nnumerable 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 the country people's toilsome life in a remote
agricultural district in England--a small rustic village set amid green
and arable fields, woods and common lands. We have it from the inside by
one who had part in it, born and bred to the humble life he described;
and, finally, it is not given as a full day-to-day record--photographed
as we may say--with all the minute unessential details and repetitions,
but as it appeared when looked back upon from a distance, reliving it in
memory, the sights and sounds and events which had impressed the boy's
mind standing vividly out. Of this lowly poem it may be truly said that
it is "emotion recollected in tranquillity," to use the phrase invented
by Wordsworth when he attempted a definition of poetry generally and
signally failed, as Coleridge demonstrated.

It will be said that the facts of Bloomfield's life--that he was a
farmer's boy whose daily tasks were to scare the crows, feed the pigs,
and forty things besides, and that later, when learning the shoemaker's
trade in a London garret, he put these memories together and made them
into a poem--are wholly beside the question when we come to judge the
work as literature. A peasant poet may win a great reputation in his own
day on account of the circumstances of the case, but in the end his work
must be tried by the same standards applied in other and in all cases.

There is no getting away from this, and all that remains is to endeavour
to show that the poem, although poor as a whole, is not altogether bad,
but contains many lines that glow with beautiful poetic feeling, and
many descriptive passages which are admirable. Furthermore, I will
venture to say that despite the feebleness of a large part of the work
(as poetry) it is yet worth preserving in its entirety on account of its
unique character. It may be that I am the only person in England able
to appreciate it so fully owing to the way in which it first came to my
notice, and