Crabbe here perceives the value, as Goldsmith had done before him, of village scenery as a background to his picture of village life. It suited Goldsmith's purpose to describe the ideal rural community, happy, prosperous, and innocent, as contrast with that depopulation of villages and corruption of peasant life which he predicted from the growing luxury and selfishness of the rich. But notwithstanding the title of the poem, it is Auburn in its pristine condition that remains in our memories. The dominant thought expressed is the virtue and the happiness that belong by nature to village life. Crabbe saw that this was no less idyllic and unreal, or at least incomplete, than the pictures of shepherd life presented in the faded copies of Theocritus and Virgil that had so long satisfied the English readers of poetry. There was no unreality in Goldsmith's design. They were not fictitious and "lucrative" tears that he shed. For his object was to portray an English rural village in its ideality--rural loveliness--enshrining rural innocence and joy--and to show how man's vices, invading it from the outside, might bring all to ruin. Crabbe's purpose was different. He aimed to awaken pity and sympathy for rural sins and sorrows with which he had himself been in closest touch, and which sprang from causes always in operation within the heart of the community itself, and not to be attributed to the insidious attacks from without. Goldsmith, for example, drew an immortal picture of the village pastor, closely modelled upon Chaucer's "poor parson of a town," his piety, humility, and never failing goodness to his flock.-- "Thus to relieve the wretched was his pride, And even his failings leaned to virtue's side; But in his duty prompt at every call He watched and wept; he prayed and felt for all. And as a bird each fond endearment tries To tempt its new-fledged offspring to the skies, He tried each art, reproved each dull delay, Allured to brighter worlds, and led the way." Crabbe remembered a different type of parish priest in his boyhood, and this is how he introduces him. He has been describing, with an unmitigated realism, the village poorhouse, in all its squalor and dilapidation:-- "There children dwell who know no parents' care: Parents, who know no children's love, dwell there. Heart-broken matrons on their joyless bed, Forsaken wives, and mothers never wed" The dying pauper needs some spiritual consolation ere he passes into the unseen world,