THE AGRICULTURAL SOCIETY. 65 



busy concourse of men, to the healthy and placid and refining 

 and ennobling influences of a cultivated rural life. There are 

 charms in the unceasing current of life which flows through 

 the forum and the market-place. There is a fascination, as 

 Mr. Choate once said to me, in " the newspaper and the post- 

 ofiice," above the music of the sounding sea and the silence of 

 the lonely shore. But, when we remember the annoyances 

 which meet us at every corner, the petty strifes of men, the 

 struggles and distresses, the efforts and disappointments, shall 

 we not sigh for the rural respectability of our fathers and 

 exclaim with Cicero, " There at my Laurentium, I hear nothing 

 that I repent to have heard, say nothing that I repent to have 

 said ; no hopes delude and no fears molest me. AVelcomc then 

 life of integrity and virtue ! O, dulce otiiim, honestumqne, ac 

 pame omni negotio pulchrius ! " We must learn once more to 

 love the land ; to love it as our fathers loved it, to love it as the 

 people of old loved it, whose great men enjoyed their favorite 

 retreats, and " listened many a returning spring to the night- 

 ingales that tenanted the dark ivy and greeted the narcissus, 

 ancient coronal of mighty goddesses, as it burst into bloom 

 under the dews of heaven." When from our New England 

 cities which have received their life-blood from the country, 

 there flows back a current of wealth and intelligence to beautify 

 our towns, and cultivate our fields, we shall make our land still 

 more the fit abode of a free and intelligent people. 



And now one word in behalf of agricultural societies, as 

 nurseries of this rural love and taste of which I have spoken. 

 Not alone ambition excited by a peaceful strife for supremacy 

 on the fair grounds here ; not alone the desire to excel, 

 awakened by some successful competitor ; not alone that useful 

 knowledge which may be gained by the observation and discus- 

 sion on occasions like this ; not all this alone constitutes the 

 benefit of your exhibition. There is the exhilaration which the 

 blood receives from association ; where, divested of all care, 

 " face answereth unto face." These cheerful assemblies, do 

 they not gild the way of youth, and make the old feel young 

 again ? Do they not enhance the value of our lands and crops 

 and flocks and herds in our eyes, and do they not, moreover, 

 give us renewed interest for the enjoyment of those possessions ? 

 Here, then, let us have our annual rural sports. And when 



