THE CULTIVATOR’S ART.
We’re highly gratified to find,
The public more and more inclined
The Cultivator’s art to practise,
And patronize, because the fact is
That righteousness and cultivation
Go hand in hand t’ exalt a nation:
And Husbandry’s a hobby which
A world may ride with spur and switch,
If all mankind at once bestrode him
They could not tire nor overload him.
Not only men, who sit astride,
But ladies also on a side-
Saddle so neat, or on a pillion,
That’s big enough to hold a million,
May ride our hobby with a cheer-up,
And he’ll not kick, bite, plunge, nor rear up,
But vires in eundo crescit,[132]
As cousin Virgil somewhere has it
So fire, which has obtain’d ascendence,
When setting up for independence,
Prepares by heat of radiation
Combustibles for conflagration;—
By burning fast, the mighty master
Acquires fresh means of burning faster,
Till blazing pyramids arise,
Which threaten to consume the skies.
With ken prophetic, we behold
A brighter age than that of gold,
Which, with accelerating pace,
Is hurrying on to bless our race;
And hail its grand approximation,
Mark’d by superior cultivation,
When wise men’s heads, and good men’s hearts,
Devoted to the art of arts,
And industry’s untiring hand,
Shall make a garden of our land—
Yea, make New England, all exceeding,
A new edition of old Eden,
If not quite equal, yet before it,
In many a root, and fruit, and floret,
Indebted for its propagation
To modern arts of cultivation.
We’re tranced with rapture, when we find
Whose smile makes mortal man’s condition
But little short of sheer fruition,
By whose society is given
Earth’s purest prototype of Heaven,
Th’ angelic part of human nature
Inspire and aid the cultivator.
A plant that’s sunn’d by ladies’ eyes
Will like an exhalation rise,
We hope that horticulture may
Be therefore blest with beauty’s ray,
Till Flora’s germs gem every waste,
And every grove’s a “Bower of Taste.”
Adam, in Eden, we believe,
Had been a brute without his Eve;
An arid heath, a blasted common,
Blest with the smiles of lovely woman,
We should prefer to all that’s rare
In paradise, without the fair.
We therefore pray that friendship’s hand
From every lady in the land,
May be to us henceforth extended,
From this time till our time is ended;
And would solicit every charmer
To please to patronize the Farmer,
And make those gentlemen, who claim
And common justice must require her
To grant this boon to an admirer
Like us, so prone to chant her praises,
In verse which absolutely blazes.
His head is very like a stump
Whate’er its craniologic bump,
Who does not see that we the tillers
Of earth compose the nation’s pillars,
And may be styled, with strict propriety,
The props of civilized society.
What would have been poor mortals’ lot—
Yea, what were man, if we were not?
Nature’s poor, simple, houseless child,
The weakest wild beast of the wild,
Must live on browse, his home must be
A cavern or a hollow tree;
Sometimes, in spite of fears and cares,
Be served up raw to wolves and bears.
Or maugre tooth, nail, fist, and truncheon,
Make hungry catamounts a luncheon.
Our art, moreover, claims ascendence
As german to our independence;
Both, commonly, are coexistent,
And each the other’s best assistant.
We farmers are a sort of stuff,
Tyrants will always find too tough
For them to work up into slaves,
The servile tools of lordly knaves.
Those men who till the stubborn soil,
Enlighten’d, and inured to toil,
Cannot be made to quail or cower
By traitor’s art or tyrant’s power,
They might as well attempt to chain
The west wind in a hurricane;—
Make rivers run up hill by frightening,
Or steal a march on kindled lightning—
The great sea-serpent, which we’ve read of,
Take by the tail and snap his head off—
The firmament on cloudy nights,
Illume with artificial lights,
By such an apparatus as
Is used for lighting streets with gas—
Or, having split the north pole till it’s
Divided into baker’s billets,
Make such a blaze as never shone,
And torrefy the frozen zone—
With clubs assail the polar bear,
And drive the monster from his lair—
Attack the comets as they run
With loads of fuel for the sun,
And overset by oppugnation
Those shining colliers of creation—
The Milky Way McAdamize,
A railway raise to span the skies,
Then make, to save Apollo’s team,
The Solar Chariot go by steam.
These things shall tyrants do, and more
Than we have specified, before
Our cultivators they subdue,
While grass is green, or sky is blue.