What they saw and remembered had passed through the transfiguring medium of a poet's imagination before it reached the reader.

The finished product, like the honey of the bee, was due to the poet as well as to the flower from which he had derived the raw material.
It seems to have been generally assumed when Crabbe's _Village_ appeared, that it was of the nature of a rejoinder to Goldsmith's poem, and the fact that Crabbe quotes a line from _The Deserted Village_, "Passing rich on forty pounds a year," in his own description of the village parson, might seem to confirm that impression.

But the opening lines of _The Village_ point to a different origin.

It was rather during those early years when George's father read aloud to his family the pastorals of the so-called Augustan age of English poetry, that the boy was first struck with the unreality and consequent worthlessness of the conventional pictures of rural life.

And in the opening lines of _The Village_ he boldly challenges the judgment of his readers on this head.
The "pleasant land" of the pastoral poets was one of which George Crabbe, not unjustly, "thought scorn." "The village life, and every care that reigns O'er youthful peasants and declining swains, What labour yields, and what, that labour past, Age, in its hour of languor, finds at last; What form the real picture of the poor, Demand a song--the Muse can give no more.
Fled are those times when in harmonious strains The rustic poet praised his native plains: No shepherds now, in smooth alternate verse, Their country's beauty or their nymphs' rehearse; Yet still for these we frame the tender strain, Still in our lays fond Corydons complain, And shepherds' boys their amorous pains reveal, The only pains, alas! they never feel." At this point follow the six lines which Johnson had substituted for the author's.