At first sight the ploughman’s task seems to be one which ought rightly to be set only to some well-balanced philosopher, who could calmly descend into himself during the many lonely hours and think of nature and man in orderly thoughts. To the ordinary man, with his drug-habit of taking to reverie during any long spell of solitude, such a task would seem fatal. In fact, it is pretty certain that many a plain fellow must be turned into a fool by the immense monotony of similar furrows and the same view repeated exactly every quarter of an hour. When he is still a boy, he goes about even in the four hours’ darkness of the winter mornings with always a song amidst the sleet or the silent frost. At lunch he can look for nests or nuts or hunt a stoat. When work is over he looks forward to songs at “The Chequers” with those of his own age, or to a shamefaced walk with a girl, or to fishing for tench and eels, or even to a game of cricket. But when he is married all that is past. He leads his horses down to the plough, having some simple thought, a grievance, a recollection, perhaps a hope, running confusedly in his head, and all day he turns it over, repeating himself, exaggerating, puzzling over the meaning of someone’s words, floundering in digressions, fitting new words to the wood-pigeon’s talk, trying to keep straight and to make up his mind, justifying himself, condemning another, cursing him. Now and then he lifts his eyes to the sky or the wooded hills and his mind catches at an impression which never becomes a thought, but something between a picture and a tune in the head, and its half oblivion is pleasant, when suddenly the plough leaps forward from his relaxing grasp, he shouts “Ah, Charley!” to the leader, mutters a little and settles down again to the grievance or the recollection or the hope, to be disturbed on lucky days by the hounds, perhaps, but otherwise to go on and on; and at noon and evening he takes his horses back to the stable and confronts men with the same simple ejaculations as before, after the last glass possibly reviving his lonely thoughts, but ineffectually. “How Bill does talk!” they say. What wonder that the rustic moralist marks an infant’s tomb with the words—
“When the archangel’s trump shall blow
And souls to bodies join,
Millions shall wish their lives below
Had been as brief as thine.”
But Richard is no ordinary man, for he is happy and proud, and somewhere in the fields or in the clouds that roll before him as his plough comes to the top of the ridge, he has found that draught of excellent grace—
“Few men but such as sober are and sage,
Are by the gods to drink thereof assigned;
But such as drink, eternal happiness do find.”
There is little of wisdom in his words except moderation; but his garden is luckier, his kitchen sweeter than all the rest in the hamlet, and of all his tasks—ploughing, harrowing, rolling, drudging, reaping, mowing, carting faggots or corn or hay or green meat or dung—he likes none better than the others, because he likes them all well as they come. And ah! to see him and his team all dark and large and heroic against the sky, ploughing in the winter or the summer morning, or to see him grooming the radiant horses in their dim stable on a calm, delaying evening, is to see one who is in league with sun and wind and rain to make odours fume richly from the ancient altar, to keep the earth going in beauty and fruitfulness for still more years.