still adrift upon this tide of time, where we are all
serving our apprenticeships?--and if so, would they have worn the same
calm and cheerful equanimity amid the harvests of traffic or the blight
of a panic?--and if not adrift, would they have carried a clearer and
more justifying record to the hearing of the Great Court than they will
carry hence when our village-bell doles out the funeral march for them?

The rain is beating on my windows; the rain is beating on the plain; a
mist is driving in from the Sound, over which I see only the
spires,--those Christian beacons. And (by these hints, that always fret
the horizon) calling to mind that bit of the best of all prayers, "_Lead
us not into temptation_," it seems to me that many a country-liver might
transmute it without offence, and in all faith, into words like
these,--"Lead us not into cities." To think for a moment of poor farmer
Burns, with the suppers of Edinburgh, and the orgies of the gentlemen of
the Caledonian hunt, inflaming his imagination there in the wretched
chamber of his low farm-house of Ellisland!

But all this, down my last half-page, relates to the physical and the
moral aspects of the matter,--aspects which are, surely, richly worthy
of consideration. The question whether country-life and country-pursuits
will bring the intellectual faculties to their strongest bent is quite a
distinct one. There may be opportunity for culture; but opportunity
counts for nothing, except it occur under conditions that prompt to its
employment. The incitement to the largest efforts of which the mind is
capable comes ordinarily from mental attrition,--an attrition for which
the retirement demanded by rural pursuits gives little occasion. Milton
would never have come to his stature among pear-trees,--nor Newton, nor
Burke. They may have made first-rate farmers or horticulturists; they
may have surpassed all about them; but their level of action would have
been a far lower one than that which they actually occupied. There is a
great deal of balderdash written and talked upon this subject, which
ought to have an end; it does not help farming, it does not help the
world,--simply because it is untrue. Rural life offers charming objects
of study; but to most minds it does not offer the promptings for large
intellectual exertion. It ripens healthfully all the receptive
faculties; it disposes to that judicial calmness of mind which is
essential to clearness and directness of