I doubt if the name of this small Suffolk village, remote from towns and railroads, will have any literary associations for the reader, unless he be a person of exceptionally good memory, who has taken a special interest in the minor poets of the last century; or that it would help him if I add the names of Honington and Sapiston, two other small villages a couple of miles from Troston, with the slow sedgy Little Ouse, or a branch of it, flowing between them. Yet Honington was the birthplace of Robert Bloomfield, known as "the Suffolk poet" in the early part of the last century (although Crabbe was living then and was great, as he is becoming again after many years); while at Sapiston, the rustic village on the other side of the old stone bridge, he acquired that love of nature and intimate knowledge of farm life and work which came out later in his Farmer's Boy. Finally, Troston, the little village in which I write, was the home of Capel Lofft, a person of importance in his day, who discovered Bloomfield, found a publisher for his poems, and boomed it with amazing success.

I dare say it will only provoke a smile of amusement in readers of literary taste when I confess that Bloomfield's memory is dear to me; that only because of this feeling for the forgotten rustic who wrote rhymes I am now here, strolling about in the shade of the venerable trees in Troston Park-the selfsame trees which the somewhat fantastic Capel knew in his day as "Homer," "Sophocles," "Virgil," "Milton," and by other names, calling each old oak, elm, ash, and chestnut after one of the immortals.

I can even imagine that the literary man, if he chanced to be a personal friend, would try to save me from myself by begging me not to put anything of this sort into print. He would warn me that it matters nothing that Bloomfield's verse was exceedingly popular for a time, that twenty-five or thirty editions 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 with the birds and beasts—this seemed intolerably artificial; for I was like a hungry person who has nothing but kickshaws put before him, and eats because he is hungry until he loathes a food which in its taste confounds the appetite. Never since those distant days have I looked at a Shenstone or even seen his name in print or heard it spoken, without a slight return of that old sensation of nausea. If Shenstone alone had come to me, the desire for poetry would doubtless have been outlived early in life; but there were many passages, some very long, from the poets in various books on the shelves, and these kept my appetite alive. There was Brown's Philosophy, for example; and Brown loved to illustrate his point with endless poetic quotations, the only drawback in my case being that they were almost exclusively drawn from Akenside, who was not "rural." But there were other books in which other poets were quoted, and of all these the passages which invariably pleased me most were the descriptions of rural sights and sounds.

One day, during a visit to the city of Buenos Ayres, I discovered in a mean street, in the southern part of the town, a second-hand bookshop, kept by an old snuffy spectacled German in a long shabby black coat. I remember him well because he was a very important person to me. It was the first shop of the kind I had seen—I doubt if there was another in the town; and to be allowed to rummage by the hour among this mass of old books on the dusty shelves and heaped on the brick floor was a novel and delightful experience. The books were mostly in Spanish, French, and German, but there were some in English, and among them I came upon Thomson's Seasons. I remember the thrill of joy I experienced when I snatched up the small thin octavo in its smooth calf binding. It was the first book in English I ever bought, and to this day when I see a copy of the Seasons on a bookstall, which is often enough, I cannot keep my fingers off it and find it hard to resist the temptation to throw a couple of shillings away and take it home. If shillings had not been wanted for bread and cheese I should have had a roomful of copies by now.

Few books have given me more pleasure, and as I still return to it from time to time I do not suppose I shall ever outgrow the feeling, in spite of its having been borne in on me, when I first conversed with readers of poetry in England, that Thomson is no longer read—that he is unreadable.

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 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 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:—

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 of his work, but the opening is graceful and is not without a touch of pathos in his apologetic description of himself, as Giles, the farmer's boy.

The farm is described, the farmer, his kind, hospitable master; the animals, the sturdy team, the cows and the small flock of fore-score ewes. Ploughing, sowing, and harrowing are described, and the result left to the powers above:

While his master dreams of what will be, Giles has enough to do protecting the buried grain from thieving rooks and crows; one of the multifarious tasks being to collect the birds that have been shot, for although—

'Tis useless, he tells us, to hang these slain robbers about the fields, since in a little while they are no more regarded than the men of rags and straw with sham rifles in their hands. It was for him to shift the dead from place to place, to arrange them in dying attitudes with outstretched wings. Finally, there was the fox, the stealer of dead crows, to be guarded against; and again at eventide Giles must trudge round to gather up his dead and suspend them from twigs out of reach of hungry night-prowlers. Called up at daybreak each morning, he would take his way through deep lanes overarched with oaks to "fields remote from home" to redistribute his dead birds, then to fetch the cows, and here we have an example of his close naturalist-like observation in his account of the leading cow, the one who coming and going on all occasions is allowed precedence, who maintains her station, "won by many a broil," with just pride. A picture of the cool dairy and its work succeeds, and a lament on the effect of the greed and luxury of the over-populous capital which drains the whole country-side of all produce, which makes the Suffolk dairy-wives run mad for cream, leaving nothing but the "three-times skimmed sky-blue" to make cheese for local consumption. What a cheese it is, that has the virtue of a post, which turns the stoutest blade, and is at last flung in despair into the hog-trough, where

We then come to the sheep, "for Giles was shepherd too," and here there is more evidence of his observant eye when he describes the character of the animals, also in what follows about the young lambs, which forms the best passage in this part. I remember that, when first reading it, being then little past boyhood myself, how much I was struck by the vivid beautiful description of a crowd of young lambs challenging each other to a game, especially at a spot where they have a mound or hillock for a playground which takes them with a sort of goatlike joyous madness. For how often in those days I used to ride out to where the flock of one to two thousand sheep were scattered on the plain, to sit on my pony and watch the glad romps of the little lambs with keenest delight! I cannot but think that Bloomfield's fidelity to nature in such pictures as these does or should count for something in considering his work. He concludes:—

This image of the wind-scattered petals of the wild rose reminds him bitterly of the destined end of these joyous young lives—his white-fleeced little fellow-mortals. He sees the murdering butcher coming in his cart to demand the firstlings of the flock; he cannot suppress a cry of grief and indignation—he can only strive to shut out the shocking image from his soul!

"Summer" opens with some reflections on the farmer's life in a prosy Crabbe-like manner; and here it may be noted that as a rule Bloomfield no sooner attempts to rise to a general view than he grows flat; and in like manner he usually fails when he attempts wide prospects and large effects. He is at his best only when describing scenes and incidents at the farm in which he himself is a chief actor, as in this part when, after the sowing of the turnip seed, he is sent out to keep the small birds from the ripening corn:

Giles trudging along the borders of the field scares them with his brushing-pole, until, overcome by fatigue and heat, he takes a rest by the brakes and lying, half in sun and half in shade, his attention is attracted to the minute insect life that swarms about him:

It is one of his little exquisite pictures. Presently his vision is called to the springing lark:

In the end he falls asleep, and waking refreshed picks up his poles and starts again brushing round.

Harvesting scenes succeed, with a picture of Mary, the village beauty, taking her share in the work, and how the labourers in their unwonted liveliness and new-found wit

She is very rustic herself in her appearance:—

The leather stays have no doubt gone the way of many other dreadful things, even in the most rustic villages in the land; not so the barbarous practice of docking horses' tails, against which he protests in this place when describing the summer plague of flies and the excessive sufferings of the domestic animals, especially of the poor horses deprived of their only defence against such an enemy. At his own little farm there was yet another plague in the form of an old broken-winged gander, "the pest and tryant of the yard," whose unpleasant habit it was to go for the beasts and seize them by the fetlocks. The swine alone did not resent the attacks but welcomed them, receiving the assaults as caresses, and stretching themselves out and lying down and closing their pigs' eyes, they would emit grunts of satisfaction, while the triumphant bird, followed by the whole gabbling flock, would trample on the heads of their prostrate foes.

"Autumn" opens bravely:

It contains two of the best things in the poem, the first in the opening part, describing the swine in the acorn season, a delightful picture which must be given in full:—

It is a delightful passage to one that knows a pig—the animal we respect for its intelligence, holding it in this respect higher, more human, than the horse, and at the same time laugh at on account of certain ludicrous points about it, as for example its liability to lose its head. Thousands of years of comfortable domestic life have failed to rid it of this inconvenient heritage from the time when wild in woods it ran. Yet in this particular instance the terror of the swine does not seem wholly inexcusable, if we know a wild duck as well as a pig, especially the duck that takes to haunting a solitary woodland pool, who, when intruded on, springs up with such a sudden tremendous splash and flutter of wings and outrageous screams, that man himself, if not prepared for it, may be thrown off his balance.

Passing over other scenes, about one hundred and fifty lines, we come to the second notable passage, when after the sowing of the winter wheat, poor Giles once more takes up his old occupation of rook-scaring. It is now as in spring and summer—

and he thinks it would be nice to have a hovel, no matter how small, to take refuge in, and at once sets about its construction.

"The field becomes his prison," and the thought of this trivial restraint, which is yet felt so poignantly, brings to mind an infinitely greater one. Look, he says—

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,

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:—

The tired ploughman, steeped in luxurious heat, by and by falls asleep and dreams sweetly until his chilblains or the snapping fire awakes him, and he pulls himself up and goes forth yawning to give his team their last feed, his lantern throwing a feeble gleam on the snow as he makes his way to the stable. Having completed his task, he pats the sides of those he loves best by way of good-night, and leaves them to their fragrant meal. And this kindly action on his part suggests one of the best passages of the poem. Even old well-fed Dobbin occasionally rebels against his slavery, and released from his chains will lift his clumsy hoofs and kick, "disdainful of the dirty wheel." Short-sighted Dobbin!

The description, too long to quote, which follows of the tortures inflicted on the post-horse a century ago, is almost incredible to us, and we flatter ourselves that such things would not be tolerated now. But we must get over the ground somehow, and I take it that but for the invention of other more rapid means of transit the present generation would be as little concerned at the pains of the post-horse as they are at the horrors enacted behind the closed doors of the physiological laboratories, the atrocity of the steel trap, the continual murdering by our big game hunters of all the noblest animals left on the globe, and finally the annual massacre of millions of beautiful birds in their breeding time to provide ornaments for the hats of our women.

"Come forth he must," says Bloomfield, when he describes how the flogged horse at length gains the end of the stage and, "trembling under complicated pains," when "every nerve a separate anguish knows," he is finally unharnessed and led to the stable door, but has scarcely tasted food and rest before he is called for again.

This is over and done with simply because the post-horse is no longer wanted, and we have to remember that no form of cruelty inflicted, whether for sport or profit or from some other motive, on the lower animals has ever died out of itself in the land. Its end has invariably been brought about by legislation through the devotion of men who were the "cranks," the "faddists," the "sentimentalists," of their day, who were jeered and laughed at by their fellows, and who only succeeded by sheer tenacity and force of character after long fighting against public opinion and a reluctant Parliament, in finally getting their law.

Bloomfield's was but a small voice crying in the wilderness, and he was indeed a small singer in the day of our greatest singers. As a poet he was not worthy to unloose the buckles of their shoes; but he had one thing in common with the best and greatest, the feeling of tender love and compassion for the lower animals which was in Thomson and Cowper, but found its highest expression in his own great contemporaries, Coleridge, Shelley, and Wordsworth. In virtue of this feeling he was of their illustrious brotherhood.

In conclusion, I will quote one more passage. From the subject of horses he passes to that of dogs and their occasional reversion to wildness, when the mastiff or cur, the "faithful" house-dog by day, takes to sheep-killing by night. As a rule he is exceedingly cunning, committing his depredations at a distance frown home, and after getting his fill of slaughter he sneaks home in the early hours to spend the day in his kennel "licking his guilty paws." This is an anxious time for shepherds and farmers, and poor Giles is compelled to pay late evening visits to his small flock of heavy-sided ewes penned in their distant fold. It is a comfort to him to have a full moon on these lonely expeditions, and despite his tremors he is able to appreciate the beauty of the scene.

This is almost the only passage in the poem in which something of the vastness of visible nature is conveyed. He saw the vastness only in the sky on nights with a full moon or when he made a telescope of his hat to watch the flight of the lark. It was not a hilly country about his native place, and his horizon was a very limited one, usually bounded by the hedgerow timber at the end of the level field. The things he depicts were seen at short range, and the poetry, we see, was of a very modest kind. It was a "humble note" which pleased me in the days of long ago when I was young and very ignorant, and as it pleases me still it may be supposed that mentally I have not progressed with the years. Nevertheless, I am not incapable of appreciating the greater music; all that is said in its praise, even to the extremest expressions of admiration of those who are moved to a sense of wonder by it, find an echo in me. But it is not only a delight to me to listen to the lark singing at heaven's gate and to the vesper nightingale in the oak copse—the singer of a golden throat and wondrous artistry; I also love the smaller vocalists—the modest shufewing and the lesser whitethroat and the yellowhammer with his simple chant. These are very dear to me: their strains do not strike me as trivial; they have a lesser distinction of their own and I would not miss them from the choir. The literary man will smile at this and say that my paper is naught but an idle exercise, but I fancy I shall sleep the better tonight for having discharged this ancient debt which has been long on my conscience.