Another piece called "The Sailor's Return" found a place in the "Poets' Corner." These efforts were enough to prove his taste and gifts as a versifier. The poetic power was latent in his mind, and only needed sufficient stimulus to bring it into full exercise. This stimulus came, as was natural, from the reading of poetry itself. A copy of Thomson's "Seasons" and Milton's "Paradise Lost" fell into his hands when he was about seventeen years of age. They belonged to a Scotchman who lived and worked at a house in Bell Alley, to which the shoemakers removed about this time. The eager youth read them with the passion of a born poet; and, as he read, the fire burned within. His imagination was now fairly awakened, and it was plain to all who watched him intelligently at this time, that melodies were being awakened in his heart that sooner or later must find their expression in song. The "Seasons" was his favorite poem. He read and re-read its glowing descriptions of nature, committed favorite portions to memory, and never tired of recounting its beauties in the hearing of his sympathetic friends. The "Seasons" struck the key-note of the "Farmer's Boy," though Bloomfield was no imitator of Thomson, nor of any one else, in either matter or manner. The thought and style of these two poets of nature are as unlike as their kindred subjects would allow them to be. Thomson's music is that of a majestic and stately oratorio, while Bloomfield sings a sweet and simple pastoral symphony. But the young poet was not yet to enter on his great task. Fourteen years passed away before his first and best published poem, the "Farmer's Boy," saw the light. During this time several important events in his history occurred. In his eighteenth year, in consequence of certain disputes in the shoe-makers' trade about the legality of employing boys who had not been bound as apprentices, he went back again to Suffolk for a short time, and was taken into the home of his uncle and former master, Mr. Austin of Sapiston. Here for two months of happy leisure he roamed the fields where he spent so much of his time as a boy, reviving old impressions, and deepening in his mind that keen sense of the beautiful which city life and the imprisonment of a shoemaker's occupation had not been sufficient to destroy. His companion at this time was still the favorite "Seasons," from which, in the presence of the very charms which Thomson describes, the ardent youth derived new pleasure and inspiration.