I’m glad I built this southern porch; my chair seems easier here: I haven’t seen as fine a spring this five and twenty year. And how the time goes round so quick: a week I would have sworn, Since they were husking on the flat, and now they plough for corn!
Across the level Brown’s new place begins to make a show; I thought he’d have to wait for trees, but, bless me, how they grow! They say it’s fine—two acres filled with evergreens and things; But so much land! it worries me, for not a cent it brings.
He has the right, I don’t deny, to please himself that way, But ’tis a bad example set, and leads young folks astray: Book-learning gets the upper hand, and work is slow and slack, And they that come long after us will find things gone to wrack.
Well—I suppose I’m old, and yet it is not long ago When Reuben spread the swath to dry, and Jesse learned to mow, And William raked, and Israel hoed, and Joseph pitched with me, But such a man as I was then my boys will never be!
I don’t mind William’s hankering for lectures and for books, He never had a farming knack—you’d see it in his looks; But handsome is that handsome does, and he is well to do: ’Twould ease my mind if I could say the same of Jesse, too.
’Tis like my time is nearly out; of that I’m not afraid; I never cheated any man, and all my debts are paid. They call it rest that we shall have, but work would do no harm; There can’t be rivers there, and fields, without some sort o’ farm.”
No description in prose can as well describe his occupation as a boy, as his own lines, in the poem of the “Holly Tree.”
“The corn was warm in the ground, the fences were mended and made, And the garden-beds, as smooth as a counterpane is laid, Were dotted and striped with green, where the peas and the radishes grew, With elecampane at the foot, and comfrey, and sage, and rue. From the knoll where stood the house, the fair fields pleasantly rolled, To dells where the laurels hung, and meadows of buttercup gold.”
Such was the farm when he left it, in words of the poet’s choosing, and what he found when, after a quarter of a century of wanderings, he can best describe.
“Here are the fields again, the soldierly maize in tassel Stands on review, and carries the scabbarded ears in its armpits. Rustling, I part the ranks,—the close, engulfing battalions Shaking their plumes overhead,—and, wholly bewildered and heated, Gain the top of the ridge, where stands, colossal, the pin-oak. Yonder, a mile away, I see the roofs of the village,— See the crouching front of the meeting-house of the Quakers, Oddly conjoined with the whittled Presbyterian steeple. Right and left are the homes of the slow, conservative farmers, Loyal people and true; but, now that the battles are over, Zealous for Temperance, Peace, and the Eight of Suffrage for Women. Orderly, moral are they,—at least, in the sense of suppression; Given to preaching of rules, inflexible outlines of duty: Seeing the sternness of life; but, alas! overlooking its graces. Let me be juster: the scattered seeds of the graces are planted Widely apart; but the trumpet-vine on the porch is a token: Yea, and awake and alive are the forces of love and affection, Plastic forces that work from the tenderer models of beauty.”