, and yet those
cursed bags must be filled every year to satisfy the master and pay for
the privilege of living sparingly and wretchedly on his domain.

And still nature is always young and beautiful and generous. She sheds
poetry and beauty upon all living things, upon all the plants that are
left to develop in their own way. Nature possesses the secret of
happiness, and no one has ever succeeded in wresting it from her. He
would be the most fortunate of men who, possessing the science of his
craft and working with his hands, deriving happiness and liberty from
the exercise of his intelligent strength, should have time to live in
the heart and the brain, to understand his work, and to love the work of
God. The artist has enjoyment of that sort in contemplating and
reproducing the beauties of Nature; but, when he sees the suffering of
the men who people this paradise called the earth, the just,
kind-hearted artist is grieved in the midst of his enjoyment. Where the
mind, heart, and arms work in concert under the eye of Providence, true
happiness would be found, and a holy harmony would exist between the
munificence of God and the delights of the human soul. Then, instead of
piteous, ghastly Death walking in his furrow, whip in hand, the painter
of allegories could place beside the ploughman a radiant angel, sowing
the blessed grain in the smoking furrows with generous hand.

And the dream of a peaceful, free, poetical, laborious, simple existence
for the husbandman is not so difficult of conception that it need be
relegated to a place among chimeras. The gentle, melancholy words of
Virgil: "O how happy the life of the husbandman, if he but knew his
happiness!" is an expression of regret; but, like all regrets, it is
also a prediction. A day will come when the ploughman may be an artist,
if not to express,--which will then matter but little, perhaps,--at all
events, to feel, the beautiful. Do you believe that this mysterious
intuition of poesy does not already exist within him in the state of
instinct and vague revery? In those who have a little hoard for their
protection to-day, and in whom excess of misery does not stifle all
moral and intellectual development, pure happiness, felt and
appreciated, is at the elementary stage; and, furthermore, if poets'
voices have already arisen from the bosom of sorrow and fatigue, why
should it be said that the work of the hands excludes the exercise of
the functions of the mind? T