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.