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.