Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. by Various
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Various >> Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI.
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There is something very curious, and very touching, in thinking
how clear and distinct, and how often recurring, were our early
anticipations of things that were never to be. In this world, the fact
is for the most part the opposite of what it should be to give force to
Plato's (or Cato's) argument: the thing you vividly anticipate is the
thing that is least likely to come. The thing you don't much care for,
the thing you don't expect, is the likeliest. And even if the event
prove what you anticipated, the circumstances, and the feeling of it,
will be quite different from what you anticipated. A certain little girl
three years old was told that in a little while she was to go with her
parents to a certain city, a hundred miles off,--a city which may be
called Altenburg as well as anything else. It was a great delight to her
to anticipate that journey, and to anticipate it very circumstantially.
It was a delight to her to sit down at evening on her father's knee,
and to tell him all about how it would be in going to Altenburg. It was
always the same thing. Always, first, how sandwiches would be made,--how
they would all get into the carriage, (which would come round to the
door,) and drive away to a certain railway-station,--how they would get
their tickets, and the train would come up, and they would all get into
a carriage together, and lean back in corners, and eat the sandwiches,
and look out of the windows, and so on. But when the journey was
actually made, every single circumstance in the little girl's
anticipations proved wrong. Of course, they were not intentionally made
wrong. Her parents would have carried out to the letter, if they could,
what the little thing had so clearly pictured and so often repeated. But
it proved to be needful to go by an entirely different way and in an
entirely different fashion. All those little details, dwelt on so much,
and with so much interest, were things never to be. It is even so with
the anticipations of larger and older children. How distinctly, how
fully, my friend, we have pictured out to our minds a mode of life, a
home and the country round it, and the multitude of little things which
make up the habitude of being, which we long since resigned ourselves to
knowing could never prove realities! No doubt, it is all right and well.
Even Saint Paul, with all his gift of prophecy, was not allowed to
foresee what was to happen to himself. You know how he wrote that he
would do a certain thing, "so soon as I shall see how it will go with
me."
But our times are in the Best Hand. And the one thing about our lot, my
reader, that we may think of with perfect contentment, is that they
are so. I know nothing more admirable in spirit, and few things more
charmingly expressed, than that little poem by Mrs. Waring which sets
out that comfortable thought. You know it, of course. You should have
it in your memory; and let it be one of the first things your children
learn by heart. It may well come next after, "O God of Bethel": it
breathes the self-same tone. And let me close these thoughts with one of
its verses:--
"There are briers besetting every path,
Which call for patient care:
There is a cross in every lot,
And an earnest need for prayer:
But a lowly heart that leans on Thee
Is happy anywhere!"
THE FLAG.
There's a flag hangs over my threshold, whose folds are more dear to me
Than the blood that thrills in my bosom its earnest of liberty;
And dear are the stars it harbors in its sunny field of blue
As the hope of a further heaven that lights all our dim lives through.
But now should my guests be merry, the house is in holiday guise,
Looking out through its burnished windows like a score of welcoming eyes.
Come hither, my brothers who wander in saintliness and in sin!
Come hither, ye pilgrims of Nature! my heart doth invite you in.
My wine is not of the choicest, yet bears it an honest brand;
And the bread that I bid you lighten I break with no sparing hand;
But pause, ere you pass to taste it, one act must accomplished be:
Salute the flag in its virtue, before ye sit down with me.
The flag of our stately battles, not struggles of wrath and greed:
Its stripes were a holy lesson, its spangles a deathless creed;
'T was red with the blood of freemen, and white with the fear of the foe,
And the stars that fight in their courses 'gainst tyrants its symbols
know.
Come hither, thou son of my mother! we were reared in the self-same
arms;
Thou hast many a pleasant gesture, thy mind hath its gifts and charms;
But my heart is as stern to question as mine eyes are of sorrows full:
Salute the flag in its virtue, or pass on where others rule.
Thou lord of a thousand acres, with heaps of uncounted gold,
The steeds of thy stall are haughty, thy lackeys cunning and bold:
I envy no jot of thy splendor, I rail at thy follies none:
Salute the flag in its virtue, or leave my poor house alone.
Fair lady with silken trappings, high waving thy stainless plume,
We welcome thee to our numbers, a flower of costliest bloom:
Let a hundred maids live widowed to furnish thy bridal bed;
But pause where the flag doth question, and bend thy triumphant head.
Take down now your flaunting banner, for a scout comes breathless and
pale,
With the terror of death upon him; of failure is all his tale:
"They have fled while the flag waved o'er them! they've turned to the
foe their back!
They are scattered, pursued, and slaughtered! the fields are all rout
and wrack!"
Pass hence, then, the friends I gathered, a goodly company!
All ye that have manhood in you, go, perish for Liberty!
But I and the babes God gave me will wait with uplifted hearts,
With the firm smile ready to kindle, and the will to perform our parts.
When the last true heart lies bloodless, when the fierce and the false
have won,
I'll press in turn to my bosom each daughter and either son;
Bid them loose the flag from its bearings, and we'll lay us down to rest
With the glory of home about us, and its freedom locked in our breast.
WET-WEATHER WORK.
BY A FARMER.
I.
It is raining; and being in-doors, I look out from my library-window,
across a quiet country-road, so near that I could toss my pen into the
middle of it.
A thatched stile is opposite, flanked by a straggling hedge of
Osage-orange; and from the stile the ground falls away in green and
gradual slope to a great plateau of measured and fenced fields,
checkered, a month since, with bluish lines of Swedes, with the ragged
purple of mangels, and the feathery emerald-green of carrots. There are
umber-colored patches of fresh-turned furrows; here and there the mossy,
luxurious verdure of new-springing rye; gray stubble; the ragged brown
of discolored, frost-bitten rag-weed; next, a line of tree-tops,
thickening as they drop to the near bed of a river, and beyond the
river-basin showing again, with tufts of hemlock among naked oaks and
maples; then roofs, cupolas; ambitious lookouts of suburban houses,
spires, belfries, turrets: all these commingling in a long line of
white, brown, and gray, which in sunny weather is backed by purple
hills, and flanked one way by a shining streak of water, and the other
by a stretch of low, wooded mountains that turn from purple to blue, and
so blend with the northern sky.
Is the picture clear? A road; a farm-flat of party-colored checkers; a
near wood, that conceals the sunken meadow of a river; a farther wood,
that skirts a town,--that seems to overgrow the town, so that only a
confused line of roofs, belfries, spires, towers, rise above the wood;
and these tallest spires and turrets lying in relief against a purple
hill-side, that is as far beyond the town as the town is beyond my
window; and the purple hill-side trending southward to a lake-like gleam
of water, where a light-house shines upon a point; and northward, as I
said, these same purple hills bearing away to paler purple, and then to
blue, and then to haze.
Thus much is seen, when I look directly eastward; but by an oblique
glance southward (always from my library-window) the checkered farm-land
is repeated in long perspective: here and there is a farm-house with
its clustered out-buildings; here and there a blotch of wood, or of
orcharding; here and there a bright sheen of winter-grain; and the level
ends only where a slight fringe of tree-tops, and the iron cordon of a
railway that leaps over a marshy creek upon trestle-work, separate it
from Long Island Sound.
To the north, under such oblique glance as can be caught, the farm-lands
in smaller inclosures stretch half a mile to the skirts of a quiet
village. A few tall chimneys smoke there lazily, and below them you see
as many quick and repeated puffs of white steam. Two white spires and
a tower are in bold relief against the precipitous basaltic cliff, at
whose foot the village seems to nestle. Yet the mountain is not wholly
precipitous; for the columnar masses been fretted away by a thousand
frosts, making a sloping _debris_ below, and leaving above the
iron-yellow scars of fresh cleavage, the older blotches of gray, and the
still older stain of lichens. Nor is the summit bald, but tufted with
dwarf cedars and oaks, which, as they file away on either flank, mingle
with a heavier growth of hickories and chest-nuts. A few stunted kalmias
and hemlock-spruces have found foothold in the clefts upon the face of
the rock, showing a tawny green, that blends prettily with the scars,
lichens, and weather-stains of the cliff; all which show under a sunset
light richly and changefully as the breast of a dove.
But just now there is no glow of sunset; raining still. Indeed, I do not
know why I should have described at such length a mere landscape, (than
which I know few fairer,) unless because of a rainy day it is always
in my eye, and that now, having invited a few outsiders to such
entertainment as may belong to my wet farm-days, I should present to
them at once my oldest acquaintance,--the view from my library-window.
But as yet it is only coarsely outlined. We may some day return to it
with a fond particularity; for let me warn the reader that I have that
love of such scenes, nay, for the very verdure of the lawn, that I could
put an ink-mark for every blade of the fresh-springing grass, and yet
feel that the tale of its beauty, and of its emerald wealth, were not
half told.
This day we spend in-doors, and busy ourselves with the whims,
doctrines, and economics of a few
OLD-TIME FARMERS.
The shelves where they rest in vellum and in dust are only an
arm's-length from the window; so that I can relieve the stiff classicism
of Flaxman's rendering of the "Works and Days," or the tedious iteration
of Columella and Crescenzio, by a glance outside into the rain-cloud,
under which lies always the checkered illustration of the farming of
to-day, and beyond which the spires stand in sentinel.
Hesiod is currently reckoned one of the oldest farm-writers; but there
is not enough in his homely poem ("Works and Days") out of which to
conjure a farm-system. He gives good advice, indeed, about the weather,
about ploughing when the ground is not too wet, about the proper timber
to put to a plough-beam, about building a house, and taking a bride.
But, on the other hand, he gives very bad advice, where, as in Book II.,
(line 244,) he recommends to stint the oxen in winter, and (line 285) to
put three parts of water to the Biblian wine.
Mr. Gladstone notes the fact that Homer talks only in a grandiose way of
rural life and employments, as if there were no small landholders in his
day; but Hesiod, who must have lived within a century of Homer, with
his modest homeliness, does not confirm this view. He tells us a farmer
should keep two ploughs, and be cautious how he lends either of them.
His household stipulations, too, are most moderate, whether on the score
of the bride, the maid, or the "forty-year-old" ploughman; and for
guardianship of the premises the proprietor is recommended to keep "a
sharp-toothed cur."
This reminds us how Ulysses, on his return from voyaging, found seated
round his good bailiff Eumaeus four savage watch-dogs, who straightway
(and here Homer must have nodded) attack their old master, and are
driven off only by a good pelting of stones.
This Eumaeus, by the way, may be regarded as the Homeric representative
farmer, as well as bailiff and swineherd,--the great original of Gurth,
who might have prepared a supper for Cedric the Saxon very much as
Eumaeus extemporized one upon his Greek farm for Ulysses. Pope
shall tell of this bit of cookery in rhyme that has a ring of the
Rappahannock:--
"His vest succinct then girding round his waist,
Forth rushed the swain with hospitable haste,
Straight to the lodgements of his herd he run,
Where the fat porkers slept beneath the sun;
Of two his cutlass launched the spouting blood;
These quartered, singed, and fixed on forks of wood,
All hasty on the hissing coals he threw;
And, smoking, back the tasteful viands drew,
Broachers, and all."
This is roast pig: nothing more elegant or digestible. For the credit of
Greek farmers, I am sorry that Eumaeus has nothing better to offer his
landlord,--the most abominable dish, Charles Lamb and his pleasant
fable to the contrary notwithstanding, that was ever set before a
Christian.
To return to Hesiod, we suspect that he was only a small farmer--if
he had ever farmed at all--in the foggy latitude of Boeotia, and knew
nothing of the sunny wealth in the south of the peninsula, or of such
princely estates as Eumaeus managed in the Ionian seas. Flaxman has
certainly not given him the look of a large proprietor in his outlines:
his toilet is severely scant, and the old gentleman appears to have lost
two of his fingers in a chaff-cutter. As for Perses, who is represented
as listening to the sage,[A] his dress is in the extreme of classic
scantiness,--being, in fact, a mere night-shirt, and a tight fit at
that.
[Footnote A: Flaxman's _Illustrations of "Works and Days,"_ Plate I.]
But we dismiss Hesiod, the first of the heathen farm-writers, with a
loving thought of his pretty Pandora, whom the goddesses so bedecked,
whom Jove looks on (in Flaxman's picture) with such sharp approval, and
whose attributes the poet has compacted into one resonant line, daintily
rendered by Cooke,--
"Thus the sex began
A lovely mischief to the soul of man."
I next beg to pull from his place on the shelf, and to present to the
reader, my friend General Xenophon, a most graceful writer, a capital
huntsman, an able strategist, an experienced farmer, and, if we may
believe Laertius, "handsome beyond expression."
It is refreshing to find such qualities united in one man at any time,
and doubly refreshing to find them in a person so far removed from the
charities of today that the malcontents cannot pull his character in
pieces. To be sure, he was guilty of a few acts of pillage in the course
of his Persian campaign; but he tells the story of it in his "Anabasis"
with a brave front: his purse was low, and needed replenishment; there
is no cover put up, of disorderly sutlers or camp-followers.
The farming reputation of the General rests upon his "Economics" and
his horse-treatise ([Greek: Hippikae]).
Economy has come to have a contorted meaning in our day, as if it
were only--saving. Its true gist is better expressed by the word
_management_; and in that old-fashioned sense it forms a significant
title for Xenophon's book: management of the household, management of
flocks, of servants, of land, of property in general.
At the very outset we find this bit of practical wisdom, which is put
into the mouth of Socrates, who is replying to Critobulus:--"Those
things should be called goods that are beneficial to the master. Neither
can those lands be called goods which by a man's unskilful management
put him to more expense than he receives profit by them; nor may those
lands be called goods which do not bring a good farmer such a profit as
may give him a good living."
Thereafter (sec. vii.) he introduces the good Ischomachus, who, it
appears, has a thrifty wife at home, and from that source flow in a
great many capital hints upon domestic management. The apartments, the
exposure, the cleanliness, the order, are all considered in such an
admirably practical, common-sense way as would make the old Greek a good
lecturer to the sewing-circles of our time. And when the wife of
the wise Ischomachus, in an unfortunate moment, puts on _rouge_
and cosmetics, the grave husband meets her with this complimentary
rebuke:--"Can there be anything in Nature more complete than yourself?"
"The science of husbandry," he says, and it might be said of the science
in most times, "is extremely profitable to those who understand it;
but it brings the greatest trouble and misery upon those farmers who
undertake it without knowledge." (sec. xv.)
Where Xenophon comes to speak of the details of farm-labor, of
ploughings and fallowings, there is all that precision and particularity
of mention, added to a shrewd sagacity, which one might look for in the
columns of the "Country Gentleman." He even describes how a field should
be thrown into narrow lands, in order to promote a more effectual
surface-drainage. In the midst of it, however, we come upon a stereorary
maxim, which is, to say the least, of doubtful worth:--"Nor is there any
sort of earth which will not make very rich manure, by being laid a due
time in standing water, till it is fully impregnated with the virtue of
the water." His British translator, Professor Bradley, does, indeed,
give a little note of corroborative testimony. But I would not advise
any active farmer, on the authority either of General Xenophon or of
Professor Bradley, to transport his surface-soil very largely to the
nearest frog-pond, in the hope of finding it transmuted into manure. The
absorptive and retentive capacity of soils is, to be sure, the bone just
now of very particular contention; but whatever that capacity may be,
it certainly needs something more palpable than the virtue of standing
water for its profitable development.
Here, again, is very neat evidence of how much simple good sense has
to do with husbandry: Socrates, who is supposed to have no particular
knowledge of the craft, says to his interlocutor,--"You have satisfied
me that I am not ignorant in husbandry; and yet I never had any master
to instruct me in it."
"It is not," says Xenophon, "difference in knowledge or opportunities of
knowledge that makes some farmers rich and others poor; but that which
makes some poor and some rich is that the former are negligent and lazy,
the latter industrious and thrifty."
Next, we have this masculine _ergo_:--"Therefore we may know that those
who will not learn such sciences as they might get their living by, or
do not fall into husbandry, are either downright fools, or else propose
to get their living by robbery or by begging." (sec. xx.)
This is a good clean cut at politicians, office-holders, and other
such beggar craft, through more than a score of centuries,--clean as
classicism can make it: the Attic euphony in it, and all the aroma of
age.
Once more, and it is the last of the "Oeconomica," we give this charming
bit of New-Englandism:--"I remember my father had an excellent rule,"
(_Ischomachus loquitur_,) "which he advised me to follow: that, if ever
I bought any land, I should by no means purchase that which had been
already well-improved, but should choose such as had never been tilled,
either through neglect of the owner, or for want of capacity to do it;
for he observed, that, if I were to purchase improved grounds, I must
pay a high price for them, and then I could not propose to advance their
value, and must also lose the pleasure of improving them myself, or of
seeing them thrive better by my endeavors."
When Xenophon wrote his rural treatises, (including the [Greek:
Kunaegetikos],) he was living in that delightful region of country which
lies westward of the mountains of Arcadia, looking toward the Ionian
Sea. Here, too, he wrote the story of his retreat, and his wanderings
among the mountains of Armenia; here he talked with his friends, and
made other such _symposia_ as he has given us a taste of at the house of
Callias the Athenian; here he ranged over the whole country-side with
his horses and dogs: a stalwart and lithe old gentleman, without a
doubt; able to mount a horse or to manage one, with the supplest of the
grooms; and with a keen eye, as his book shows, for the good points in
horse-flesh. A man might make a worse mistake than to buy a horse after
Xenophon's instructions, to-day. A spavin or a wind-gall did not escape
the old gentleman's eye, and he never bought a horse without proving his
wind and handling him well about the mouth and ears. His grooms were
taught their duties with nice speciality: the mane and tail to be
thoroughly washed; the food and bed to be properly and regularly
prepared; and treatment to be always gentle and kind.
Exception may perhaps be taken to his doctrine in regard to
stall-floors. Moist ones, he says, injure the hoof: "Better to have
stones inserted in the ground close to one another, equal in size to
their hoofs; for such stalls consolidate the hoofs of those standing on
them, beside strengthening the hollow of the foot."
After certain directions for rough riding and leaping, he advises
hunting through thickets, if wild animals are to be found. Otherwise,
the following pleasant diversion is named, which I beg to suggest to
sub-lieutenants in training for dragoon-service:--"It is a useful
exercise for two horsemen to agree between themselves, that one shall
retire through all sorts of rough places, and as he flees, is to turn
about from time to time and present his spear; and the other shall
pursue, having javelins blunted with balls, and a spear of the same
description, and whenever he comes within javelin-throw, he is to hurl
the blunted weapon at the party retreating, and whenever he comes within
spear-reach, he is to strike him with it."
Putting aside his horsemanship, in which he must have been nearly
perfect, there was very much that was grand about the old Greek,--very
much that makes us strangely love the man, who, when his soldiers lay
benumbed under the snows on the heights of Armenia, threw off his
general's coat, or blanket, or what not, and set himself resolutely to
wood-chopping and to cheering them. The farmer knew how.
Such men win battles. He has his joke, too, with Cheirisophus, the
Lacedaemonian, about the thieving propensity of his townspeople, and
invites him, in virtue of it, to _steal_ a difficult march upon the
enemy. And Cheirisophus grimly retorts upon Xenophon, that Athenians are
said to be great experts in stealing the public money, especially the
high officers. This sounds home-like! When I come upon such things, I
forget the parasangs and the Taochians and the dead Cyrus, and seem to
be reading out of American newspapers.
It is quite out of the question to claim Theocritus as a farm-writer;
and yet in all old literature there is not to be found such a lively
bevy of heifers, and wanton kids, and "butting rams," and stalwart
herdsmen, who milk the cows "upon the sly," as in the "Idyls" of the
musical Sicilian.
There is no doubt but Theocritus knew the country to a charm: he knew
all its roughnesses, and the thorns that scratched the bare legs of the
goatherds; he knew the lank heifers, that fed, "like grasshoppers," only
on dew; he knew what clatter the brooks made, tumbling headlong adown
the rocks,--
[Greek: apo tus petras kataleibetai ypsothen ydor]
he knew, moreover, all the charms and coyness of the country-nymphs,
giving even a rural twist to his praises of the courtly Helen:--
"In shape, in height, in stately presence
fair,
Straight as a furrow gliding from the
share."[B]
[Footnote B: Elton's translation, I think. I do not vouch for its
correctness.]
A man must have had an eye for good ploughing and a lithe figure, as
well as a keen scent for the odor of fresh-turned earth, to make such a
comparison as that!
Theocritus was no French sentimentalist; he would have protested against
the tame elegancies of the Roman Bucolics; and the _sospiri ardenti_ and
_miserelli aman_ of Guarini would have driven him mad. He is as brisk as
the wind upon a breezy down. His cow-tenders are swart and bare-legged,
and love with a vengeance. There is no miserable tooting upon flutes,
but an uproarious song that shakes the woods; and if it comes to a
matter of kissing, there are no "reluctant lips," but a smack that makes
the vales resound.
It is no Boucher we have here, nor Watteau: cosmetics and rosettes are
far away; tunics are short, and cheeks are nut-brown. It is Teniers,
rather:--boors, indeed; but they are live boors, and not manikin
shepherds.
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