lds,
And strolls the Crusoe of the lonely fields.
On whitehorn tow'ring, and the leafless rose,
A frost-nipped feast in bright vermilion glows;
Where clust'ring sloes in glossy order rise,
He crops the loaded branch, a cumbrous prize;
And on the flame the splutt'ring fruit he rests,
Placing green sods to seat the coming guests;
His guests by promise; playmates young and gay;
But ah! fresh pastures lure their steps away!
He sweeps his hearth, and homeward looks in vain,
Till feeling Disappointment's cruel pain
His fairy revels are exchanged for rage,
His banquet marred, grown dull his hermitage,
The field becomes his prison, till on high
Benighted birds to shades and coverts fly.

"The field becomes his prison," and the thought of this trivial
restraint, which is yet felt so poignantly, brings to mind an infinitely
greater one. Look, he says--

From the poor bird-boy with his roasted sloes

to the miserable state of those who are confined in dungeons, deprived
of daylight and the sight of the green earth, whose minds perpetually
travel back to happy scenes,

Trace and retrace the beaten worn-out way,

whose chief bitterness it is to be forgotten and see no familiar
friendly face.

"Winter" is, I think, the best of the four parts it gives the idea that
the poem was written as it stands, from "Spring" onwards, that by the
time he got to the last part the writer had acquired a greater ease and
assurance. At all events it is less patchy and more equal. It is also
more sober in tone, as befits the subject, and opens with an account of
the domestic animals on the farm, their increased dependence on man and
the compassionate feelings they evoke in us. He is, we feel, dealing
with realities, always from the point of view of a boy of sensitive
mina and tender heart--one taken in boyhood from this life before it had
wrought any change in him. For in due time the farm boy, however fine
his spirit may be, must harden and grow patient and stolid in heat and
cold and wet, like the horse that draws the plough or cart; and as he
hardens he grows callous. In his wretched London garret if any change
came to him it was only to an increased love and pity for the beasts he
had lived among, who looked and cried to him to be fed. He describes it
well, the frost and bitter cold, the hungry cattle following the cart
to the fields, the load of turnips thrown out on the hard frozen grou