MY FARM OF EDGEWOOD 



ripeness. The first figs I ever gathered, were 

 gathered on such a slope in a dreamy atmos- 

 phere of Southern France, with the blue of 

 the Mediterranean in reach of the eye, and the 

 sweetest roses of Provence lending a balmy 

 fragrance to the air. 



Sheltered slopes recall too, always, what is 

 most captivating in rural life. You never see 

 them or look for them even, in Dutch-land— 

 in Poland, never; in Prussia, or on the high- 

 ways of travel in France, never. And few 

 rural poems, or pictures that haunt the memory, 

 were ever rhymed or sketched in those regions. 

 Theocritus lived where lie the sweetest of val- 

 leys ; Tibullus and Horace both knew the pur- 

 ple shadows that lay in the clefts of the Latian 

 hills. Delille chased his rural phantoms be- 

 yond the Burgundian mountains, before they 

 had taken their best form. 



But in the English Isle— by Abergavenny, 

 by Merthyr, under the Tors of Derbyshire, in 

 the lea of the Dartmoor hills, — abreast of 

 Snowdon — what sheltered greenness and 

 bloom ! What nestling homesteads ! 



I must not forget to give a sequence to my 

 story. I had entered my advertisement. Was 

 it possible that any one in the possession of 



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