th little
of that delicacy of taste which results from the attrition of fastidious
and refined society, and altogether too truthful and matter-of-fact to
call in the aid of imagination, he describes in the simplest and most
direct terms the circumstances in which he found himself, and the
impressions which these circumstances had made on his own mind. He calls
things by their right names; no euphuism or transcendentalism,--the
plainer and commoner the better. He tells us of his farm life, its
joys and sorrows, its mirth and care, with no embellishment, with no
concealment of repulsive and ungraceful features. Never having seen a
nightingale, he makes no attempt to describe the fowl; but he has seen
the night-hawk, at sunset, cutting the air above him, and he tells of it.
Side by side with his waving corn-fields and orchard-blooms we have the
barn-yard and pigsty. Nothing which was necessary to the comfort and
happiness of his home and avocation was to him "common or unclean."
Take, for instance, the following, from a poem written at the close of
autumn, after the death of his wife:--

"No more may I the Spring Brook trace,
No more with sorrow view the place
Where Mary's wash-tub stood;
No more may wander there alone,
And lean upon the mossy stone
Where once she piled her wood.
'T was there she bleached her linen cloth,
By yonder bass-wood tree
From that sweet stream she made her broth,
Her pudding and her tea.
That stream, whose waters running,
O'er mossy root and stone,
Made ringing and singing,
Her voice could match alone."

We envy not the man who can sneer at this simple picture. It is honest
as Nature herself. An old and lonely man looks back upon the young years
of his wedded life. Can we not look with him? The sunlight of a summer
morning is weaving itself with the leafy shadows of the bass-tree,
beneath which a fair and ruddy-checked young woman, with her full,
rounded arms bared to the elbow, bends not ungracefully to her task,
pausing ever and anon to play with the bright-eyed child beside her, and
mingling her songs with the pleasant murmurings of gliding water! Alas!
as the old man looks, he hears that voice, which perpetually sounds to us
all from the past--no more!

Let us look at him