36 EARLY SPRING IN MASSACHUSETTS. 
must have some distinct and important truth to 
communicate, and the most important it will 
always be the most easy to communicate to the 
vulgar. 
If anybody thinks a thought how sure we 
are to hear of it. Though it be only a half 
thought or half a delusion, it gets into the 
newspapers, and all the country rings with it. 
But how much clearing of land, and plowing 
and planting, and building of stone wall is done 
every summer without being reported in the 
newspapers or in literature. Agricultural lit¬ 
erature is not as extensive as the fields, and the 
farmer’s almanac is never a big book. Yet I 
think that the history (or poetry) of one farm 
from a state of nature to the highest state of 
cultivation comes nearer to being the true sub¬ 
ject of a modern epic than the siege of Jerusa¬ 
lem or any such paltry and ridiculous romance 
to which some have thought men reduced. Was 
it Coleridge who said that the “Works and 
Days” of Hesiod, the Eclogues and Georgies of 
Virgil are but leaves out of that epic? The 
turning of a swamp into a garden, though the 
poet may not think it an improvement, is at 
any rate an enterprise interesting to all men. 
A wealthy farmer, who has money to let, was 
here yesterday who said that fourteen years ago 
a man came to him to hire two hundred dollars 
