“The field becomes his prison,” and the thought of this trival 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 ground; but the turnips too are frozen hard and they cannot eat them until Giles, following with his beetle, splits them up with vigorous blows, and the cows gather close round him, sending out a cloud of steam from their nostrils.

The dim short winter day soon ends, but the sound of the flails continues in the barns till long after dark before the weary labourers end their task and trudge home.  Giles, too, is busy at this time taking hay to the housed cattle, many a sweet mouthful being snatched from the load as he staggers beneath it on his way to the racks.  Then follow the well-earned hours of “warmth and rest” by the fire in the big old kitchen which he describes:—­

   For the rude architect, unknown to fame,
   (Nor symmetry nor elegance his aim),
   Who spread his floors of solid oak on high,
   On beams rough-hewn from age to age that lie,
   Bade his wide fabric unimpaired sustain
   The orchard’s store, and cheese, and golden grain;
   Bade from its central base, capacious laid,
   The well-wrought chimney rear its lofty head
   Where since hath many a savoury ham been stored,
   And tempests howled and Christmas gambols roared.