256 EUROPEAN AGRICULTURE. 



husband ; but I have intended simply to show how grateful and 

 gratifying to him must have been the lively interest and sym 

 pathy which she took in concerns which necessarily so much 

 engaged his time and attention ; and how the country could be 

 divested of that dulness and ennui, so often complained of as 

 inseparable from it, when a cordial and practical interest is taken 

 in the concerns which necessarily belong to rural life. I meant 

 also to show as this and many other examples which have 

 come under my observation emphatically do show that an 

 interest in, and a familiarity with, even the most humble occu 

 pations of agricultural life, are not inconsistent with the highest 

 refinements of taste, the most improved cultivation of the mind, 

 the practice of the polite accomplishments, and a grace, and 

 elegance, and dignity of manners, unsurpassed in the highest 

 circles of society. 



XXXIX. LIFE IN THE COUNTRY. 



To live in the country, and enjoy all its pleasures, we should 

 love the country. To love the country is to take an interest in 

 all that belongs to the country its occupations, its sports, its 

 culture, and its improvements, its fields and its forests, its trees 

 and rocks, its valleys and hills, its Jakes and rivers ; to gather 

 the flocks around us, and feed them from our own hands ; to 

 make the birds our friends, and call them all by their names ; to 

 wear a chaplet of roses as if it were a princely diadem ; to rove 

 over the verdant fields with a higher pleasure than we should 

 tread the carpeted halls of regal courts ; to inhale the fresh air 

 of the morning as if it were the sweet breath of infancy ; to 

 brush the dew from the glittering fields as if our path were 

 strewed with diamonds ; to hold converse with the trees of the 

 forest, in their youth and in their decay, as if they could tell us 

 the history of their own times, and as if the gnarled bark of the 

 aged among them were all written over with the record of by 

 gone days, of those who planted them, and those who early 

 gathered their fruits : to find hope and joy bursting like a flood 

 upon our hearts, as the darting rays of light gently break upon 



