“I know not how, but I am brought
    Into a large and Gothic hall,
  Seated with those I never sought—­
    Kings, Caliphs, Kaisers—­silent all;
  Pale as the dead; enrobed and tall,
    Majestic, frozen, solemn, still;
  They make my fears, my wits appal,
    And with both scorn and terror fill.”

This, again, may be compared, or rather contrasted, with Coleridge’s Pains of Sleep, and it can hardly be doubted that the two poems had a common origin.

The year 1805 was the last of Crabbe’s sojourn in Suffolk, and it was made memorable in the annals of literature by the appearance of the Lay of the Last Minstrel.  Crabbe first met with it in a bookseller’s shop in Ipswich, read it nearly through while standing at the counter, and pronounced that a new and great poet had appeared.

This was Crabbe’s first introduction to one who was before long to prove himself one of his warmest admirers and friends.  It was one of Crabbe’s virtues that he was quick to recognise the worth of his poetical contemporaries.  He had been repelled, with many others, by the weak side of the Lyrical Ballads, but he lived to revere Wordsworth’s genius.  His admiration for Burns was unstinted.  But amid all the signs of a poetical renaissance in progress, and under a natural temptation to tread the fresh woods and pictures new that were opening before him, it showed a true judgment in Crabbe that he never faltered in the conviction that his own opportunity and his own strength lay elsewhere.  Not in the romantic or the mystical—­not in perfection of form or melody of lyric verse, were his own humbler triumphs to be won.  Like Wordsworth, he was to find a sufficiency in the “common growth of mother-earth,” though indeed less in her “mirth” than in her “tears,” Notwithstanding his Eustace Grey, and World of Dreams, and the really powerful story of Aaron the Gipsy (afterwards to appear as the The Hall of Justice), Crabbe was returning to the themes and the methods of The Village.  He had already completed The Parish Register, and had The Borough in contemplation, when he returned to his Leicestershire parish.  The woods of Belvoir, and the rural charms of Parham and Glemham, had not dimmed the memory of the sordid little fishing-town, where the spirit of poetry had first met him, and thrown her mantle round him.

And now the day had come when the mandate of the bishop could no longer be ignored.  In October 1805, Crabbe with his wife and two sons returned to the Parsonage at Muston.  He had been absent from his joint livings about thirteen years, of which four had been spent at Parham, five at Great Glemham, and four at Rendham, all three places lying within a small area, and within reach of the same old friends and relations.  No wonder that he left the neighbourhood with a reluctance that was probably too well guessed by his parishioners in the Vale of Belvoir.