Shenstone, in a small, shabby, coverless volume.  This I read and re-read until I grew sick of bright Roxana tripping o’er the green, or of gentle Delia when a tear bedews her eye to think yon playful kid must die.  To my uncultivated mind—­for I had never been at school, and lived in the open air with the birds and beasts—­this seemed intolerably artificial; for I was like a hungry person who has nothing but kickshaws put before him, and eats because he is hungry until he loathes a food which in its taste confounds the appetite.  Never since those distant days have I looked at a Shenstone or even seen his name in print or heard it spoken, without a slight return of that old sensation of nausea.  If Shenstone alone had come to me, the desire for poetry would doubtless have been outlived early in life; but there were many passages, some very long, from the poets in various books on the shelves, and these kept my appetite alive.  There was Brown’s Philosophy, for example; and Brown loved to illustrate his point with endless poetic quotations, the only drawback in my case being that they were almost exclusively drawn from Akenside, who was not “rural.”  But there were other books in which other poets were quoted, and of all these the passages which invariably pleased me most were the descriptions of rural sights and sounds.

One day, during a visit to the city of Buenos Ayres, I discovered in a mean street, in the southern part of the town, a second-hand bookshop, kept by an old snuffy spectacled German in a long shabby black coat.  I remember him well because he was a very important person to me.  It was the first shop of the kind I had seen—­I doubt if there was another in the town; and to be allowed to rummage by the hour among this mass of old books on the dusty shelves and heaped on the brick floor was a novel and delightful experience.  The books were mostly in Spanish, French, and German, but there were some in English, and among them I came upon Thomson’s Seasons.  I remember the thrill of joy I experienced when I snatched up the small thin octavo in its smooth calf binding.  It was the first book in English I ever bought, and to this day when I see a copy of the Seasons on a bookstall, which is often enough, I cannot keep my fingers off it and find it hard to resist the temptation to throw a couple of shillings away and take it home.  If shillings had not been wanted for bread and cheese I should have had a roomful of copies by now.

Few books have given me more pleasure, and as I still return to it from time to time I do not suppose I shall ever outgrow the feeling, in spite of its having been borne in on me, when I first conversed with readers of poetry in England, that Thomson is no longer read—­that he is unreadable.