ent would combine the defects of
gentleman- and poet-farming, and that he would escape the bankruptcy of
Shenstone only by possessing the purse of Astor. That a man of refined
sentiments, elegant tastes, wide cultivation, and humane and tender
genius, given, moreover, to indulgences in "Reveries" and the
"Dream-Life," should succeed in the real business of agriculture, seemed
a monstrous supposition to those cockney idealists who consider the
cultivation of the mind incompatible with the cultivation of the ground,
who cannot bring, by any theory of the association of ideas, practical
talent into neighborly good-will with lofty aspirations, and who
necessarily connect the government of brutes with an imbruted
intelligence. The book we have under review is a blunt contradiction to
objectors of the literary class. That it is practical, the coarsest
farmer must admit; that its practicality is not purchased by any mean
and unwise concessions to "popular prejudice," the most sensitive
_litterateur_ will concede; and that the whole representation
constitutes a most charming book, all readers will be eager to
pronounce. Indeed, the critic of the volume is somewhat puzzled to
harmonize the fine rhythm of the periods, and the superb propriety of
the tone, with the subject-matter. The bleakest and most ghastly aspects
of Nature,--the most prosaic facts of the farmer's life,--Irish servants
and compost-heaps,--cows which try to consume their own milk,--beehives
which send forth swarms to sting the children of the house, and give no
honey,--soils which refuse to bear the products which intelligence has
anticipated,--all are transformed into "something rich and strange" by
the poet's alchemy, without any sacrifice of truth, or the insertion of
details which a farmer would disavow as inaccurate or sentimental. The
"Ik" is a full counterpoise to the "Marvel," even to the most literal
reader of the volume, though it is certain that no book has ever before
appeared in our country in which the farmer-life of New England has
assumed so poetic a form. The "chiel" among the agriculturists "taking
notes" will be more likely to seduce than to warn; and if the record of
his eventual triumphs be received as gospel truth, we must expect a vast
emigration of the men of mind from the cities to the country. Who would
not cheerfully encounter all the vexations attending a settlement in "My
Farm in Edgewood" for the compensations so bountifully provided