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.
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