ing under the trees,--and yellow fields of grain, along the
hill-sides, billowy in the breeze, and bending before the shadows of
the clouds that sail above them. And mingling and harmonizing with
these visions, we should hear the lowing of kine, and the tinkle of
the bell that leads the flock, and the shout of the boy behind the
creeping plough, and the echoes of the axe, and the fall of the tree
in the distant forest, and the rhythmical clangor, softened into a
metallic whisper by the distance, of the mowers whetting their
scythes. With these visions and these sounds there would come to the
minds which give them birth convictions that rural life is the best
life, and resolutions that, by-and-by, in some golden hour, when the
sun of life begins to lengthen the eastward shadows, that life shall
be enjoyed, and that the soul shall pass at last from the quiet scenes
of Nature into those higher scenes which they symbolize. There is a
thought in all this that the farm is nearer heaven than the street,--a
reminiscence of the first estate, when man was lord of Eden; and this
thought, old as art and artificial life, cannot be rooted out of the
mind. It has a life of its own, independent of reason, above instinct,
among the quickest intuitions of the soul.

Now this idea, so universal, so identical in millions of minds,
springing with such spontaneity in the midst of infinitely varied
circumstances, abiding with such tenacity in every soul, can have its
basis nowhere save in a Divine intention and a human possibility. The
cultivation of the farm is the natural employment of man. It is upon
the farm that virtue should thrive the best, that the body and the
mind should be developed the most healthfully, that temptations should
be the weakest, that social intercourse should be the simplest and
sweetest, that beauty should thrill the soul with the finest raptures,
and that life should be tranquillest in its flow, longest in its
period, and happiest in its passage and its issues. This is the
general and the first ideal of the farmer's life, based upon the
nature of the farmer's calling and a universally recognized human
want. Why does the actual differ so widely from the ideal? It is not
because the farmer's labor is hard and constant, alone. There is no
fact better established than that it is through the habitual use both
of the physical and mental powers that the soul achieves, or receives,
its most healthful enjoyment, and acquire