ou may
frame an idyl of some sort from his apparently prosaic existence. Our
poets, we must needs think, are deficient in that shiftiness, ready
adaptation to circumstances, and ability of making the most of things,
for which, as a people, we are proverbial. Can they make nothing of our
Thanksgiving, that annual gathering of long-severed friends? Do they
find nothing to their purpose in our apple-bees, buskings, berry-
pickings, summer picnics, and winter sleigh-rides? Is there nothing
available in our peculiarities of climate, scenery, customs, and
political institutions? Does the Yankee leap into life, shrewd, hard,
and speculating, 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 attracte