FARMING LIFE IN NEW ENGLAND.
New England does not produce the bread she eats, nor the raw materials of the fabrics she wears. A multitude of her purely agricultural towns are undergoing, more or less rapidly, a process of depopulation. Yet these facts exist by the side of positive advances in agricultural science and decided improvements in the means and modes of farming. The plough is perfected, and the theory of ploughing is understood. The advantages of thorough draining are universally recognized, and tiles are for sale everywhere. Mowing and reaping machines have ceased to be a novelty upon our plains and meadows. The natural fertilizers have been analyzed, and artificial nutrients of the soil have been contrived. The pick and pride of foreign herds have regenerated our neat stock, and the Morgan and the Black-Hawk eat their oats in our stalls. The sheepfold and the sty abound with choice blood. Sterling agricultural journals are on every farmer's table, and Saxton's hand-books upon agricultural specialties are scattered everywhere. Public shows and fairs bring on an annual exacerbation of the agricultural fever, which is constantly breaking out in new places, beyond the power of the daily press to chronicle. Yet it is too evident that the results are not at all commensurate with the means under tribute and at command. What is the reason?
In looking at the life of the New England farmer, the first fact that strikes us is, that it is actually a very different thing from what it might be and ought to be. There dwells in every mind, through all callings and all professions, the idea that the farmer's life is, or may be, is, or should be, the truest and sweetest life that man can live. The merchant may win all the prizes of trade, the professional man may achieve triumphs beyond his hopes, the author may find his name upon every lip, and his works accounted among the nation's treasures, and all may move amid the whirl and din of the most inspiring life, yet there will come to every one, in quiet evening-hours, the vision of the old homestead, long since forsaken; or the imagination will weave a picture of its own,—a picture of rural life, so homely, yet so beautiful, that the heart will breathe a sigh upon it, the eye will drop a tear upon it, and the voice will say, "It were better so!"
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
