ing, armed, like Pallas, for a struggle with fortune? Are
there not boys and girls, school loves and friendship, courtings and
match-makings, hope and fear, and all the varied play of human passions,
--the keen struggles of gain, the mad grasping of ambition,--sin and
remorse, tearful repentance and holy aspirations? Who shall say that we
have not all the essentials of the poetry of human life and simple
nature, of the hearth and the farm-field? Here, then, is a mine
unworked, a harvest ungathered. Who shall sink the shaft and thrust in
the sickle?

And here let us say that the mere dilettante and the amateur ruralist may
as well keep their hands off. The prize is not for them. He who would
successfully strive for it must be himself what he sings,--part and
parcel of the rural life of New England,--one who has grown strong amidst
its healthful influences, familiar with all its details, and capable of
detecting whatever of beauty, humor, or pathos pertain to it,--one who
has added to his book-lore the large experience of an active
participation in the rugged toil, the hearty amusements, the trials, and
the pleasures he describes.

We have been led to these reflections by an incident which has called up
before us the homespun figure of an old friend of our boyhood, who had
the good sense to discover that the poetic element existed in the simple
home life of a country farmer, although himself unable to give a very
creditable expression of it. He had the "vision," indeed, but the
"faculty divine" was wanting; or, if he possessed it in any degree, as
Thersites says of the wit of Ajax, "it would not out, but lay coldly in
him like fire in the flint."

While engaged this morning in looking over a large exchange list of
newspapers, a few stanzas of poetry in the Scottish dialect attracted our
attention. As we read them, like a wizard's rhyme they seemed to have
the power of bearing us back to the past. They had long ago graced the
columns of that solitary sheet which once a week diffused happiness over
our fireside circle, making us acquainted, in our lonely nook, with the
goings-on of the great world. The verses, we are now constrained to
admit, are not remarkable in themselves, truth and simple nature only;
yet how our young hearts responded to them! Twenty years ago there were
fewer verse-makers than at present; and as our whole stock of light
literature consisted of Ellwood's _Davideis_ and the selections of
_