Though she is only a grade Jersey, the cow is a pretty creature, and gives a rural, ruminant touch to our approach, along with the lilacs and the hens. Hitched here on the front lawn the cow suggests economy, too. She is more than a wagon hitched to a star. She is a mowing-machine, and a rake and tedder, and a churn. The gods with her do my mowing, gather up and cure my hay, and turn it into cream.
Every cow gives some skim milk—which we need for the chickens, for cooking, and cottage cheese. Life is not all cream. If I speak of gods doing my chores, I will say they do not milk for me in the mornings, and that it is one of the boys who milks at night. A cow clipping your lawn is poetry and cream too, but caring for the creature is often skim milk and prose. Milking ought to be done regularly. Get a cow and you find her cud a kind of pendulum to all creation, the time to milk being synchronized twice daily to the stars.
I did not plant war-potatoes on my front lawn, partly because they would not grow there, and partly because, in times of peace, I had prepared for war-potatoes; and partly because I think a front lawn looks better in cows than in potatoes. If thou shouldst
“So live, that when thy summons comes to join
The innumerable caravan ...
Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night,
Scourged to his dungeon,”
—should we not all live so that, when war comes, we need not plough up the beds for potatoes where the portulaca and poppy ought to blow?
But what a confession here! When war comes! As if I expected war to come again! Many of us are fighting feebly against both the thought and the hideous thing. But many more are preparing for it. Our generals of the late war are going up and down the land preaching preparedness, as they always have. We learn nothing. They know everything. Their profession is war. Can a man lay down his life for a profession he does not believe in? The military men believe in war.
But so do we all as a people. War is the oldest, most honored profession in the world. In all of the fifty years of its history, the great University, of which, for almost half of that time, I have been a teacher, had never conferred an honorary degree. For fifty years it had carried a single laurel wreath in its hand to crown some honored head. Prophets came and went; poets came and went; scientists came and went; scholars came and went; but still the University, dedicated to life and learning, waited with its single wreath a yet more honorable brow.