adable.

After such a find I naturally went back many times to burrow in that
delightful rubbish heap, and was at length rewarded by the discovery of
yet another poem of rural England--the Farmer's Boy. I was prepared to
like it, for although I did not know anything about the author's early
life, the few passages I had come across in quotations in James Rennie's
and other old natural history compilations had given me a strong desire
to read the whole poem. I certainly did like it--this quiet description
in verse of a green spot in England, my spiritual country which so far
as I knew I was never destined to see; and that I continue to like it
is, as I have said, the reason of my being in this place.

While thus freely admitting that the peculiar circumstances of the case
caused me to value this poem, and, in fact, made it very much more to
me than it could be to persons born in England with all its poetical
literature to browse on, I am at the same time convinced that this is
not the sole reason for my regard.

I take it that the Farmer's Boy is poetry, not merely slightly poetized
prose in the form of verse, although it is undoubtedly poetry of a very
humble order.

Mere descriptions of rural scenes do not demand the higher qualities of
the poet--imagination and passion. The lower kind of inspiration is, in
fact, often better suited to such themes and shows nature by the common
light of day, as it were, instead of revealing it as by a succession of
lightning flashes. Even among those who confine themselves to this lower
plane, Bloomfield is not great: his small flame is constantly sinking
and flickering out. But at intervals it burns up again and redeems
the work from being wholly commonplace and trivial. He is, in fact, no
better than many another small poet who has been devoured by Time since
his day, and whose work no person would now attempt to bring back. It
is probable, too, that many of these lesser singers whose fame was brief
would in their day have deeply resented being placed on a level with the
Suffolk peasant-poet. In spite of all this, and of the impossibility of
saving most of the verse which is only passably good from oblivion, I
still think the Farmer's Boy worth preserving for more reasons than one,
but chiefly because it is the only work of its kind.

There is no lack of rural poetry--the Seasons to begin with and much
Thomsonian poetry besides, treating of nature in a general way; then we
have i