No. 4.] NEW ENGLAND AGRICULTUEE. 107 



at a fearful rate. They live "the pace that kills;" they 

 have not the virile force to renew themselves, and, if they 

 were not constantly recruited from the fresh blood of the 

 country, must soon fall into decay. 



If I might venture to suffo'est a few of the necessary 

 qualifications of a successful larmer under such conditions 

 as exist in New England to-day, I should strongly empha- 

 size two or three points. 



To begin with, I shall place in the very front rank of such 

 qualifications, as one without which no farmer, whatever his 

 other advantages, can reach the highest measure of suc- 

 cess, a genuine love of the soil and of his occupation. In 

 every other field of effort we readily recognize the necessity 

 of an adaptation between the man and his work. He must 

 bo drawn to it, not by the mere caprice of circumstances, 

 but ])ecause he finds there scope for the full exercise of his 

 mental and moral forces and full range for the play of his 

 spiritual faculties. The danger of mechanical employments 

 is that they make the man mechanical. They tend to 

 deaden the exercise of the imaginative faculty in man, 

 which, whether he be orator, poet, artist or worker, sets 

 him out from the midst of the material things with which 

 he deals and gives him the zest which comes from a sense 

 of mastery and freedom. For some specially gifted minds, 

 indeed, mechanical operations furnish an almost limitless 

 field for the exercise of ingenuity and the introduction of 

 improvements. But "to him who, in the love of nature, 

 holds communion with her visible forms, she speaks " a 

 language of infinite variety and beauty. 



As another poet says, " Nature never did betray the heai-t 

 that loved her. " Every form and operation of nature thrills 

 and throl)s with ever-fresh life. Whether in the starry night 

 the husbandman looks up to marvel at the grandeur and 

 majesty of the endless procession of the heavenly bodies ; 

 whether he watches the clouds which are driven api)arently 

 by chance winds, and learns that they too, represent in their 

 form and movement the highest type of law ; whether he 

 studies the soil beneath his feet, with its well-nigh limitless 

 possibilities of responsiveness to his touch, or whether he 

 studies the laws of life as revealed in the plants and animals 



