in kind, if not
in degree.

Now the farmer, partly from isolation and partly from absorption in
labor, is the most unsocial man in New England. The farmers are
comparatively few who go into society at all, who ever dine with their
neighbors, or who take any genuine satisfaction in the company of the
women whom their wives invite to tea. They may possibly be
farmers among farmers, but they are not men among men and
women. Intellectually, they are very apt to leave life where they
begin it. Socially, they become dead for years before they die. The
inhabitants of a city can have but a poor apprehension of the amount
of enjoyment and development that comes to them through social
stimulus. Like gold, humanity becomes bright by friction, and grows
dim for lack of it. So, we say, the farmer's life and home can never
be what they should be,--can never be attractive by the side of other
life containing a true social element,--until they have become more
social. The individual life must not only occupy a place above that of
a beast of burden, but that life must be associated with all congenial
life within its reach. The tree that springs in the open field, though
it be fed by the juices of a rood, through absorbents that penetrate
where they will, will present a hard and stunted growth; while the
little sapling of the forest, seeking for life among a million roots,
or growing in the crevice of a rock, will lift to the light its cap of
leaves upon a graceful stem, and whisper, even-headed, with the
stateliest of its neighbors. Men, like trees, were made to grow
together, and both history and philosophy declare that this Divine
intention cannot be ignored or frustrated with impunity.

Traditional routine has also operated powerfully to diminish the
attractiveness of agricultural employments. This cause, very happily,
grows less powerful from year to year. The purse is seen to have an
intimate sympathy with intelligent farming. Were we to say that God
had so constituted the human mind that routine will tire and disgust
it, we should say in effect that he never intended the farmer's life
to be one of routine. Nature has done all she can to break up routine.
While the earth swings round its orbit once a year, and turns on its
axis once in twenty-four hours,--while the tide ebbs and flows twice
daily, and the seasons come and go in rotation, every atom changes its
relations to every other atom every moment. Influences are tossed int