ions of his Farmer's Boy were issued within
three years of its publication in 1800 that it continued to be read for
half a century afterwards. There are other better tests. Is it alive
to-day? What do judges of literature say of it now? Nothing! They smile
and that's all. The absurdity of his popularity was felt in his own day.
Byron laughed at it; Crabbe growled and Charles Lamb said he had looked
at the Farmer's Boy and it made him sick. Well, nobody wants to look at
it now.

Much more might be said very easily on this side; nevertheless, I think
I shall go on with my plea for the small verse-maker who has long fallen
out; and though I may be unable to make a case out, the kindly critic
may find some circumstance to extenuate my folly--to say, in the end,
that this appears to be one of the little foolishnesses which might be
forgiven.

I must confess at starting that the regard I have for one of his poems,
the Farmer's Boy, is not wholly a matter of literary taste or
the critical faculty; it is also, to some extent, a matter of
association,--and as the story of how this comes about is rather
curious, I will venture to give it.

In the distant days of my boyhood and early youth my chief delight
was in nature, and when I opened a book it was to find something about
nature in it, especially some expression of the feeling produced in us
by nature, which was, in my case, inseparable from seeing and hearing,
and was, to me, the most important thing in life. For who could look
on earth, water, sky, on living or growing or inanimate things, without
experiencing that mysterious uplifting gladness in him! In due time I
discovered that the thing I sought for in printed books was to be found
chiefly in poetry, that half a dozen lines charged with poetic feeling
about nature often gave me more satisfaction than a whole volume of
prose on such subjects. Unfortunately this kind of literature was not
obtainable in my early home on the then semi-wild pampas. There were a
couple of hundred volumes on the shelves--theology, history, biography,
philosophy, science, travels, essays, and some old forgotten fiction;
but no verse was there, except 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