68 MASSACHUSETTS AGRICULTURE. 



• We leave our homes and journey to Italy to study there the 

 lessons of history — of art — the wisdom and the beauty of a 

 vanished age : but we have before us always monuments more 

 ancient, more impressive, and more beautiful than Rome can 

 show. The humble grass which we trample daily under our 

 feet can reveal a history more ancient, and more strange, and 

 secrets more marvellous. That slender elastic stem, which 

 waves so gracefully in every breeze, which bends but breaks 

 not even in the storm, is a tower builded atom by atom, not of 

 red granite, like the obelisk, but of the purest emerald flint. 

 Arch above arch — story above story — it lifts its cells and cham- 

 bers from the dark earth, storing them as it rises, with its 

 ripened sweetness. Winding channels, too, are formed, through 

 which throb and flow hidden currents, as mysterious as our own 

 vital blood ; but their secrets are as yet undiscovered and 

 unknown. The delicacy and the strength of that astonishing 

 masonry laugh at the poor imitations of human skill. Is there 

 an artisan so skilful who could build one of these wonderful 

 cells, or frame one of these perfect arches, — a painter so skilful, 

 who on his pallet could mix and mingle the hues of that delicate 

 emerald ? The history of that structure is more ancient than 

 obelisk or pyramid, for it dates back to that wonderful, unim- 

 aginable dawn when God said : " Let the earth bring forth grass, 

 and it was so." It has had its journeys, too, and migrations. 



From those pastoral plains of Central Asia, Which were the 

 ancient home of our race, the grass has followed man all over 

 the globe, at once the pioneer and the proof of civilization — not 

 as monuments of barbaric wars and triumphs, built only to 

 decay, but of civilization, of humanity, and of progress ; and 

 the wild woods vanish before it, and the dark morass is changed 

 to verdure as it journeys on. Like that obelisk of which I spoke, 

 it was a worshiper of the sun, but it has never forgotten its con- 

 secration, nor renounced its allegiance. It is the faithful wit- 

 ness of the Divine power which gave it birth, the unerring 

 chronicle of His power and majesty. Its religion has never 

 changed, and can never vanish, but year after year it bears 

 aloft the consecrated symbols of flower and seed — the flower 

 that withers and fades, as life must fade, the seed that is the 

 fruit of departing life, the pledge and promise of a resurrection. 

 It has its own hieroglyphics, too, inscribed upon it, not the 



