Bloomfield’s was but a small voice crying in the wilderness, and he was indeed a small singer in the day of our greatest singers.  As a poet he was not worthy to unloose the buckles of their shoes; but he had one thing in common with the best and greatest, the feeling of tender love and compassion for the lower animals which was in Thomson and Cowper, but found its highest expression in his own great contemporaries, Coleridge, Shelley, and Wordsworth.  In virtue of this feeling he was of their illustrious brotherhood.

In conclusion, I will quote one more passage.  From the subject of horses he passes to that of dogs and their occasional reversion to wildness, when the mastiff or cur, the “faithful” house-dog by day, takes to sheep-killing by night.  As a rule he is exceedingly cunning, committing his depredations at a distance frown home, and after getting his fill of slaughter he sneaks home in the early hours to spend the day in his kennel “licking his guilty paws.”  This is an anxious time for shepherds and farmers, and poor Giles is compelled to pay late evening visits to his small flock of heavy-sided ewes penned in their distant fold.  It is a comfort to him to have a full moon on these lonely expeditions, and despite his tremors he is able to appreciate the beauty of the scene.

   With saunt’ring steps he climbs the distant stile,
   Whilst all around him wears a placid smile;
   There views the white-robed clouds in clusters driven
   And all the glorious pageantry of heaven. 
   Low on the utmost bound’ry of the sight
   The rising vapours catch the silver light;
   Thence fancy measures as they parting fly
   Which first will throw its shadow on the eye,
   Passing the source of light; and thence away
   Succeeded quick by brighter still than they. 
   For yet above the wafted clouds are seen
   (In a remoter sky still more serene)
   Others detached in ranges through the air,
   Spotless as snow and countless as they’re fair;
   Scattered immensely wide from east to west
   The beauteous semblance of a flock at rest.

This is almost the only passage in the poem in which something of the vastness of visible nature is conveyed.  He saw the vastness only in the sky on nights with a full moon or when he made a telescope of his hat to watch the flight of the lark.  It was not a hilly country about his native place, and his horizon was a very limited one, usually bounded by the hedgerow timber at the end of the level field.  The things he depicts were seen at short range, and the poetry, we see, was of a very modest kind.  It was a “humble note” which pleased me in the days of long ago when I was young and very ignorant, and as it pleases me still it may be supposed that mentally I have not progressed with the years.  Nevertheless, I am not incapable of appreciating the greater music; all that is said in its praise, even to the extremest expressions of admiration of