462 The Farmer. 
and a pride for fashionable things, and feel that life is passing 
and promising one of honor and elevation. But soon his folly 
will develope its fruits. His constitution, by its deprivation or 
wapt of exercise, will indicate its surrender. Then he will say to 
himself — " that I had the health of the laboring man — with 
that I could enjoy life in the humblest sphere. But I have bar- 
tered it away for the foolishness of fashion, and vain ambition for 
a professional life." 
He sees too late the error of his father and himself; the rude 
exterior of his rustic life passed through the change of " toilet im- 
provements," and now shows the yellow changes of approaching 
dissolution. With what joy would he grasp the plow if he could 
but reassume the sturdy life of the farmer, reinvigorate his 
health and enjoy life in the pursuits of honest, useful industry. 
He learns too late that the laws of God, which were established 
to govern his physical being, were not to be trifled with or 
neglected. He finds that whilst the fashions and follies of the 
world may change and puff the pride of the thoughtless, the laws 
of his nature do not change, whilst he might and did violate them 
and sold his life for the mere bubbles and tinsels of a more fash- 
ionable and less useful life. 
This is the picture and sad tale of thousands; and originates 
entirely from a false pride and false view of things. Did parents 
only see the truth, that honor and greatness are inseparable from 
industry and usefulness, they would not fall into this fatal error. 
Although it is true that the life of the farmer is, generally speak- 
ing, one of " hard labor," it is so only because it is made so un- 
necessarily! A man can make himself a slave at any thing, and 
can destroy himself by over application in any employment. The 
life of the farmer may be one of drudgery, toil and heavy labor 
constantly, or it may be one of steady, healthy and easy exercise. 
Hard as the life of the farmer is considered by some to be, it is 
scarcely possible to break down the constitution by following it, 
as soon as by intellectual and sedentary pursuits. 
Our lunatic asylums prove the sad reality of ruined minds and 
constitutions by only a few brief months of literary application. 
Minds which would have been sane, buoyant and happy through 
lives of agricultural labor under the heaviest toil, have sunk to 
ruin and permanent imbecility in less than one brief year. He 
who traversed the fields in the beauty and healthful air of the 
early morning in gay and buoyant spirit, has been turned into a 
maniac in a few short months to end his days in melancholy or 
fury of a broken mind. Nature will not be overtaxed with impu- 
nity. If we bear too hard upon the laws that govern our intel- 
lectual being, they will recoil upon us with deadly vengeance, 
and overthrow the empire of mind and sink us in insanity and 
ruin, drawing after it physical destruction also. 
