the critical reader can, if he thinks proper, discount what
I am now saying as mere personal feeling. But the case is this: when, in
a distant region of the world, I sought for and eagerly read anything I
could find relating to country scenes and life in England--the land of
my desire--I was never able to get an extended and congruous view of it,
with a sense of the continuity in human and animal life in its relation
to nature. It was all broken up into pieces or "bits"; it was in
detached scenes, vividly reproduced to the inner eye in many cases,
but unrelated and unharmonized, like framed pictures of rural subjects
hanging on the walls of a room. Even the Seasons failed to supply this
want, since Thomson in his great work is of no place and abides nowhere,
but ranges on eagle's wings over the entire land, and, for the matter
of that, over the whole globe. But I did get it in the Farmer's Boy. I
visualized the whole scene, the entire harmonious life; I was with him
from morn till eve always in that same green country with the same sky,
cloudy or serene, above me; in the rustic village, at the small church
with a thatched roof where the daws nested in the belfry, and the
children played and shouted among the gravestones in the churchyard; in
woods and green and ploughed fields and the deep lanes--with him and his
fellow-toilers, and the animals, domestic and wild, regarding their life
and actions from day to day through all the vicissitudes of the year.

The poem, then, appears to fill a place in our poetic literature, or to
fill a gap; at all events from the point of view of those who, born and
living in distant parts of the earth, still dream of the Old Home. This
perhaps accounts for the fact, which I heard at Honington, that most of
the pilgrims to Bloomfield's birthplace are Americans.

Bloomfield followed his great example in dividing his poem into the four
seasons, and he begins, Thomson-like, with an invitation to the Muse:--

O come, blest spirit, whatsoe'er thou art,
Thou kindling warmth that hov'rest round my heart.

But happily he does not attempt to imitate the lofty diction of the
Seasons or Windsor Forest, the noble poem from which, I imagine,
Thomson derived his sonorous style. He had a humble mind and knew his
limitations, and though he adopted the artificial form of verse which
prevailed down to his time he was still able to be simple and natural.

"Spring" does not contain much of the best o