CULTIVATION OF HEART'S-EASE. 53 



tries of Europe they have ceased to exist ; and their extinction 

 is regretted by sound j)olitical thinkers as a nli^fln■tune. They 

 form the basis on which the fabric of social order may be most 

 securely reared. Tlie spirit of radicalism may erect its menac- 

 ing crest in our cities and large towns, demagogues may be 

 loud and voluble wherever crowds can gather to hear them, 

 but so long as the soil of Massachusetts is occupied by small 

 proprietors, cultivating the lands they own, we have a conserv- 

 ative element in our society which may quiet the most uneasy 

 alarmist. They keep the ship in trim ; and though she may 

 take a lurch now and then, she will not go over. 



And now I liave done all that I proposed to do. I have 

 presented some considerations which should make the farmers 

 of Massachusetts contented with their lot. Starting with the 

 admission that the soil is not of remarkable and exuberant 

 fertility, I have endeavored to illustrate that great law of 

 compensation which runs througli the whole sciieme of Divine 

 Providence, b}' showing that the causes which make the soil 

 what it is, give us other natural advantages not otherwise to be 

 had, so that what is lost in one way is gained in another. 

 And so far as man's relation to the land is concerned, I have 

 shown — and it is an obvious truth — that the position of the 

 Massachusetts farmer is one of peculiar dignity and desirable- 

 ness : I mean peculiar, in comparison with the whole civilized 

 world. His brethren of the rest of New England, and of the 

 whole Northern States, generally, share with him in this advan- 

 tage. And the moral I would draw from my discourse — the 

 improvement, as an old-fashioned minister would call it — is 

 this : let the young man who has resolved to become a farmer, 

 also resolve to stay at home. He will hear wonderful stories 

 of the boundless fertility of the "West: how the wind of the 

 level prairie waves the deep-bosomed grain for hundreds and 

 thousands of acres, and the yellow harvest runs up to the blue 

 line of the sky ; but let him hear it unmoved. They have no 

 mountains : they have no sea : the two grand voices of Nature 

 . are silent there. Those corn-bearing plains are the prose of 

 earth and not its poetry ; and the imagination languishes and 

 dies amid those wastes of fertility. From the barren mountains 

 and the unfurrowed sea, the soul and the mind of man draw 

 their divinest nutriment. Health, too, will surely be your 



