Imagens das páginas
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THE glory of the country is in its homes, which contain the true elements of national vitality, and are the embodied type of heaven.

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All day the meal is floating there,

Rising and falling in the breeze;
And when the sunlight strikes its mist
It glitters like a swarm of bees:
Or like the cloud of smoke and light
Above a blacksmith's forge at night.

I love our pleasant, quaint old Mill,
It still recalls my boyish prime;
'Tis changed since then, and so am I,

We both have known the touch of time:

The mill is crumbling in decay,
And I-my hair is early gray.

I stand beside the stream of life,
And watch the current sweep along:
And when the flood-gates of my heart
Are raised, it turns the wheel of song:
But scant, as yet, the harvest brought
From out the golden fields of Thought.
RICHARD HENRY STODDARD.

FARMING.

HILE the city is refreshed and renovated by the pure tides poured from the country into its steamy and turbid channels, the cultivation of the soil affords at home that moderate excitement, healthful occupation, and reasonable return, which most conduce to the prosperity and enjoyment of life. It is, in fact, the primitive employment of man,—first in time, first in importance. The newly-created father of mankind was placed by the Supreme Author of his being in the garden which the hand of Omnipotence itself had planted, "to dress and to keep it." Before the heaving bellows had urged the furnace, before a hammer had struck upon an anvil, before the gleaming waters had flashed from an oar, before trade had hung up its scales or gauged its measures, the culture of the soil began. "To dress the garden and to keep it!"-This was the key-note struck by the hand of God himself in that long, joyous, wailing, triumphant, troubled, pensive strain of life-music which sounds through the generations and ages of our race. Banished from the garden of Eden, man's merciful sentence at once doom, reprieve and livelihood-was "to till the ground from which he was taken," and this, in its primitive simplicity, was the occupation of the gathering societies of men.

To this wholesome discipline the mighty East, in the days of her ascendency, was trained; and so rapid was her progress that in periods anterior to the dawn of history she had tamed the domestic animals, had saddled the horse, and yoked the ox, and milked the cow, and sheared the patient sheep, and possessed herself of most of the cereal grains which feed mankind at the present day. I obtained from the gardens of Chatsworth, and sent to this country, where they germinated, two specimens of wheat raised from grains supposed to have been wrapped up in Egyptian mummy-cloths 3,000 years ago, and not materially differing from our modern varieties; one of them, indeed, being precisely identical—thus affording us the pleasing assurance that the corn which Joseph placed in Benjamin's sack before the great pyramid was built was not inferior to the best of the present day.

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I WOULD rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself, than to be crowded on a velvet cushion.

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