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.
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