Curiously enough, Midas always had a spite against children, which grow up thickest among heaps of clam-shells and on poor side-hills.
Into our flowering ecclesiastial garden, planted with every known variety, and exhibiting large and vigorous growths, Joseph Smith—a Vermont simple—introduced, in 1827, a new shrub. It bore at first a double Mormon flower-looking tip, distributed in pretty equal numbers on its deep-green, sucker-like shoots; but transplanted first to Nauvoo, Illinois, in 1838, and ten years later to the alkaline soil of Utah, it immediately bore the female variety in alarming disproportion. This Salt Lake shrub—of the genus polygamous—has become by cultivation a very rank weed, smelling earthily to heaven. Its numerous Young off-shoots require severe cutting, if not distinct subsoil treatment.
Architecture at last began to raise its tasteful fronts, Elizabethan, Gothic, Italian cottage, or American composite, set in trim yards or on smooth-shaven lawns, netted and webbed by paths and walks. On headlands, fringed with sea-wave ruffles; in valleys gladdened by the smiles of brooks and rallied into happy, healthy, joyousness by the outbursting frolicsome hills that cannot hold in their peculiar humors; on the sloping banks of many rivers seaward running; and on bossed and tufted hillocks where the pines, spruces, and larches hang aloft through all seasons their graceful flags, tasteful residences with clustering out-houses, sheltered thrift, corralled the domestic wealth which Midas cannot buy, and resounded with whoops that brought out other hoops in turn. Farmsteads had steadily added improvements, amplified their breadths, changed their white coats into colors more harmonious, and gathered around them well-adjusted farm buildings, and in their neatly fenced yards better stock, quadrupedal, bipedal, feathered, furred, and scaly.
Under improved cultivation our two national farms—the sea and land—produced, in 1850, crops that weighted the census heavily. The former showed 1,360 new American-built vessels, carrying 272,218 tons; and the latter bore a growth that year of 53,000,000 pounds of wool, 100,000,000 bushels of wheat, 592,000,000 bushels of Indian corn, 813,000,000 pounds of cotton, 14,000,000 tons of hay, grown on farms valued at $3,300,000,000, upon which were used implements costing $153,000,000, and stocked with live animals valued at $544,000,000.
But while American hands were thus busy through the half-century, American heads were not idle or unproductive. Of course in numbers political writings led, as political discussion is the intellectual bread and butter of Americans. Histories of many of the States—of Connecticut, by Benjamin Trumbull; of Pennsylvania, by Robert Proud; of New England, by Hannah Adams; “Annals of America,” by Dr. Abiel Holmes, father of the many-tongued, myriad-sided Oliver Wendell, and others—gathered up the variously colored skeins of the busy-fingered past; while lives of eminent statesmen—Patrick Henry’s, by the accomplished Wirt, laus laudato viro; of Columbus, by Irving, himself a discoverer of new worlds in America; Washington’s, Franklin’s, Adams’s, and others, by Jared Sparks; and a long catalogue of others—presented pictures of rare personal daring, heroism, patriotism, learning, and worth, set in choicely carved and polished frames.
Investigations in, and sketches of, our physical geography and of the natural history of our flora, fauna, reptilia, fishes, and birds, by Professor Barton, Alexander Wilson, John J. Audubon, Samuel L. Mitchell, Timothy Flint, and kindred minds, brought out, in lights as brilliant as our October sunsets, our wide surfaces, and the objects crawling, flitting, or flying upon and over them. In sacred literature, theology, and polemics, Samuel Miller, Edward Robinson, Moses Stuart, William Ellery Channing, Francis Wayland, Nicholas Murray, the Wares (father and son), Theodore Parker, the Alexanders, George Bush, Edward Beecher, and a marshalled host of others, upheld by logical force and with learned or lively dialectics the cherished views of their various sects. Philosophy, moral, mental, metaphysical, and international, spoke golden-mouthed and eloquent its reasoned rules, principles, and large, grasping deductions through Henry James, Tayler Lewis, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Asa Mahan, C. S. Henry, L. P. Hickok, Henry Wheaton, and other diligent minds; while language was enriched and fertilized by the culturing labors of Worcester, Webster, Marsh, Schoolcraft, and Duponceau.
In general literature our hemisphere sparkled with fixed stars, like Irving, Prescott, Story, the Everetts (Alexander and Edward), Cooper, Motley, Ticknor, Bancroft, Paulding, Hawthorne, Hillard, Wilde, Legarè, and uncounted more, which lit it up with beautiful lights, that blent their flames with the soft poetic rays of Bryant, Longfellow, Halleck, Whittier, Saxe, Lowell, Poe, Willis, Hillhouse, the Careys, the Davidson sisters,—scarcely shown ere they were snatched away,
“Ostendent terris hunc tantum fata neque ultra
Esse sinent.”
Magazines and Reviews, although first appearing in 1745, began to be cultivated about 1815 by scholarly minds, for refined readers. “The North American Review,” “The American Quarterly,” “Southern Quarterly,” “The Christian Examiner,” “The New York Review,” “The Knickerbocker,” and eager crowds of less note, presented, ere the half-shell was cast aside, such palatable relishes that people wondered how they had ever contrived to make a meal without them.