AND FLOWERS OF POETRY. 201 
everywhere the ‘ staff of life.’ To reap and gather it in, every 
creature of the hamlet is assembled. The farmer is in the 
field, like a rural king amid his people: 
Around him ply the reaper band 
With lightsome heart and eager hand, 
And mirth and music cheer the toil, 
While sheaves that stud the russet soil, 
And sickles gleaming in the sun, 
f Tell jocund autumn is begun. 
“ The labourer, old or young, is there to collect what he has 
sown with toil, and watched in its growth with pride; the 
dame has left her wheel and her shady cottage, and, with sleeve- 
defended arms, scorns to do less than the best of them; the 
blooming damsel is there, adding her sunny beauty to that of 
universal nature; the boy cuts down the stalks which overtop 
his head; children gleam among the shocks; and even the un- 
walkable infant sits propped with sheaves, and plays with the 
stubble, and 
With all its twined flowers. 
Such groups are often seen in the wheat-field as deserve the 
immortality of the pencil. There is something, too, about 
wheat-harvest which carries back the mind and feasts it with 
the pleasures of antiquity. The sickle is almost the only im¬ 
plement which has descended from the olden times in its pris¬ 
tine simplicity — to the present hour, neither altering its form, 
nor becoming obsolete, amid all the fashions and improvements 
of the world. It is the same now as it was in those scenes of 
rural beauty which the scripture history, without any laboured 
description, often by a single stroke, presents so livingly to the 
imagination, as it was when tender thoughts passed 
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when sick for home. 
She stood in tears amid the alien corn; 
