compost-heaps

Updated: May 20, 2025

The bleakest and most ghastly aspects of Nature, the most prosaic facts of the farmer's life, Irish servants and compost-heaps, cows which try to consume their own milk, beehives which send forth swarms to sting the children of the house, and give no honey, soils which refuse to bear the products which intelligence has anticipated, all are transformed into "something rich and strange" by the poet's alchemy, without any sacrifice of truth, or the insertion of details which a farmer would disavow as inaccurate or sentimental.

Various - The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864