the sunshine, and
generally train one or a few faculties at the expense of the others. The
artisan carries skill to perfection, the genius towers into sublimity,
but the man suffers. Not so the farmer. His life is not only many-, but
all-sided. His ever-changing employment gives him every variety of
motion and posture. Not a muscle but is pressed into service. His work
lies chiefly out-of-doors. The freedom of earth and sky are his. Every
power of his mind may be brought into play. He is surrounded by
mysteries which the longest life will not give him time enough to
fathom, problems whose solution may furnish employment for the deepest
thought and the most sustained attention, and whose solution is at the
same time a direct and most important contribution to his own ease and
riches. The constant presence of beautiful and ever-shifting scenery
ministers to his taste and his imagination. Nature, in her grandeur, in
her loveliness, in the surpassing beauty of her utilities, is always
spread before him. All her wonderful processes go on beneath his eyes.
The great laboratory is ever open. The furnace-fire is always burning.
Patent to his curious or admiring gaze the transmutation takes place.
The occult principle of life surrounds him, might almost bewilder him,
with manifestations. Bee and bird, fruit and blossom, and the phantom
humanity in beasts, offer all their secrets to his eyes. Every process
is his minister. His mental and material interests lie in one right
line. The sun is his servant. The shower fulfils his behest. The dew
drops silently down to do his work. The fragrance of the apple-orchard
shall turn to gold in his grasp. The beauty of bloom shall fill his home
with plenty. The frost of winter is his treasure-keeper, and the snows
wrap him about with beneficence. With nothing trivial, deceptive,
inflated, has he to do. An unimpeachable sincerity pervades all things.
All things are natural, and all things act after their kind. Is it a
divine decree that all this shall tend to no good? Shall all this pomp
of preparation rightly come to nothing? Do we gather the natural fruits
of circumstance, when the mind travels on to madness, the body goes
prematurely to disease and decay, and the heart shrivels away from love
and is overcast with gloom? Is all the appearance of adaptation false,
and do farmers gain the due emoluments of their position? Not so. It is
their fault that they do not see the life which revels in e