Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. by Various

V >> Various >> Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI.

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I shall call out another Sicilian here, named Moschus, were it only
for his picture of a fine, sturdy bullock: it occurs in his "Rape of
Europa":--

"With yellow hue his sleekened body beams;
His forehead with a snowy circle gleams;
Horns, equal-bending, from his brow emerge,
And to a moonlight crescent orbing verge."

Nothing can be finer than the way in which this "milky steer," with
Europa on his back, goes sailing over the brine, his "feet all oars."
Meantime, she, the pretty truant,

"Grasps with one hand his curved projecting horn,
And with the other closely drawn compressed
The fluttering foldings of her purple vest,
Whene'er its fringed hem was dashed with dew
Of the salt sea-foam that in circles flew:
Wide o'er Europa's shoulders to the gale
The ruffled robe heaved swelling, like a sail."

Moschus is as rich as the Veronese at Venice; and his picture is truer
to the premium standard. The painting shows a pampered animal, with
over-red blotches on his white hide, and is by half too fat to breast
such "salt sea-foam" as flashes on the Idyl of Moschus.

Another poet, Aratus of Cilicia, whose very name has a smack of tillage,
has left us a book about the weather [Greek: Dosaemeia] which is
quite as good to mark down a hay-day by as the later meteorologies of
Professor Espy or Judge Butler.

Besides which, our friend Aratus holds the abiding honor of having been
quoted by St. Paul, in his speech to the Athenians on Mars Hill:--

"For in Him we live, and move, and have our being; as certain also of
your own poets have said: 'For we are also His offspring.'"

And Aratus, (after Elton,)--

"On thee our being hangs; in thee we move;
All are thy offspring, and the seed of Jove."

Scattered through the lesser Greek poets, and up and down the Anthology,
are charming bits of rurality, redolent of the fields and of field-life,
with which it would be easy to fill up the measure of this rainy day,
and beat off the Grecian couplets to the tinkle of the eave-drops. Up
and down, the cicada chirps; the locust, "encourager of sleep," sings
his drowsy song; boozy Anacreon flings grapes; the purple violets and
the daffodils crown the perfumed head of Heliodora; and the reverent
Simonides likens our life to the grass.

Nor will I part company with these, or close up the Greek ranks
of farmers, (in which I must not forget the great schoolmaster,
Theophrastus,) until I cull a sample of the Anthology, and plant it
for a guidon at the head of the column,--a little bannerol of music,
touching upon our topic, as daintily as the bees touch the flowering
tips of the wild thyme.

It is by Zonas the Sardian:--

[Greek: Ai o agete nxouthai oimblaeides akra melissai,
_K.T.L.,]

and the rendering by Mr. Hay:--

"Ye nimble honey-making bees, the flowers are in their prime;
Come now and taste the little buds of sweetly breathing thyme,
Of tender poppies all so fair, or bits of raisin sweet,
Or down that decks the apple tribe, or fragrant violet;
Come, nibble on,--your vessels store with honey while you can,
In order that the hive-protecting, bee-preserving Pan
May have a tasting for himself, and that the hand so rude,
That cuts away the comb, may leave yourselves some little food."

Leaving now this murmur of the bees upon the banks of the Pactolus,
will slip over-seas to Tusculum, where Cato was born, who was the oldest
of the Roman writers upon agriculture; and thence into the Sabine
territory, where, upon an estate of his father's, in the midst of the
beautiful country lying northward of the Monte Gennaro, (the Lucretilis
of Horace,) he learned the art of good farming.

In what this art consisted in his day, he tells us in short, crackling
speech;--"_Primum_, bene arare; _secundum_, arare; _tertium_,
stercorare." For the rest, he says, choose good seed, sow thickly, and
pull all the weeds. Nothing more would be needed to grow as good a crop
upon the checkered plateau under my window as ever fattened among the
Sabine Hills.

Has the art come to a stand-still, then; and shall we take to reading
Cato on fair days, as well as rainy?

There has been advance, without doubt; but all the advance in the world
would not take away the edge from truths, stated as Cato knew how to
state them. There is very much of what is called Agricultural Science,
nowadays, which is--rubbish. Science is sound, and agriculture always an
honest art; but the mixture, not uncommonly, is bad,--no fair marriage,
but a monstrous concubinage, with a monstrous progeny of muddy treatises
and disquisitions which confuse more than they instruct. In contrast
with such, it is no wonder that the observations of such a man as Cato,
whose energies had been kept alive by service in the field, and whose
tongue had been educated in the Roman Senate, should carry weight with
them. The grand truths on which successful agriculture rests, and which
simple experience long ago demonstrated, cannot be kept out of view, nor
can they be dwarfed by any imposition of learning. Science may explain
them, or illustrate or extend; but it cannot shake their preponderating
influence upon the crop of the year. As respects many other arts,
the initial truths may be lost sight of, and overlaid by the mass
of succeeding developments,--not falsified, but so belittled as
practically to be counted for nothing. In this respect, agriculture is
exceptional. The old story is always the safe story: you must plough and
plough again; and manure; and sow good seed, and enough; and pull the
weeds; and as sure as the rain falls, the crop will come.

Many nice additions to this method of treatment, which my fine-farming
friends will suggest, are anticipated by the old Roman, if we look far
enough into his book. Thus, he knew the uses of a harrow; he knew the
wisdom of ploughing in a green crop; he had steeps for his seed; he knew
how to drain off the surface-water,--nay, there is very much in his
account of the proper preparation of ground for olive-trees, or
vine-setting, which looks like a mastery of the principles that govern
the modern system of drainage.[C]

[Footnote C: XLIII. "Sulcos, si locus aquosus erit, alveatos esse
oportet," etc.]

Of what particular service recent investigations in science have been to
the practical farmer, and what positive and available aid, beyond what
could be derived from a careful study of the Roman masters, they put
into the hands of an intelligent worker, who is tilling ground simply
for pecuniary advantage, I shall hope to inquire and discourse upon,
some other day: when that day comes, we will fling out the banner of the
nineteenth century, and give a gun to Liebig, and Johnson, and the rest.

Meantime, as a farmer who endeavors to keep posted in all the devices
for pushing lands which have an awkward habit of yielding poor crops
into the better habit of yielding large ones, I will not attempt to
conceal the chagrin with which I find this curmudgeon of a Roman
Senator, living two centuries before Christ, and northward of Monte
Gennaro, who never heard of "Hovey's Root-Cutter," or of the law of
primaries, laying down rules[D] of culture so clear, so apt, so full,
that I, who have the advantages of two thousand years, find nothing in
them to laugh at, unless it be a few oblations to the gods;[E] and this,
considering that I am just now burning a little incense (Havana) to the
nymph Volutia, is uncalled for.

[Footnote D: This mention, of course, excludes the Senator's _formulae_
for unguents, aperients, cattle-nostrums, and pickled pork.]

[Footnote E: CXXXIV. Cato, _De Re Rustica_.]

And if Senator Cato were to wake up to-morrow, in the white house that
stares through the rain yonder, and were to open his little musty vellum
of slipshod maxims, and, in faith of it, start a rival farm in the bean
line, or in vine-growing,--keeping clear of the newspapers,--I make no
doubt but he would prove as thrifty a neighbor as my good friend the
Deacon.

We nineteenth-century men, at work among our cabbages, clipping off the
purslane and the twitch-grass, are disposed to assume a very complacent
attitude, as we lean upon our hoe-handles,--as if we were doing tall
things in the way of illustrating physiology and the cognate sciences.
But the truth is, old Laertes, near three thousand years ago, in his
slouch cap and greasy beard, was hoeing up in the same way his purslane
and twitch-grass, in his bean-patch on the hills of Ithaca. The
difference between us, so far as the crop and the tools go, is, after
all, ignominiously small. _He_ dreaded the weevil in his beans, and _we_
the club-foot in our cabbages; _we_ have the "Herald," and _he_ had
none; _we_ have "Plantation-Bitters," and _he_ had his jug of the
Biblian wine.

M. Varro, another Roman farmer, lies between the same covers "De Re
Rustica" with Cato, and seems to have had more literary tact, though
less of blunt sagacity. Yet he challenges at once our confidence by
telling us so frankly the occasion of his writing upon such a subject.
Life, he says, is a bubble,--and the life of an old man a bubble about
to break. He is eighty, and must pack his luggage to go out of this
world. ("_Annus octogesimus admonet me, ut sarcinas colligam antequam
proficiscar e vita_.") Therefore he, writes down for his wife, Fundania,
the rules by which she may manage the farm.

And a very respectably old lady she must have been, to deal with the
_villici_ and the _coloni_, if her age bore suitable relation to that
of her husband. The ripe maturity of many of the rural writers I have
introduced cannot fail to strike one. Thus, Xenophon gained a strength
in his Elian fields that carried him into the nineties; Cato lived to be
over eighty; and now we have Varro, writing his book out by Tusculum at
eighty, and surviving to counsel with Fundania ten years more. Pliny,
too, (the elder,) who, if not a farmer, had his country-seats, and left
very much to establish our acquaintance with the Roman rural life, was
a hale, much-enduring man, of such soldierly habits and large
abstemiousness as to warrant a good fourscore,--if he had not fallen
under that murderous cloud of ashes from Mount Vesuvius, in the year 79.

The poets, doubtless, burnt out earlier, as they usually do. Virgil,
whom I shall come to speak of presently, certainly did: he died at
fifty-one. Tibullus, whose opening Idyl is as pretty a bit of gasconade
about living in a cottage in the country, upon love and a few
vegetables, as a maiden could wish for, did not reach the fifties; and
Martial, whose "Faustine Villa," if nothing else, entitles him to rural
oblation, fell short of the sixties.

Varro indulges in some sharp sneers at those who had written on the same
subject before him. This was natural enough in a man of his pursuits: he
had written four hundred books!

Of Columella we know scarcely more than that he lived somewhere about
the time of Tiberius, that he was a man of wealth, that he travelled
extensively through Gaul, Italy, and Greece, observing intelligently
different methods of culture, and that he has given the fullest existing
compend of ancient agriculture. In his chapter upon Gardening he warms
into hexameters; but the rest is stately and euphonious prose. In his
opening chapter, he does not forego such praises of the farmer's life
as sound like a lawyer's address before a county-society on a fair-day.
Cincinnatus and his plough come in for it; and Fabricius and Curius
Dentatus; with which names, luckily, our orators cannot whet their
periods, since Columella's mention of them is about all we know of their
farming.

He falls into the way, moreover, of lamenting, as people obstinately
continue to do, the "good old times," when men were better than "now,"
and when the reasonable delights of the garden and the fields engrossed
them to the neglect of the circus and the theatres. But when he opens
upon his subject proper, it is in grandiose, Spanish style, (he was
a native of Cadiz,) with a maxim broad enough to cover all possible
conditions:--"_Qui studium agricolationi dederit, sciat haec sibi
advocanda: prudentiam rei, facultatem impendendi voluntatem agendi_."
Or, as Tremellius says,--"That man will master the business, _qui et
colere sciet, et poterit, et volet_."

This is comprehensive, if not encouraging. That "_facultatem
impendendi_" is a tremendous bolster to farming as to anything else; it
is only another shape of the "_poterit_," and the "_poterit"_ only
a scholarly rendering of pounds and pence. As if Tremellius had
said,--That man will make his way at farming who understands the
business, who has the money to apply to it, and who is willing to bleed
freely.

With a kindred sagacity this shrewd Roman advises a man to slip upon his
farm often, in order that his steward may keep sharply at his work; he
even suggests that the landlord make a feint of coming, when he has no
intention thereto, that he may gain a day's alertness from the bailiff.
The book is of course a measure of the advances made in farming during
the two hundred years elapsed since Cato's time; but those advances were
not great. There was advance in power to systematize facts, advance in
literary aptitude, but no very noticeable gain in methods of culture.
Columella gives the results of wider observation, and of more persistent
study; but, for aught I can see, a man could get a crop of lentils
as well with Cato as with Columbia; a man would house his flocks and
servants as well out of the one as the other; in short, a man would grow
into the "_facultatem impendendi_" as swiftly under the teachings of the
Senator as of the later writer of the reign of Tiberius.

It is but dull work to follow those teachings; here and there I warm
into a little sympathy, as I catch sight, in his Latin dress, of our
old friend _Curculio;_ here and there I sniff a fruit that seems
familiar,--as the _fraga_, or a _morum;_ and here and there comes
blushing into the crabbed text the sweet name of some home-flower,--a
lily, a narcissus, or a rose. The chief value of the work of Columella,
however, lies in its clear showing-forth of the relative importance
given to different crops, under Roman culture, and to the raising of
cattle, poultry, fish, etc.; as compared with crops. Knowing this, we
know very much that will help us toward an estimate of the domestic life
of the Romans. We learn, with surprise, how little they regarded their
oxen, save as working-animals,--whether the milk-white steers of
Clitumnus, or the dun Campanian cattle, whose descendants show their
long-horned stateliness to this day in the Roman forum. The sheep, too,
whether of Tarentum or of Canusium, were regarded as of value chiefly
for their wool and milk; and it is surely amazing, that men who could
appreciate the iambics of Horace and the eloquence of Cicero should
have shown so little fancy for a fat saddle of mutton or for a mottled
sirloin of beef.

I change from Columella to Virgil, and from Virgil back to some pleasant
Idyl of Tibullus, and from Tibullus to the pretty prate of Horace about
the Sabine Hills; I stroll through Pliny's villa, eying the clipped
box-trees; I hear the rattle in the tennis-court; I watch the tall Roman
girls--

"Grandes virgines proborum colonorum"--

marching along with their wicker-baskets filled with curds and
fresh-plucked thrushes, until there comes over me a confusion of times
and places.

--The sound of the battle of to-day dies; the fresh blood-stains
fade; and I seem to wake upon the heights of Tusculum, in the days of
Tiberius. The farm-flat below is a miniature Campagna, along which I
see stretching straight to the city the shining pavement of the Via
Tusculana. The spires yonder melt into mist, and in place of them I see
the marble house-walls of which Augustus boasted. As yet the grander
monuments of the Empire are not built; but there is a blotch of cliff
which may be the Tarpeian Rock, and beside it a huge hulk of building on
the Capitoline Hill, where sat the Roman Senate. A little hitherward are
the gay turrets of the villa of Maecenas, and of the princely houses on
the Palatine Hill, and in the foreground the stately tomb of Cecilia
Metella. I see the barriers of a hippodrome, (where now howling
jockeys make the twilight hideous); a _gestatio_, with its lines
of cherry-trees, is before me, and the velvety lavender-green of
olive-orchards covers the hills behind. Vines grow upon the slope
eastward,--

"Neve tibi ad solem vergant vineta cadentem,"--

twining around, and flinging off a great wealth of tendrils from their
supporting-poles (_pedamenta_). The figs begin to show the purple bloom
of fruitage, and the _villicus_, who has just now come in from the
_atriolum_, reports a good crop, and asks if it would not be well to
apply a few loads of marl (_tofacea_) to the summer fallow, which Cato
is just now breaking up with the Campanian steers, for barley.

Scipio, a stanch Numidian, has gone to market with three asses loaded
with cabbages and asparagus. Villicus tells me that the poultry in the
fattening-coops (as close-shut as the Strasburg geese)[F] are doing
well, and he has added a _soupcon_ of sweetening to their barley-gruel.
The young doves have their legs faithfully broken, ("_obteras crura_")
and are placidly fattening on their stumps. The thrush-house is properly
darkened, only enough light entering to show the food to some three or
four thousand birds, which are in course of cramming for the market. The
_cochlearium_ has a good stock of snails and mussels; and the little
dormice are growing into fine condition for an approaching Imperial
banquet.

[Footnote F: "Locus ad hanc rem desideratur maxime calidus, et minimi
luminis, in quo singulae caveis angustioribus vel sportis inclusae
pendeant aves, sed ita coarctatae, _ne versari posslnt_."--Columella,
Lib. VIII. cap. vii.]

Villicus reports the clip of the Tarentine sheep unusually fine, and
free from burrs. The new must is all a-foam in the _vinaria;_ and around
the inner cellar (_gaudendem est!_) there is a tier of urns, as large as
school-boys, brimming with ripe Falernian.

If it were not stormy, I might order out the farm-chariot, or
_curriculum_, which is, after all, but a low, dumpy kind of horse-cart,
and take a drive over the lava pavement of the Via Tusculana, to learn
what news is astir, and what the citizens talk of in the forum. Is all
quiet upon the Rhine? How is it possibly with Germanicus? And what of
that story of the arrest of Seneca? It could hardly have happened, they
say, in the good old days of the Republic.

And with this mention, as with the sound of a gun, the Roman pastoral
dream is broken. The Campagna, the olive-orchards, the _columbarium_,
fall back to their old places in the blurred type of Columella. The
Campanian steers are unyoked, and stabled in the text of Varro. The
turrets of the villa of Maecenas, and of the palaces of Sylla and the
Caesars, give place to the spires of a New-England town,--southward of
which I see through the mist a solitary flag flying over a soldiers'
hospital. It reminds of nearer and deadlier perils than ever environed
the Roman Republic,--perils out of which if the wisdom and courage of
the people do not find a way, some new Caesar will point it with the
sword.

Looking northward, I see there is a bight of blue in the sky; and a lee
set of dark-gray and purple clouds is folding down over the eastern
horizon,--against which the spires and the flag show clearer than ever.
It means that the rain has stopped; and the rain having stopped, my
in-door work is done.

* * * * *

GOLDEN WEDDING.

The reader whose eye is arrested by my title will doubtless anticipate a
romance on that ever-old, ever-new theme of a certain god with a torch
leading two souls bound together by iron concealed in flower-wreaths,
until, alas! life seems ordinary enough to be symbolized by _tin_,--of
the tin-wedding entering into the refiner's fire, and, by sure
transmutation, rising from the baser metal to the paler, but purer
silver,--of the subtile alchemy of years, which, in human life's great
crucible,

"Transmute, so potent are the spells they know
Into pure gold the silver of to-day."

Perhaps, reader, you are not altogether to be disappointed; and yet, for
the present, it is only a glass of sparkling wine I wish you to take
with me. You will please read on that delicate strip of paper around the
bottle's neck the name in gilt,--"Golden Wedding." At once you
grow transcendental, and suppose that some German vine-dresser in
Catawba-land--by the way, Gerritt Smith's gardener is a nephew of
Schiller!--was dreaming of the marriage of the Sun with the Vine, his
darling plant, in whose juice linger and sparkle the light and joy of
many faded days. But no, it was named from a real Golden Wedding.

Let me take you--as the clairvoyants say--to a large, sooty, toiling
city in the West. From street to street you shall go, and see but little
to excite your admiration, unless you are a constant believer that _work
is worship_. But here, in the centre of the city, is a noble old mansion
with its beautiful park around it, which a traveller who saw it once
compared to a pearl on the breast of a blacksmith. Here it was that the
Golden Wedding took place.

Who that was there can ever forget it? In my own memory that throng of
the worthy, the beautiful, the gay of a great city will stand as the one
fulfilment which Fate has given me of many Oriental promissory dreams,
most of which she has failed to honor. In that great company you might
have traced all the circles of that city's growth, as you may trace a
tree's history in its rings. That lady there was the first white baby
born here, where now over two hundred thousand human beings reside. Here
are the pioneers who filled the first log-huts on the city's site,
until they overflowed through the roofs. And here is an inner circle of
children, and an outer one of grandchildren, about the two who are the
heart of this beautiful celebration. Can that lovely, erect, blooming
lady be a bride of fifty years? Looking at her, one would say it is a
great and unnecessary mistake of ours to grow old. But more closely must
we look at that quaint old man by her side. Lately he has passed away;
but every day of his long life left a trace worthy to be noted well. His
eighty years and twenty-five days of life comprise an epitome of the
history and growth of a great community. Not so would you at first
interpret that plain old man; though, to a knowing eye, that eye, clear
with looking at the duty that lies nearest, that mouth, telling of
patient, unimpulsive energy, that broadness about the brow, would be
guaranties of a marked life.

And now for my story, which you must let me tell in a rambling way; for
any systematic biography of that man would be like putting one of his
own Catawba-vines into your herbarium.

I introduce you to a fair-haired, handsome youth, on the deck of a small
steamboat, which is bearing him to his fortune in the great West. He is
penniless. His father was wealthy; but in the war he was a Tory, and, in
the confiscation of his property, his sin was visited upon his son. But
he was not the boy to repine, with youth and the great West before him.
And now as from the steamer's deck he sees a fine landscape with a few
log-houses on it, he believes that it is one day to be a great city, and
concludes to stop there. So he is put ashore with his trunk.

He has already determined to study law. He goes to the one judge
who resides there, and is taken as a student into his office. More
log-houses are built; a court-house is erected; and presently that
institution at sight of which the shipwrecked Englishman fell on his
knees and thanked God he was in a Christian land--the gallows--made its
appearance. So the young man had a fair practice.

The records of the West, if they are ever written, will testify how
often whimsical Fortune thrusts her favors on men against their will.
This very judge with whom our youth studied law became environed with
pecuniary difficulties, and wished once to satisfy a claim of a few
hundred dollars by deeding away a sheep-pasture of a few acres, which
was of no sort of use to him. But when he went to get his wife's
signature to the conveyance, she burst into tears; she knew, she said,
that the pasture was worthless; but she had in her childhood heard there
the tinkling of the bells of her father's sheep; it was very foolish,
she knew, but now that they had all passed away, the bells over in the
pasture tinkled on in her memory, and she hated to give it up. The kind
husband would not insist, but went sadly to his work. It was not long
before the sheep-pasture was worth a million dollars! Sentiment, you
see, is not always an unproductive article.

But this case was scarcely so curious as that which presently thrust a
goodly capital on the hands of our young law-student. His first case in
the court was that of a horse-thief, whom he induced a jury to acquit.
When he came to his client for a fee, the scapegrace whispered that
he had nothing on earth wherewith to pay the fee except two old
whiskey-stills and--_a horse_. When he heard this last word, the
lawyer's conscience gave him a twinge. After a moment's reflection, he
said,--"You will need the horse; and you had best make him take you as
far as possible from this region of country. I must be satisfied with
the whiskey-stills." It was not for a long time that he thought even to
inquire about the stills. When he did so, he found them in possession
of a man who implored him not to take them away, and promised to pay
something for them. Finding that he could not do this, he begged our
hero to accept as payment for them a few acres of barren land, which,
with great reluctance, he agreed to do. Erelong the tide of emigration
set westward, and this land is to-day worth two million dollars!

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