour vainly shines around."

Crabbe here perceives the value, as Goldsmith had done before him, of
village scenery as a background to his picture of village life. It
suited Goldsmith's purpose to describe the ideal rural community, happy,
prosperous, and innocent, as contrast with that depopulation of
villages and corruption of peasant life which he predicted from the
growing luxury and selfishness of the rich. But notwithstanding the
title of the poem, it is Auburn in its pristine condition that remains
in our memories. The dominant thought expressed is the virtue and the
happiness that belong by nature to village life. Crabbe saw that this
was no less idyllic and unreal, or at least incomplete, than the
pictures of shepherd life presented in the faded copies of Theocritus
and Virgil that had so long satisfied the English readers of poetry.
There was no unreality in Goldsmith's design. They were not fictitious
and "lucrative" tears that he shed. For his object was to portray an
English rural village in its ideality--rural loveliness--enshrining
rural innocence and joy--and to show how man's vices, invading it from
the outside, might bring all to ruin. Crabbe's purpose was different. He
aimed to awaken pity and sympathy for rural sins and sorrows with which
he had himself been in closest touch, and which sprang from causes
always in operation within the heart of the community itself, and not to
be attributed to the insidious attacks from without. Goldsmith, for
example, drew an immortal picture of the village pastor, closely
modelled upon Chaucer's "poor parson of a town," his piety, humility,
and never failing goo