In a city like Boston there are farms enough imagined every year to make another New England. Could the fairest fancies of that congeries of minds be embodied and exhibited, we should see green meadows sparkling with morning dew,--silver-slippered rivulets skipping into musical abysses,--quiet pasture-lands shimmering so sleepily in the sun that the lazy flocks and herds forget to graze, and lie winking and ruminating under the trees,--and yellow fields of grain, along the hill-sides, billowy in the breeze, and bending before the shadows of the clouds that sail above them. And mingling and harmonizing with these visions, we should hear the lowing of kine, and the tinkle of the bell that leads the flock, and the shout of the boy behind the creeping plough, and the echoes of the axe, and the fall of the tree in the distant forest, and the rhythmical clangor, softened into a metallic whisper by the distance, of the mowers whetting their scythes. With these visions and these sounds there would come to the minds which give them birth convictions that rural life is the best life, and resolutions that, by-and-by, in some golden hour, when the sun of life begins to lengthen the eastward shadows, that life shall be enjoyed, and that the soul shall pass at last from the quiet scenes of Nature into those higher scenes which they symbolize. There is a thought in all this that the farm is nearer heaven than the street,--a reminiscence of the first estate, when man was lord of Eden; and this thought, old as art and artificial life, cannot be rooted out of the mind. It has a life of its own, independent of reason, above instinct, among the quickest intuitions of the soul.
Now this idea, so universal, so identical in millions of minds, springing with such spontaneity in the midst of infinitely varied circumstances, abiding with such tenacity in every soul, can have its basis nowhere save in a Divine intention and a human possibility. The cultivation of the farm is the natural employment of man. It is upon the farm that virtue should thrive the best, that the body and the mind should be developed the most healthfully, that temptations should be the weakest, that social intercourse should be the simplest and sweetest, that beauty should thrill the soul with the finest raptures, and that life should be tranquillest in its flow, longest in its period, and happiest in its passage and its issues. This is the general and the first ideal of the farmer's life, based upon the nature of the farmer's calling and a universally recognized human want. Why does the actual differ so widely from the ideal? It is not because the farmer's labor is hard and constant, alone. There is no fact better established than that it is through the habitual use both of the physical and mental powers that the soul achieves, or receives, its most healthful enjoyment, and acquires that tone which responds most musically to the touch of the opportunities of leisure. Why, then, we repeat, does the actual differ so widely from the ideal?
A general answer to this question is, that that is made an end of life which should be but an incident or a means. Life is confounded with labor, and thrift with progress; and material success is the aim to which all other aims are made subordinate. There is no fact in physiology better established than that hard labor, followed from day to day and year to year, absorbing every thought and every physical energy, has the direct tendency to depress the intellect, blunt the sensibilities, and animalize the man. In such a life, all the energies of the brain and nervous system are directed to the support of nutrition and the stimulation of the muscular system. Man thus becomes a beast of burden,--the creature of his calling; and though he may add barn to barn and acre to acre, he does not lead a life which rises in dignity above that of the beasts which drag his plough. He eats, he works, he sleeps. Surely, there is no dignity in a life like this; there is nothing attractive and beautiful and good in it. It is a mean and contemptible life; and all its maxims, economies, associations, and objects are repulsive to a mind which apprehends life's true enjoyments and ends. We say that it is a pestilent perversion. We say that it is the sale of the soul to the body; it is turning the back upon life, upon growth, upon God, and descending into animalism.
The true ideal of the farmer's life--of any life--contemplates something outside of, and above, the calling which is its instrument. The farmer's life is no better than the life of a street-sweeper, if it rise no higher than the farmer's work. If the farmer, standing under the broad sky, breathing the pure air, listening to the song of birds, watching the progress of
"The great miracle that still goes on,"
to work the transformation of the brown seeds which he drops into the soil into fields of green and gold, and gazing upon landscapes shifting with the seasons and flushed with new tints through every sunlit and moonlit hour, does not apprehend that his farm has higher uses for him than those of feeding his person and his purse, he might as well dwell in a coal-mine.
Our soil is sterile, our modes of farming have been rude until within a few years; and under the circumstances,--with the Yankee notion that the getting of money is the chief end of man,--exclusive devotion to labor has been deemed indispensable to success. The maxims of Franklin have been literally received and adopted as divine truth. We have believed that to labor is to be thrifty, that to be thrifty is to be respectable, that to be respectable is to afford facilities for being still more thrifty; and our experience is, that with increased thrift comes increased labor. This is the circle of our ambitions and rewards. All begins and ends in labor. The natural and inevitable result of this is both physical and mental deterioration.
It is doubtful whether the world furnishes a finer type of man, physically and intellectually, than the Irish gentleman. He is handsome, large, courageous,--a man of fine instincts, brilliant imagination, courtly manners, and full, vital force. By the side of the Irish gentleman, there has grown for centuries the Irish peasant. He is ugly, of stunted stature, and pugnacious; and he produces children like himself. The two classes started from a common blood; they now present the broadest contrast. We do not say that freedom from severe labor on one side, and confinement to it on the other, are entirely responsible for this contrast; difference of food and other obvious causes have had something to do with it; but we say that hard labor has, directly and indirectly, degraded from a true style of manhood the great mass of the Irish peasantry. They are a marked class, and carry in their forms and faces the infallible insignia of mental and physical degeneration.
We would by no means compare New England farmers with the Irish peasantry. We only present the contrast between these two classes of the Irish population as the result of unremitting toil on one side, and a more rational kind of life on the other. If we enter a New England church, containing a strictly rural assembly, and then visit another containing a class whose labor is lighter, and whose style of life is based upon different ideas, we shall see a contrast less marked, perhaps, but presenting similar features. The farming population of New England is not a handsome population, generally. The forms of both men and women are angular; their features are not particularly intellectual; their movements are not graceful; and their calling is evident by indubitable signs. The fact that the city assemblage is composed of a finer and higher grade of men, women, and children is of particular moment to our argument, because it is composed of people who are only one, two, or three removes from a rural origin. The city comes from the country; the street is replenished by the farm; but the city children, going back to the farm, show that a new element has been introduced into their blood. The angles are rounded; the face is brighter; the movements are more graceful; there is in every way a finer development.
There is probably no better exponent of the farmer's life than the farmer's home. We propose to present the portrait of such a home, and, while we offer it as a just outline of the farmer's home generally, in districts removed from large social centres, we gladly acknowledge the existence of a great multitude of happy exceptions. But the sketch:--A square, brown house; a chimney coming out of the middle of a roof; not a tree nearer than the orchard, and not a flower at the door. At one end projects a kitchen; from the kitchen projects a wood-shed and wagon-cover, occupied at night by hens; beyond the wood-shed, a hog-pen, fragrant and musical. Proceeding no farther in this direction, we look directly across the road, to where the barn stands, like the hull of a great black ship-of-the-line, with its port-holes opened threateningly upon the fort opposite, out of one of which a horse has thrust his head for the possible purpose of examining the strength of the works. An old ox-sled is turned up against the wall close by, where it will have the privilege of rotting. This whole establishment was contrived with a single eye to utility. The barn was built in such a manner that its deposits might be convenient to the road which divides the farm, while the sty was made an attachment of the house for convenience in feeding its occupants.