gs, to please his master and buy the right of living on his
land in sordid wretchedness. Yet nature is eternally young, beautiful,
and generous. She pours forth poetry and beauty on all creatures and
all plants that are allowed free development.

She owns the secret of happiness, of which no one has ever robbed her.
The happiest of men would be he who, knowing the full meaning of his
labor, should, while working with his hands, find his happiness and his
freedom in the exercise of his intelligence, and, having his heart in
unison with his brain, should at once understand his own work and love
that of God, The artist has such delights as these in contemplating and
reproducing the beauties of nature; but if his heart be true and tender,
his pleasure is disturbed when he sees the miseries of the men who
people this paradise of earth. True happiness will be theirs when mind,
heart, and hand shall work in concert in the sight of Heaven, and there
shall be a sacred harmony between God's goodness and the joys of his
creatures. Then, instead of the pitiable and frightful figure of Death
stalking, whip in hand, across the fields, the painter of allegories
may place beside the peasant a radiant angel, sowing the blessed grain
broadcast in the smoking furrow. The dream of a serene, free, poetic,
laborious, and simple life for the tiller of the soil is not so
impossible that we should banish it as a chimera. The sweet, sad words
of Virgil: "Oh, happy the peasants of the field, if they knew their own
blessings!" is a regret, but, like all regrets, it is also a prophecy.
The day will come when the laborer too may be an artist, and may at
least feel what is beautiful, if he cannot express it,--a matter of far
less importance. Do not we know that this mysterious poetic intuition
is already his, in the form of instinct and vague reverie? Among those
peasants who possess some of the comforts of life, and whose moral
and intellectual development is not entirely stifled by extreme
wretchedness, pure happiness that can be felt and appreciated exists
in the elementary stage; and, moreover, since poets have already raised
their voices out of the lap of pain and of weariness, why should we say
that the labor of the hands excludes the working of the soul? Without
doubt this exclusion is the common result of excessive toil and of deep
misery; but let it not be said that when men shall work moderately and
usefully there will be nothing but bad wor