Up to this point Crabbe shows himself wholly unsuspicious of this fact.

It had not occurred to him that it was possible for him safely to trust his own instincts.

And yet there is a stray entry in his diary which seems to show how (in obedience to his visionary instructor) he was trying experiments in more hopeful directions.

On the twelfth, of May he intimates to his Mira that he has dreams of success in something different, something more human than had yet engaged his thoughts.

"For the first time in my life that I recollect," he writes, "I have written three or four stanzas that so far touched me in the reading them as to take off the consideration that they were things of my own fancy." Thus far there was nothing in what he had printed--in _Inebriety_ or _The Candidate_--that could possibly have touched his heart or that of his readers.