98 WITH EARTH AND SKY 
splendor like summer in conflagration, here a 
wild rose, now an aster, here a trillium, now a 
rosa rugosa to give single rose blossom all the 
summer through. What a degradation not to 
know that all this is a liberal culture if done 
in the spirit of the Master of the Garden and the 
Wildwood. 
Would all the farmers were poets! How goodly 
would their sweet vocations seem as well as how 
wholesome; and a refined ecstasy would run 
along their veins through all the months which 
constitute the year. Not to perceive the fun and 
poetry of farming is to rob the soul; and not 
to know the poetry of agriculture is a misdemeanor 
of unusual proportions. Woe is me if poetry slips 
from my vocabulary when I plant and sow and 
fain would reap. It is as delicious to see trees 
of your own hand-planting grow as to swim in 
a crystal stream under pine shadows. To work 
with a grim utility makes people old before their 
time; while to know each morning is a pageant 
and each night’s arrival a beatitude, redeems 
labor from drudgery and turns farming into an 
zsthetic procedure like carving a Milo’s Venus. 
Meantime I am in the apple orchard and 
digressing, though I make no apologies, seeing 
digressions are the worth-whiles on the Pipes of 
Pan. I am hunting for the poet who planted 
this orchard and these other unfruitful trees 
which bear the pleasant apples of far Hesperides, 
for though we eat not this fruit, we none the 
