s that tone which responds
most musically to the touch of the opportunities of leisure. Why,
then, we repeat, does the actual differ so widely from the ideal?

A general answer to this question is, that that is made an end of life
which should be but an incident or a means. Life is confounded with
labor, and thrift with progress; and material success is the aim to
which all other aims are made subordinate. There is no fact in
physiology better established than that hard labor, followed from day
to day and year to year, absorbing every thought and every physical
energy, has the direct tendency to depress the intellect, blunt the
sensibilities, and animalize the man. In such a life, all the
energies of the brain and nervous system are directed to the support
of nutrition and the stimulation of the muscular system. Man thus
becomes a beast of burden,--the creature of his calling; and though he
may add barn to barn and acre to acre, he does not lead a life which
rises in dignity above that of the beasts which drag his plough. He
eats, he works, he sleeps. Surely, there is no dignity in a life like
this; there is nothing attractive and beautiful and good in it. It is
a mean and contemptible life; and all its maxims, economies,
associations, and objects are repulsive to a mind which apprehends
life's true enjoyments and ends. We say that it is a pestilent
perversion. We say that it is the sale of the soul to the body; it is
turning the back upon life, upon growth, upon God, and descending into
animalism.

The true ideal of the farmer's life--of any life--contemplates
something outside of, and above, the calling which is its instrument.
The farmer's life is no better than the life of a street-sweeper, if
it rise no higher than the farmer's work. If the farmer, standing
under the broad sky, breathing the pure air, listening to the song of
birds, watching the progress of

"The great miracle that still goes on,"

to work the transformation of the brown seeds which he drops into the
soil into fields of green and gold, and gazing upon landscapes
shifting with the seasons and flushed with new tints through every
sunlit and moonlit hour, does not apprehend that his farm has higher
uses for him than those of feeding his person and his purse, he might
as well dwell in a coal-mine.

Our soil is sterile, our modes of farming have been rude until within
a few years; and under the circumstances,--with the Yankee notion that
th