"Peculiar people--death had made them dear."

And henceforth the engagement between the lovers was frankly accepted.
But though the course of this true love was to run more and more
smooth, the question of Crabbe's future means of living seemed as
hopeless of solution as ever.

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