206 SELECTIONS FROM ADDRESSES. 



subjects he wrote more perhaps than any man of that day in the 

 Commonweahh, if we except the lamented Thomas G. Fessen- 

 den. Mr. Lowell was the chief support of the periodical work 

 then published by the Massachusetts society, (over which he 

 presided,) and more than once addressed that society at the pub- 

 lic shows in Brighton. He entered upon the discussion of ag- 

 ricultural questions with the same intelligence and frankness, 

 the same sincere, if not always successful, desire to arrive at a 

 correct result, which have marked his productions on other to- 

 pics. As a writer, he was unambitious, not to say careless, in re- 

 spect to mere finish and ornament, but he always wrote with the 

 greatest simplicity and earnestness, and there was such an evi- 

 dent knowledge and interest in his subject, such a copiousness 

 of illustration, and easy flow of language, so much of that which 

 reaches the heart, because it comes from the heart, that I know 

 of no agricultural author, better entitled to the character of an 

 impressive and interesting writer. 



The great men, whom I have mentioned, were, as you know, 

 not distinguished as farmers merely. They were deeply en- 

 gaged in political questions, which were never more agitating 

 than in their day, and on many of these questions diflered wide- 

 ly from each other. But their political friends and foes could 

 bear witness, that neither of them carried his party feelings into 

 his agricultural investigations. Here, to borrow a happy phrase 

 of Jeflerson on another occasion, they were " all Federalists, all 

 Republicans," all warmly interested in the subject, all governed 

 by feelings of patriotism and philanthropy, all anxious to im- 

 prove our agriculture, and promote the prosperity and well- 

 being of our great rural population. Men of their comprehen- 

 sive minds could not fail to appreciate this object. If the 

 greatest poet and brightest genius of ancient Rome, in a pane- 

 gyric on rural life, to which two thousand years have failed to 

 produce a parallel, could ascribe the unequalled greatness of his 

 country to the domestic virtues, which chister round the farm- 

 er's dwelling, with how much more reason must we look to that 

 spot for the security of our best interests, under the influence of 

 a purer faith, and of a general system of moral and intellectual 

 education, of which the ancient world scarcely dreamed ! 



