322 AROUND AN OLD HOMESTEAD. 



art In the country, and music, and the literature which 

 is the boast of cities, and to live, moreover, surrounded 

 with all the perpetual beauty of sky and earth, with 

 pure air and pure food and sweet, clear water, with 

 opportunities for refreshing labor and for companion- 

 ship with the animals and with all the life of God's 

 world. Art museums might just as well flourish out 

 in the open air, amid the scenes which inspired their 

 paintings, as in the smoke of factories; and culture 

 ought no less to be advocated and pursued in the fields 

 than in the paved streets. Indeed, the pictures in the 

 galleries do but afford a glimpse of that which lies 

 on every hand beyond their walls. The dangers of life 

 in the country lie in the sordidness which is found in 

 many farmers, and which absence from the refining 

 social influences of the city encourages. Then, too, 

 when farming becomes too absorbingly a business its 

 poetry is lost. But its decided advantages are the inde- 

 pendence and self-reliance it develops; and he would be 

 a thick-skinned fellow who did not see some poetry in 

 his fields of wheat. And the power to do good, too, 

 lies with the countryman ; for were it not for the farmer 

 men could not live. Yet women especially (and not 

 altogether without reason, as many farms are man- 

 aged) regard life in the country, on a farm, as they 

 would life-imprisonment, as an existence absolutely de- 

 void of any pleasure, or beauty, or society — nothing 

 but a routine of perpetual drudgery : anything but that, 

 they say. Yet are the social advantages of cities so 

 absorbing as all that? Could not a little mite of them 

 be introduced into the country? Many women there 

 be after the order of Mrs. Hardcastle, in "She Stoops 



