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.
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