82 MASSACHUSETTS AGRICULTURE. 



restless and ambitious life we have poured our best powers of 

 mind and body into our cities and towns, and exhausted them 

 in the forum, or in the hard toil of the inventive arts. We 

 have forgotten too much the old rural homes — those broad 

 fields, those overshadowing trees, that substantial New England 

 dwelling, whose very presence even now tells of the staunch 

 and reliable virtues of those who have long since gone to their 

 rest. We should know that the charm of life is not in our 

 cities and large towns. Neither our moral nor our religious 

 nor our physical natures can be developed with that beauty of 

 proportion of which man is capable, so long as we prefer the 

 feverish excitement of the busy concourse of men to the healthy 

 and refining influences of a cultivated rural life. 



There are charms in the increasing current of life which flows 

 through the farm and the market-place. There is a fascination, 

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

 office," above the quiet of a country life. But when we remem- 

 ber the annoyances which meet us at every corner, the petty 

 strifes of men, the struggles and distresses, the efibrts and dis- 

 appointments, shall we not sigh for the rural respectability of 

 our ancestors, and exclaim with Cicero, " Tiiere at my Lauren- 

 tium, 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. Welcome, then, life of integrity and virtue." We 

 must learn 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 nightingales that tenanted the dark ivy, and greeted the 

 narcissus, ancient coronal of mighty goddesses, as it burst in 

 beauty under the dews of heaven. When from our New Eng- 

 land cities, which have received their life-blood from the coun- 

 try, 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. 



