And yet the enforced idleness of these following years was far from unprofitable.  The less time occupied in the routine work of his profession, the more leisure he had for his favourite study of natural history, and especially of botany.  This latter study had been taken up during his stay at Woodbridge, the neighbourhood of which had a Flora differing from that of the bleak coast country of Aldeburgh, and it was now pursued with the same zeal at home.  Herbs then played a larger part than to-day among curative agents of the village doctor, and the fact that Crabbe sought and obtained them so readily was even pleaded by his poorer patients as reason why his fees need not be calculated on any large scale.  But this absorbing pursuit did far more than serve to furnish Crabbe’s outfit as a healer.  It was undoubtedly to the observing eye and retentive memory thus practised in the cottage gardens, and in the lanes, and meadows, and marshes of Suffolk that his descriptions, 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:—­