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 innumerable detached descriptions of actual scenes, such as we find scattered throughout Cowper’s Task, and numberless other works.  Besides all this there are the countless shorter poems, each conveying an impression of some particular scene or aspect of nature; the poet of the open air, like the landscape painter, is ever on the look out for picturesque “bits” and atmospheric effects as a subject.  In Bloomfield we get something altogether different—­a simple, consistent, and fairly complete account of