That looks the meaning in the mind conveyed: 
  But here to strangers, words nor looks impart
  The various movements of the suffering heart;
  Nor will that heart with those alliance own,
  To whom its views and hopes are all unknown
  What, if no grievous fears their lives annoy,
  Is it not worse no prospects to enjoy? 
  ’Tis cheerless living in such bounded view,
  With nothing dreadful, but with nothing new;
  Nothing to bring them joy, to make them weep;
  The day itself is, like the night, asleep.”

The essence of workhouse monotony has surely never been better indicated than here.

The Borough did much to spread Crabbe’s reputation while he remained, doing his duty to the best of his ability and knowledge, in the quiet loneliness of the Vale of Belvoir, but his growing fame lay far outside the boundaries of his parish.  When, a few years later, he visited London and was received with general welcome by the distinguished world of literature and the arts, he was much surprised.  “In my own village,” he told James Smith, “they think nothing of me.”  The three years following the publication of The Borough were specially lonely.  He had, indeed, his two sons, George and John, with him.  They had both passed through Cambridge—­one at Trinity and the other at Caius, and were now in holy orders.  Each held a curacy in the near neighbourhood, enabling them to live under the parental roof.  But Mrs. Crabbe’s condition was now increasingly sad, her mind being almost gone.  There was no daughter, and we hear of no other female relative at hand to assist Crabbe in the constant watching of the patient.  This circumstance alone limited his opportunities of accepting the hospitalities of the neighbourhood, though with the Welbys and other county families, as well as with the surrounding clergy, he was a welcome guest.

The Borough appeared in February 1810, and the reviewers were prompt in their attention.  The Edinburgh reviewed the poem in April of the same year, and the Quarterly followed in October.  Jeffrey had already noticed The Parish Register in 1808.  The critic’s admiration of Crabbe had been, and remained to the end, cordial and sincere.  But now, in reviewing the new volume, a note of warning appears.  The critic finds himself obliged to admit that the current objections to Crabbe’s treatment of country life are well founded.  “His chief fault,” he says, “is his frequent lapse into disgusting representations.”  All powerful and pathetic poetry, Jeffrey admits, abounds in “images of distress,” but these images must never excite “disgust,” for that is fatal to the ends which poetry was meant to produce.  A few months later the Quarterly followed in the same strain, but went on to preach a more questionable doctrine.  The critic in fact lays down the extraordinary canon that the function of Poetry is not to present any truth, if it happens to be unpleasant, but to substitute an agreeable illusion in its place.  “We turn to poetry,” he says, “not that we may see and feel what we see and feel in our daily experience, but that we may be refreshed by other emotions, and fairer prospects, that we may take shelter from the realities of life in the paradise of Fancy.”