Chapter III: Part 3

Surely these things ought not so to be. Looking at this earth as the divinely prepared dwelling-place of man, and looking at man as divinely appointed to dress and keep it, to replenish and subdue it, we should naturally suppose that there would be an obvious and preeminent adaptation of the one to the other. We should naturally suppose that the primary, the fundamental occupation of the race would be one which should not only keep body and soul together, but should be especially and exactly fitted to develop and strengthen all the powers called into exercise, and should also be most likely to call into exercise a great variety of powers to the fashioning of a healthy and beautiful symmetry. Looking still further at the secondary occupations, we find our views confirmed. The shoemaker must bend over his lapstone, and he becomes stooping and hollow-chested. The blacksmith twists the sinews of his arms to strength, but at the expense of his other members. The watchmaker trains his eyes to microscopic vision, but his muscles are small and his skin colorless. A very large majority of the secondary callings remove men from the open air, often from the sunshine, and generally train one or a few faculties at the expense of the others. The artisan carries skill to perfection, the genius towers into sublimity, but the man suffers. Not so the farmer. His life is not only many-, but all-sided. His ever-changing employment gives him every variety of motion and posture. Not a muscle but is pressed into service. His work lies chiefly out-of-doors. The freedom of earth and sky are his. Every power of his mind may be brought into play. He is surrounded by mysteries which the longest life will not give him time enough to fathom, problems whose solution may furnish employment for the deepest thought and the most sustained attention, and whose solution is at the same time a direct and most important contribution to his own ease and riches. The constant presence of beautiful and ever-shifting scenery ministers to his taste and his imagination. Nature, in her grandeur, in her loveliness, in the surpassing beauty of her utilities, is always spread before him. All her wonderful processes go on beneath his eyes. The great laboratory is ever open. The furnace-fire is always burning. Patent to his curious or admiring gaze the transmutation takes place. The occult principle of life surrounds him, might almost bewilder him, with manifestations. Bee and bird, fruit and blossom, and the phantom humanity in beasts, offer all their secrets to his eyes. Every process is his minister. His mental and material interests lie in one right line. The sun is his servant. The shower fulfils his behest. The dew drops silently down to do his work. The fragrance of the apple-orchard shall turn to gold in his grasp. The beauty of bloom shall fill his home with plenty. The frost of winter is his treasure-keeper, and the snows wrap him about with beneficence. With nothing trivial, deceptive, inflated, has he to do. An unimpeachable sincerity pervades all things. All things are natural, and all things act after their kind. Is it a divine decree that all this shall tend to no good? Shall all this pomp of preparation rightly come to nothing? Do we gather the natural fruits of circumstance, when the mind travels on to madness, the body goes prematurely to disease and decay, and the heart shrivels away from love and is overcast with gloom? Is all the appearance of adaptation false, and do farmers gain the due emoluments of their position? Not so. It is their fault that they do not see the life which revels in exuberance around them. In their minds is no under-draining, no subsoiling. Earth with all her interests takes unrelaxing hold of their potato-patch, but they have eyes only for the potato-patch. Accustoming themselves to the contemplation of little things, considered separately and not as links in the universal chain, their angle of vision has grown preternaturally acute. Things they see, but not the relations of things. They dwell on desert islands. For all the integrity of Nature, they fail to learn integrity. The honest farmer is no more common than the honest merchant. He abhors the tricks of trade, he has his standing joke about the lawyer's conscience: but the load of hay which he sold to the merchant was heavier by his own weight on the scales than at the merchant's stable-yard; the lawyer who buys his wood, taught by broad rural experience, looks closely to the admeasurement; and a trout in the milk Thoreau counts as very strong circumstantial evidence. The farmer does not compass sublime swindles like the merchant, nor such sharp practice as the lawyer; but in small ways he is the peer of either. We do not say that farmers are any more addicted to their characteristic vices than the lawyers and merchants are to theirs; but that they have their peculiarities, like other classes, and that the term _honest_ is as necessary a prefix to _farmer_ as to any other noun of occupation. We admit all this, but we believe it is the fault of the farmer, and not of his circumstances.

"His fault!" says the farmer, and say many men of whom better things might be expected. "How can he get wisdom that holdeth the plough, and that glorieth in the goad, that driveth oxen, and is occupied in their labors, and whose talk is of bullocks?" How? By "seeking her as silver, and searching for her as for hid treasures." For remember, O farmer! the despairing question is from below, the inspiring answer from above. It is not the Bible, but the Apocrypha, that casts doubt upon agricultural education. There is wisdom to him that holdeth the plough. Honor and health and wealth and great-heartedness are to be found in the soil. Earth is not one huge incumbrance to weigh man down; it is the means by which he may rise to heavenly heights. Earth has been the mother of dignity ever since her Maker's eyes looked upon her, and the Maker's voice pronounced her very good. And "Very Good" is the true verdict. Ignorance, stupidity, and sin insist upon perpetuating the curse from which she has been once redeemed; but a blessing lies in her heart for him who has but the courage to grasp it.

What analogies have they to prop their conclusions withal, who maintain the necessary degradation of the soil? Fire, air, and water bow down and do obeisance to man. They are analyzed and recombined. They are studied with insatiable curiosity. They receive the absorbed attention of a lifetime. Daily their secrets are wrested from them. Their likings and their dislikings are forced into man's service; they are coupled in strange unions and harnessed to his chariot. Whithersoever he will, they bear him. They minister to his lowliest needs, they bend to his loftiest dreams. They have lifted him from the earth whereon he crept, and have given him the wings of the wind. Swifter than the eagle flies, swift as the lightnings flash, they run to and fro at his command. Nor has the limit of their capacities been reached. Nor has man ceased to pry into the mysteries which lie hidden in their depths. He was once their abject slave. He is now their crowned king. He will one day be their absolute monarch.

But while the three ancient elements are thus wrought into glory and honor, the fourth sister, Earth, remains a clod. They give gifts to men, but she only sears him with the brand of servitude. Every bold seeker, adventuring into their arcana, bears back his treasure-trove; but the earth only mocks her wooer, and robs him of his strength who sleeps upon her knees!

It is easy to point to occurrences which seem to prove this,--to experiments which seemed fruitless,--to plans adopted only to be laid aside,--to new modes that were heralded with great flourish of trumpets, and shuffled ignominiously out through the pantry-door. But every science and every art has had its empirical age, and every age has its empiricists. Astrology spoke its great swelling words, made its cabalistic signs, and passed away to its burial; but astronomy remains eternal as the heavens. The stars cannot tell a man when he shall die, and they shine upon the shepherd as brightly as on the sage; but they have marvellous secrets to whisper to him who watches the long night through to behold their coming and mark the magic of their ways; and by so much knowledge unfolded Earth takes her place in the skies. There was no El Dorado beyond the western sea to bestow eternal youth upon the Spanish dreamer; but there was a land fairer than all his fancy painted, to whose light the Gentiles shall yet come, and kings to the brightness of its rising. The philosopher's stone has never been found which should transmute all metals to gold; but gold itself is worthless in the presence of such truths as philosophy reveals. All the way through, no science has been pushed to barren results. A thousand errors have branched off from the central truth, and have sometimes been mistaken for it; a thousand false steps have been made for one in the right direction; yet the truth is central and indivisible, and men have pressed on steadily to reach it. Counterfeits do not annihilate the pure coin. Pretenders do not destroy faith in the rightful prince. Even failures lead the way to success. Honest, wise, persevering research has ever been rewarded in full measure, pressed down, shaken together, and running over. And it is not to be supposed that the one science of the earth vaster and nobler than all others, the science that ministers most directly to man's life, shall be the one science to baffle his research and yield him meagre returns. We do not know what wealth the earth holds in store for us, and it is our shame and misery that we so little strive to know, so little care to seek. With an ignorance for which our rich experience leaves us no excuse, we doggedly assume that we have attained the ultimatum. The earth is to us but an immense pippin covered all over with the arrogant label, "Seek-no-further."

If farmers choose to accept this label as their motto, they should also accept the consequences without complaint. If they choose to live in a rut, they must not expect to breathe the air which they would find on a hill. Many readers will remember a passage at arms that occurred in the legislative assembly of one of our New-England States. A clergyman, advocating a bill which was to help a certain class of young men in obtaining education, referred to several persons who had by assistance become men of note, but who without it would have remained "only farmers." Another member immediately took umbrage, avowed himself to be a farmer, and assured the assembly that he should not vote for a bill which was to educate young men to sneer at him! The bill failed,--whether from constitutional weakness or from this death-blow we are not informed, but are left to infer the latter. The repartee was very good as a repartee, and a respectable degree of Parliamentary skill was shown in seizing upon a plausible pretext for a foregone conclusion; but so far as the question was of principle and not of repartee, the clergyman was right and the farmer was wrong. We may exalt democracy, and abase aristocracy, and cajole people with specious phrases. Ignorance and uncouthness may put on the garb of modest merit, and worthlessness seek to veil itself by an unattractive exterior; but under never so many layers the truth remains intact. "Only a farmer" expresses with all-sufficient accuracy the relative position of farmers,--not their necessary, but their actual position. The occupation which should be a liberal profession is a most illiberal labor. The eloquence of Demosthenes cannot change facts. Farming is honorable, just as any other business is honorable, according to the amount of mind and heart brought to bear on it. Shoemaking will always be an inferior craft to statesmanship, because the amount of intellect required is less in the former than in the latter. The man who aims at the highest culture, both of his farm and himself, is aiming, whether consciously or not, at the highest rank, and he shall not stand among mean men; but he who simply delves in the dirt will find no laurels there. Fine-sounding phrases cannot give dignity to that which is in itself undignified. No amount of complaint can elevate prejudice, obstinacy, and routine into intelligence, generosity, magnanimity. Farmers themselves act upon this principle with entire unanimity, because it is a law of Nature, and not an effort of the will. The man upon whose experiments they look with utter distrust, ill-concealed contempt, and covert ridicule, whose science seems to them mere nonsense, extravagance, and recklessness, they at the same time regard with reverence, admiration, and confidence. They look down upon him as a farmer, but they look up to him as a man. They have a consciousness that he lives on another plane than theirs. They are proud and pleased to have his family visit and receive theirs. They feel that he is of a different order from themselves. And if farmers persist in keeping education and science away from their farms, if they will bring only their hard hands to the work, and will leave their brains to shrivel in their skulls, this state of things must go on. The best of materials is of no use without will and skill to work it. Matter is a sorry substance until mind lays hold of it. The world was not made with tug and sweat, but He spake and it was done, He commanded, and it stood fast. As the world was made, so must it be subdued, not by matter clawing at matter, but by the calm dominion of spirit over matter. Until intellect percolates the soil, the soil will not part with its hidden hoards. We shall have effort, struggle, wear, and weariness, but no victory. It is the strife of clod with clod.

So it is that the men who grieve to bring their minds into play will never make of their occupation a profession. The people who work mind and muscle, who turn knowledge into wisdom, shall stand before kings. Those who

"Keep in uninquiring trust
The old dull round of things"

shall be hewers of wood and drawers of water to the end of the days. If farming is doomed, farmers are doomed. For here is the earth ready-made, and however much we may dislike it, it is all we have and the best we shall get. If farming must be mere mechanical labor,--_peine forte et dure_,--then there is a point where elevation and improvement must stop, for there must always exist a class of serfs,--serfs to the soil, slaves of their own farms; and none are more sure of this than those who have lived in a farming community, and seen how surely the adventurous spirits, the active, the energetic, the intellectual, the promising, turn away from the dismal monotony of the farm and launch out on currents of freer flow, or, if they remain at home, remain only in consequence of the continued and earnest expostulations and the fairest promises of parents, to rock the cradle of their declining years, and not unfrequently to rock it over.

But if the founders of our Agricultural College, or if any furtherers of rural education, propose to themselves to diffuse light (and dispel darkness) by appealing to farmers,--if they think to correct the evils of ignorance by furnishing special opportunities to farmers,--if they flatter themselves that they can establish a college of aims and claims so moderate that farmers and farmers' boys will not be discouraged by the time, money, or mind required,--if they design to narrow the crown that lesser brows may be circled,--they are spending their strength for nought. No college and no school can be founded so wisely and fitly, that farmers, as a class, will send their sons to it. Why should they, believing, as they do, that the district-school already gives them as much "learnin'" as they need? Boys there can "read, write, and cipher." They gain knowledge enough to reckon with the hired man, to keep the tally of the marketing, to compute interest, and to do parish business. What more do they want? Your college-men will talk about selections and temperatures, silex and fluorine; but what has all that to do with planting the ten-acre lot? Timothy and red-top grew before Liebig was born. A rose by any other name is just as sweet to the agricultural nose. Farmers who have grown to manhood with full faith in the fixity of their condition, in the impossibility of its improvement, are not to be turned right-about-face by a programme. The best patent cultivator could not root out this main article of their creed. Agricultural colleges may spread all their blandishments; but farmers will not listen to the voice of the charmer, charm he never so wisely. The academic roof may be set low and the academic door flung wide open, and the academic Siren, with new and deeper meaning, may sweetly

"Sing a song of sixpence, a bag full of rye";

but before it reaches the rural ear, it will have transformed itself into a new rendering of the fatal entomological civility,--

"'Will you walk into my parlor?' said the spider to the fly."

Reasoning is of no avail. Analogy has nothing to take hold of. Farmers do not grasp the chances already offered them; how should they be expected to possess themselves of future ones? Able treatises on breeding, instructive, eloquent, and forcible, are written and printed; but these men continue to tie up nightly their ill-favored and lean-fleshed kine, and are weekly dragged to church by loose-jointed nags wabbling over the road, head between legs. There are yearly reports, rich in suggestion, well printed, cleverly illustrated, distributed without cost--to the receivers. They will not read them. They may glance at the foreign-looking sheep, with folds of wool on his throat; they will utter a strong idiomatic exclamation over the broad-sided short-horn; but they will not go beyond the limits of their own township to replenish their stock. They have not time nor money nor heart for experiments. You prove to them beyond the possibility of gainsaying that their mode is cumbrous, and, in truth, extravagant; they will assent to your propositions, admit the force of your arguments, but inevitably leave your presence with the remark, that, "after all, they think, like Gran'ma'am Howdy, they'd better go on in the good old diabolical way,"--and there, accordingly, they go. Their logic is devious, but it is always ready. It may not be convincing, but it is conclusive. The major premise is often hidden, but it is as firm as Fate.

"Parson Edwards's been round with the temperance-pledge," says one old farmer to another.

"Yes," answers the latter. "Came to me. Asked me, says he, 'Mr. Solomon,' says he, 'have you got any cider in your suller?' 'Yes, Sir,' says I,--'sixteen barrels, good as ever you see in your life, I don't care _where_ 't is.' 'Well,' says he, 'Mr. Solomon, my advice to you is, to go an' tap them barrels, every one on 'em, an' let it run!'"

"Guess you told him you'd wait a spell, didn't you?"

"Humph! Let it run! _I knew his gran'sir!_ Meddlin' toad! Advisin' me to throw my cider away! I KNEW HIS GRAN'SIR!"

Whenever any amendment is suggested, some "gran'sir" or other will be sure to block the way. That he has been two generations dead, or that he has no apparent connection with the point at issue, may be indisputably proved, but it does not open the road.

Nor will the farmer's sons be any more ready to avail themselves of their college than the farmer's self. As a general thing, they have either ploughed their own furrow "in the good old diabolical way," and walk in it as their fathers walked, caring for no other, or they have acquired so unconquerable a repugnance to the uncongenial toil that they cannot conceive of any plan or process by which it can be made tolerable. To elevate farming by placing the lever under the farmers is to attack a fort where its defences are strongest. But we can apply socially as well as agriculturally the principle of a rotation of crops. Poets are not necessarily the sons of poets. We do not draw upon engineers' families for our supply of engineers. The greatest statesman of the age may come from the smallest estate in the country. So also is there no Medo-Persic law compelling the cultivation of our lands by farmers' sons. An infusion of fresh blood is sometimes the best remedy for longstanding disease and weakness, especially in social organizations. The end desired is not the education of any special existing class, but the establishment of a class fit to receive in trust special existing interests. We want our country's soil to be intelligently and beneficially cultivated. We desire that it shall be rescued from ignorance and from quackery, and placed in the hands of active intellect and sound sense. We want our farmers to be working-men, not day-laborers. We want them to be practical farmers, book-farmers, and gentlemen-farmers in one. The proprietors of the soil stand at the base of society, and should constitute by themselves an order of nobility,--but eclectic, not hereditary. Whenever a boy displays a turn for agriculture, there is a fit subject for agricultural education, a proper student for an agricultural college, whether his father were merchant, farmer, policeman, or president. You cannot make a college so mean that farmers' sons will flock into it, but you can make it so great that the best of all classes shall press in. Endosmose and exosmose are the soul of growth; either, alone, would bring death,--death on one side from exhaustion, on the other from over-fulness. The city is currently said to draw its best blood from the country. Let the city pour it back again over field and meadow, turning our wildernesses into gardens. Country and city will be invigorated by an exchange of commodities,--the one giving of its nature, the other of its culture. We want no exclusiveness, aristocratic or democratic. We want intelligent men to develop the capacity of the soil. The problem is, to vindicate the ways of God to man,--to demonstrate that He spake truth, when He looked upon the earth which He had made, and pronounced it very good. It is the duty of this generation to show to the future that agriculture opens a career, and not a grave, to thought, energy, and genius. It needs strong arms and stout hearts, but there are bays to be won and worn. We want farmers who do not look upon their land as a malicious menial, but who love it and woo it, and delight in enriching and adorning it. We want men who are enthusiastic,--who will not be put down by failures, nor disheartened by delay,--men who believe that the Earth holds in her lap richer stores than gold or silver,--who are not deceived by all the grovelling that has been laid to her charge, but know in their inmost souls that she is full of beneficence and power, and that it needs only to pronounce the "Open Sesame!" to gain admittance to her treasure-house and possession of her richest gifts. We want men who are willing to spend and be spent, not for paltry gains or sordid existence, but for gains that are not paltry and existence that is not sordid,--for love of truth,--men who attribute the failure of their experiments, not to the poverty of Nature, but to their own short-sighted, rough-handed endeavor, and who will simply take heart and try again,--men who are fully persuaded in their own minds that there must be, and are fully determined in their own hearts that there shall be, profit to him that glorieth in the goad.

It is left for our country to show that manual and mental skill, strength, exercise, and labor are not incompatible,--that hard hands may comport with gracious manners,--that one may be a gentleman digging in a ditch, as well as dancing in a drawing-room. The Old World groans under her peasant system,--even free England has her Hodge; but we will have no peasantry here, no Hodges in hobnailed shoes, no stolid perpetual serfdom to nurse our vanity and pride. The very genius of our nation makes every man's manhood his most valuable possession. America professes to believe that no one can with impunity evade the decree, "In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread." She professes to hold labor in honor; but she should show her faith by her work. She should display her children of labor, fairer and fatter than the children of kings and princes. If they are seen to be decrepit in mind and body before their time,--if they have less happiness than the Austrian peasant, and less content than the English clown, and no breadth of vision or liberality of thought or clear foresight to atone for such deficiency, we shall have to compass sea and land before we make many intelligent men or nations proselytes to our faith.

The time especially has need of men. This hour, and every hour of the last three years, ought to prove to us beyond cavil that no class can safely be left in ignorance, least of all the class that holds in its hands a people's staff of life. Our country needs all the brain, all the conscience, all the nerve and patience and moral strength, that can be commanded. Her salvation lies in a yeomanry capable of comprehending the momentous issues at stake. "More light!" is the dying gasp of a dying people. Our republican institutions are but half completed. To give every man the right to vote, without giving him at the same time the power to vote intelligently, is but questionable service. If such an arrangement were perpetual, it would be unquestionable disservice. Only as fast and as far as we keep enlightenment abreast of power are we seeing that the Republic receives no detriment. Ignorance is the never-failing foe of freedom, the never-failing ally of despotism. We have organized and successfully fought a crusade against tyranny; we are now in the full tide of our crusade against slavery; let us have one more, organized and efficient, against ignorance, that the fruit of our former victories be not lost to us for lack of wisdom to use them aright.

That the people who suffer most from want of knowledge should disdain it is but natural. To see the need of teaching, men must be taught. It is this very ignorance which is the strong buttress against education. Ignorance propagates itself. It can be subdued only by force or tact, not by argument. But for men who have attained by the help of their education whatever reputation they possess to affect to question its importance is to spurn the ladder by which they have mounted to eminence. We are sometimes almost tempted to suspect the existence of a petty jealousy in members of the learned professions. It would seem as if a small fear were indulged lest a wider diffusion of knowledge and a more thorough culture among the farming classes should detract from the supremacy of others. There is certainly, among some writers, a leaning towards a continuance of present abuses for which it is difficult to account. The shrewdness of the plain farmer is pitted against the science of the scholar, to the entire discomfiture of the latter. But would the plain farmer's shrewdness be at all diminished by educating the plain farmer? Would his sharp sense be blunted by being expressed with some partial subjection to grammatical forms? Would his observation be any less close for being trained? Would his reasoning be any less profitable by being wisely directed than by running at hap-hazard? Would it not be more economical to strengthen and polish his powerful weapons, and give them honest work to do, than to leave them rough and rusty from disuse, and only brought out at long intervals to hew and hack devices for walking in darkness? If education is not the foe of legal, mechanical, polemic, nor forensic acuteness, why should it be hostile to any?

No lover of his country, who brings to this view the same clearness and sense which he takes to political or personal plans, but must hail as an omen of good the efforts now making throughout the North in behalf of agriculture and education. It is a cause for proud and grateful gratulation and congratulation, that our government is so wise and strong as to look through all the smoke and cloud of warfare, and set firm in the tumultuous present the foundations of future greatness,--that, calm and confident, it lays in the midst of the thunder-storm of battle the corner-stone of the temple of Peace. It is equally encouraging to see the States from east to west responding to this movement, consulting with each other, enlisting in the enterprise their best men, and sending them up and down in the land, and in other lands, to observe and collate and infer, that the beneficent designs of Congress may be carried out and carried on in the best possible manner for the highest good of all. So a free people governs itself. So a free people discerns its weakness and unfolds its strength. So a true aristocracy will yet develop a worthy democracy. From such living, far-seeing patriotism we augur the best results. Mistakes will doubtless be made; wisdom will not die with this generation; but a beginning is the sure presage of the end. Hesitation and precipitancy, unseemly delay and ill-advised action, may retard, but will not prevent, a glorious consummation. In these colleges we look to see agricultural centres from which shall radiate new light across our hills and valleys. They will not at once turn every plough-boy into a philosopher, nor send us Liebigs to milk the cows; but to every plough-boy and dairyman in the country they will give a new and a wider horizon. They will bring fresh and manly incentives into the domain of toil. They will establish in society a new order of men,--an order whose mere existence will give heart and hope to the farmer-lad disgusted with his narrow life, yet unable to relinquish it. They will send out to us men who have learned and will teach that the plough, the hoe, the rake are implements of profit and honor, as well as of industry. They will show that the hand and the head may march abreast, and that only so can their full capacity be tested. Science will be corrected by practice, and practice will be guided by science. These men will go over the land and quietly set up their household gods among our old-time farmers. They will gradually acquire influence, not by loud-voiced rhetoric, but by the silent eloquence of rich cornfields, heavy-laden orchards, full-uddered kine, and merry-hearted boys and girls,--by the gentle, but irresistible force of kindly words, pleasant ways, ready sympathy, a helping hand in trouble, "sage counsel in cumber,"--by the thousand little devices of taste and culture and good-fellowship,--by the cheap elegances, the fine endearments, all the small, sweet courtesies of life. They will approve the beneficence and the power of the Great Mother; they will demonstrate to farmers the possibility of large and generous living; they will teach them to distinguish between the mountebanks of pretended science and the apostles of that science which alone is truth; they will give to thought a new direction, to energy a new impulse, to earth a new creation, to man a new life.

SAADI.

Whilst the Journal of the Oriental Society attests the presence of good Semitic and Sanskrit scholars in our colleges, no translation of an Eastern poet has yet appeared in America. Of the two hundred Persian bards of whose genius Von Hammer Purgstall has given specimens to Germany, we have had only some fragments collected in journals and anthologies. There are signs that this neglect is about to be retrieved. In the interval, while we wait for translations of our own, we welcome the announcement of an American edition, if it be only a careful reprint, of the "Gulistan" of Saadi,--a book which has been current in Asia and Europe now for six hundred years. Of the "Gulistan or Rose-Garden" there exist three respectable English translations. That of Gladwin is to be preferred for its more simple and forcible style. Mr. Gladwin has not thought fit to turn into rhyme the passages of verse with which the "Gulistan" is interspersed. It is the less important, that these verses are seldom more than a metrical repetition of the sentiment of the preceding paragraph. Mr. Eastwick's metrical renderings do not make us regret their omission. Mr. James Ross, in an "Essay on the Life and Genius of Saadi," has searched the works of his author, as well as outside history, for biographical facts or personal allusions.

The slowness to import these books into our libraries--mainly owing, no doubt, to the forbidding difficulty of the original languages--is due also in part to some repulsion in the genius of races. At first sight, the Oriental rhetoric does not please our Western taste. Life in the East wants the complexity of European and American existence; and in the writing of the primitive nations a certain monotony betrays the poverty of the landscape, and of social conditions. Every word in Arabic is said to be derived from the camel, the horse, or the sheep. We fancy we are soon familiar with all their images. Medschun and Leila, rose and nightingale, parrots and tulips; mosques and dervishes; desert, caravan, and robbers; peeps at the harem; bags of gold dinars; slaves, horses, camels, sabres, shawls, pearls, amber, cohol, and henna; insane compliments to the Sultan, borrowed from the language of prayer; Hebrew and Gueber legends molten into Arabesque;--'tis a short inventory of topics and tropes, which incessantly return in Persian poetry. I do not know but at the first encounter many readers take also an impression of tawdry rhetoric, an exaggeration, and a taste for scarlet, running to the borders of the negro-fine,--or if not, yet a pushing of the luxury of ear and eye where it does not belong, as the Chinese in their mathematics employ the colors blue and red for algebraic signs, instead of our pitiless _x_ and _y_. These blemishes disappear, or diminish, on better acquaintance. Where there is real merit, we are soon reconciled to differences of taste. The charge of monotony lies more against the numerous Western imitations than against the Persians themselves, and though the torrid, like the arctic zone, puts some limit to variety, it is least felt in the masters. It is the privilege of genius to play its game indifferently with few or with many pieces, as Nature draws all her opulence out of a few elements. Saadi exhibits perpetual variety of situation and incident, and an equal depth of experience with Cardinal de Retz in Paris or Doctor Johnson in London. He finds room on his narrow canvas for the extremes of lot, the play of motives, the rule of destiny, the lessons of morals, and the portraits of great men. He has furnished the originals of a multitude of tales and proverbs which are current in our mouths, and attributed by us to recent writers; as, for example, the story of "Abraham and the Fire-Worshipper," once claimed for Doctor Franklin, and afterwards traced to Jeremy Taylor, who probably found it in Gentius.

The superlative, so distasteful in the temperate region, has vivacity in the Eastern speech. In his compliments to the Shah, Saadi says,--"The incurvated back of the sky became straight with joy at thy birth." "A tax-gatherer," he says, "fell into a place so dangerous, that, from fear, a male lion would become a female." Of dunces he says, with a double superlative,--"If the ass of Christ should go to Mecca, it would come back an ass still." It is a saying from I know not what poet,--"If the elegant verses of Dhoair Fariabi fall into thy hands, steal them, though it were in the sacred temple of Mecca itself." But the wildness of license appears in poetical praises of the Sultan:--"When his bow moves, it is already the last day [for his enemies]; whom his onset singles out, to him is life not appointed; and the ghost of the Holy Ghost were not sure of its time."

But when once the works of these poets are made accessible, they must draw the curiosity of good readers. It is provincial to ignore them. If, as Mackintosh said, "whatever is popular deserves attention," much more does that which has fame. The poet stands in strict relation to his people: he has the over-dose of their nationality. We did not know them, until they declared their taste by their enthusiastic welcome of his genius. Foreign criticism might easily neglect him, unless their applauses showed the high historic importance of his powers. In these songs and elegies breaks into light the national mind of the Persians and Arabians. The monotonies which we accuse, accuse our own. We pass into a new landscape, new costume, new religion, new manners and customs, under which humanity nestles very comfortably at Shiraz and Mecca, with good appetite, and with moral and intellectual results that correspond, point for point, with ours at New York and London. It needs in every sense a free translation, just as, from geographical position, the Persians attribute to the east wind what we say of the west.

Saadi, though he has not the lyric flights of Hafiz, has wit, practical sense, and just moral sentiments. He has the instinct to teach, and from every occurrence must draw the moral, like Franklin. He is the poet of friendship, love, self-devotion, and serenity. There is a uniform force in his page, and, conspicuously, a tone of cheerfulness, which has almost made his name a synonyme for this grace. The word _Saadi_ means _Fortunate_. In him the trait is no result of levity, much less of convivial habit, but first of a happy nature, to which victory is habitual, easily shedding mishaps, with sensibility to pleasure, and with resources against pain. But it also results from the habitual perception of the beneficent laws that control the world. He inspires in the reader a good hope. What a contrast between the cynical tone of Byron and the benevolent wisdom of Saadi!

Saadi has been longer and better known in the Western nations than any of his countrymen. By turns, a student, a water-carrier, a traveller, a soldier fighting against the Christians in the Crusades, a prisoner employed to dig trenches before Tripoli, and an honored poet in his protracted old age at home,--his varied and severe experience took away all provincial tone, and gave him a facility of speaking to all conditions. But the commanding reason of his wider popularity is his deeper sense, which, in his treatment, expands the local forms and tints to a cosmopolitan breadth. Through his Persian dialect he speaks to all nations, and, like Homer, Shakspeare, Cervantes, and Montaigne, is perpetually modern.

To the sprightly, but indolent Persians, conversation is a game of skill. They wish to measure wit with you, and expect an adroit, a brilliant, or a profound answer. Many narratives, doubtless, have suffered in the translation, since a promising anecdote sometimes heralds a flat speech. But Saadi's replies are seldom vulgar. His wit answers to the heart of the question, often quite over the scope of the inquirer. He has also that splendor of expression which alone, without wealth of thought, sometimes constitutes a poet, and forces us to ponder the problem of style. In his poem on his old age, he says,--"Saadi's whole power lies in his sweet words: let this gift remain to me, I care not what is taken."

The poet or thinker must always, in a rude nation, be the chief authority on religion. All questions touching its truth and obligation will come home to him, at last, for their answer. As he thinks and speaks will intelligent men believe. Therefore a certain deference must be shown him by the priests,--a result which conspicuously appears in the history of Hafiz and Saadi. In common with his countrymen, Saadi gives prominence to fatalism,--a doctrine which, in Persia, in Arabia, and in India, has had, in all ages, a dreadful charm. "To all men," says the Koran, "is their day of death appointed, and they cannot postpone or advance it one hour. Wilt thou govern the world which God governs? Thy lot is cast beforehand, and whithersoever it leads, thou must follow." "Not one is among you," said Mahomet, "to whom is not already appointed his seat in fire or his seat in bliss."

But the Sheik's mantle sits loosely on Saadi's shoulders, and I find in him a pure theism. He asserts the universality of moral laws, and the perpetual retributions. He celebrates the omnipotence of a virtuous soul. A certain intimate and avowed piety, obviously in sympathy with the feeling of his nation, is habitual to him. All the forms of courtesy and of business in daily life take a religious tinge, as did those of Europe in the Middle Age.

With the exception of a few passages, of which we need not stop to give account, the morality of the "Gulistan" and the "Bostan" is pure, and so little clogged with the superstition of the country that this does not interfere with the pleasure of the modern reader: he can easily translate their ethics into his own. Saadi praises alms, hospitality, justice, courage, bounty, and humility; he respects the poor, and the kings who befriend the poor. He admires the royal eminence of the dervish or religious ascetic. "Hunger is a cloud out of which falls a rain of eloquence and knowledge: when the belly is empty, the body becomes spirit; when it is full, the spirit becomes body." He praises humility. "Make thyself dust, to do anything well." "Near Casbin," he tells us, "a man of the country of Parthia came forth to accost me, mounted on a tiger. At this sight, such fear seized me that I could not flee nor move. But he said,--'O Saadi, be not surprised at what thou seest. Do thou only not withdraw thy neck from the yoke of God, and nothing shall be able to withdraw its neck from thy yoke.'"

In a country where there are no libraries and no printing, people must carry wisdom in sentences. Wonderful is the inconsecutiveness of the Persian poets. European criticism finds that the unity of a beautiful whole is everywhere wanting. Not only the story is short, but no two sentences are joined. In looking through Von Hammer's anthology, culled from a paradise of poets, the reader feels this painful discontinuity. 'Tis sand without lime,--as if the neighboring desert had _saharized_ the mind. It was said of Thomson's "Seasons," that the page would read as well by omitting every alternate line. But the style of Thomson is glue and bitumen to the loose and irrecoverable ramble of the Oriental bards. No topic is too remote for their rapid suggestion. The Ghaselle or Kassida is a chapter of proverbs, or proverbs unchaptered, unthreaded beads of all colors, sizes, and values. Yet two topics are sure to return in any and every proximity,--the mistress and the name of the poet. Out of every ambush these leap on the unwary reader. Saadi, in the "Gulistan," by the necessity of the narrative, corrects this arid looseness, which appears, however, in his odes and elegies, as in Hafiz and Dschami. As for the incessant return of the poet's name,--which appears to be a sort of registry of copyrights,--the Persians often relieve this heavy custom by wit and audacious sallies.

The Persians construct with great intrepidity their mythology and legends of typical men. Jamschid, who reigned seven hundred years, and was then driven from his throne, is their favorite example of the turns of fortune. Karun or Corah, the alchemist, who converted all things to gold, but perished with his treasures at the word of Moses, is their Croesus. Lokman, the AEsop of the East, lived to an enormous age, was the great-grandson of Noah, etc. Saadi relates, that Lokman, in his last years, dwelt on the border of a reedy marsh, where he constructed a cabin, and busied himself with making osier baskets. The Angel of Death appeared to him, and said,--"Lokman, how is it, that, in three thousand years that you have lived in the world, you have never known how to build a house?" Lokman replied,--"O Azrael! one would be a fool, knowing that you were always at his heels, to set himself at building a house." Hatem Tai is their type of hospitality, who, when the Greek emperor sent to pray him to bestow on him his incomparable horse, received the messenger with honor, and, having no meat in his tent, killed the horse for his banquet, before he yet knew the object of the visit. Nushirvan the Just is their Marcus Antoninus, or Washington, to whom every wise counsel in government is attributed. And the good behavior of rulers is a point to which Saadi constantly returns. It is one of his maxims, that the "_bons mots_ of kings are the kings of _bons mots_." One of these is,--"At night thou must go in prayer a beggar, if by day thou wilt carry thyself as a king." Again,--"A king is like a great and massive wall: as soon as he leans from the perpendicular [of equity], he is near his ruin." Again,--"You, O king, sit in the place of those who are gone, and of those who are to come: how can you establish a firm abode between two non-existences?" Dzoul Noun, of Grand Cairo, said to the Caliph,--"I have learned that one to whom you have given power in the country treats the subjects with severity, and permits daily wrongs and violences there." The Caliph replied,--"There will come a day when I will severely punish him." "Yes," returned the other, "you will wait until he has taken all the goods of the subjects; then you will bestir yourself, and snatch them from him, and will fill your treasury. But what good will that do to your poor and miserable people?" The Caliph was ashamed, and ordered the instant punishment of the offender.

It appears, from the anecdotes which Professor Graf has rendered from the Calcutta manuscripts, that Saadi enjoyed very high respect from the great in his own time, and from the Sultan of the Mongolian court,--and that he used very plain dealing with this last, for the redress of grievances which fell under his notice. These, with other passages, mark the state of society wherein a shepherd becomes a robber, then a conqueror, and then sultan. In a rude and religious society, a poet and traveller is thereby a noble and the associate of princes, a teacher of religion, a mediator between the people and the prince, and, by his exceptional position, uses great freedom with the rulers. The growth of cities and increase of trade rapidly block up this bold access of truth to the courts, as the narrator of these events in Saadi's life plainly intimates. "The Sultan, Abake Khan, found great pleasure in the verses. Truly, at the present time, no learned men or Sheiks would dare to utter such advice, even to a grocer or a butcher; and hence, also, is the world in such bad plight as we see."

The Persians have been called "the French of Asia"; and their superior intelligence, their esteem for men of learning, their welcome to Western travellers, and their tolerance of Christian sects in their territory, as contrasted with Turkish fanaticism, would seem to derive from the rich culture of this great choir of poets, perpetually reinforced through five hundred years, which again and again has enabled the Persians to refine and civilize their conquerors, and to preserve a national identity. To the expansion of this influence there is no limit; and we wish that the promised republication may add to the genius of Saadi a new audience in America.

THE RETURN OF THE BIRDS.

I hear, from many a little throat,
A warble interrupted long;
I hear the robin's flute-like note,
The bluebird's slenderer song.

Brown meadows and the russet hill,
Not yet the haunt of grazing herds,
And thickets by the glimmering rill
Are all alive with birds.

O Choir of Spring, why come so soon?
On leafless grove and herbless lawn
Warm lie the yellow beams of noon;
Yet winter is not gone.

For frost shall sheet the pools again;
Again the blustering East shall blow,
Whirl a white tempest through the glen,
And load the pines with snow.

Yet, haply, from the region where,
Waked by an earlier spring than here,
The blossomed wild-plum scents the air,
Ye come in haste and fear.

For there is heard the bugle-blast,
The booming gun, the jarring drum,
And on their chargers, spurring fast,
Armed warriors go and come.

There mighty hosts have pitched the camp
In valleys that were yours till then,
And Earth has shuddered to the tramp
Of half a million men.

In groves where once ye used to sing,
In orchards where ye had your birth,
A thousand glittering axes swing
To smite the trees to earth.

Ye love the fields by ploughman trod;
But there, when sprouts the beechen spray,
The soldier only breaks the sod
To hide the slain away.

Stay, then, beneath our ruder sky;
Heed not the storm-clouds rising black,
Nor yelling winds that with them fly;
Nor let them fright you back,--

Back to the stifling battle-cloud,
To burning towns that blot the day,
And trains of mounting dust that shroud
The armies on their way.

Stay, for a tint of green shall creep
Soon o'er the orchard's grassy floor,
And from its bed the crocus peep
Beside the housewife's door.

Here build, and dread no harsher sound,
To scare you from the sheltering tree,
Than winds that stir the branches round
And murmur of the bee.

And we will pray, that, ere again
The flowers of autumn bloom and die,
Our generals and their strong-armed men
May lay their weapons by.

Then may ye warble, unafraid,
Where hands, that wear the fetter now,
Free as your wings shall ply the spade,
And guide the peaceful plough.

Then, as our conquering hosts return,
What shouts of jubilee shall break
From placid vale and mountain stern
And shore of mighty lake!

And midland plain and ocean-strand
Shall thunder: "Glory to the brave,
Peace to the torn and bleeding land,
And freedom to the slave!"

MARCH, 1864.

WET-WEATHER WORK.

BY A FARMER.

VII.

In these notes upon the Farm-Writers and the Pastorals, I have endeavored to keep a certain chronologic order; and upon this wet morning I find myself embayed among those old gentlemen who lived in the latter part of the eighteenth century. George III. is tottering under his load of royalty; the French Revolution is all asmoke. Fox and Sheridan and Burke and the younger Pitt are launching speeches at this Gallic tempest of blood,--each in his own way. Our American struggle for liberty has been fought bravely out; and the master of it has retired to his estates upon the Potomac. There, in his house at Mount Vernon, he receives one day a copy of the early volumes of Young's "Annals of Agriculture," with the author's compliments, and the proffer of his services to execute orders for seeds, implements, cattle, or "anything else that might contribute to the General's rural amusements."

The General, in his good old-fashioned way, returns the compliments with interest, and says, "I will give you the trouble, Sir, of providing and sending to the care of Wakelin Welch, of London, merchant, the following articles:--

"Two of the simplest and best-constructed ploughs for land which is neither very heavy nor sandy; to be drawn by two horses; to have spare shares and coulters; and a mould, on which to form new irons, when the old ones are worn out, or will require repairing. I will take the liberty to observe, that, some years ago, from a description or a recommendation thereof which I had somewhere met with, I sent to England for what was then called the Rotherham or patent plough; and, till it began to wear and was ruined by a bungling country-smith, that no plough could have done better work, or appeared to have gone easier with two horses; but, for want of a mould, which I neglected to order with the plough, it became useless after the irons which came with it were much worn.

"A little of the best kind of cabbage seed for field-culture.

"Twenty pounds of the best turnip seed.

"Ten bushels of sainfoin seed.

"Eight bushels of the winter vetches.

"Two bushels of rye-grass seed.

"Fifty pounds of hop-clover seed."