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.