The peril of our new way of life was not lest we should fail in becoming practical agriculturists, but that we should probably cease to be anything else.While our enterprise lay all in theory, we had pleased ourselves with delectable visions of the spiritualization of labor.It was to be our form of prayer and ceremonial of worship.Each stroke of the hoe was to uncover some aromatic root of wisdom, heretofore hidden from the sun.Pausing in the field, to let the wind exhale the moisture from our foreheads, we were to look upward, and catch glimpses into the far-off soul of truth.In this point of view, matters did not turn out quite so well as we anticipated.It is very true that, sometimes, gazing casually around me, out of the midst of my toil, I used to discern a richer picturesqueness in the visible scene of earth and sky.There was, at such moments, a novelty, an unwonted aspect, on the face of Nature, as if she had been taken by surprise and seen at unawares, with no opportunity to put off her real look, and assume the mask with which she mysteriously hides herself from mortals.But this was all.The clods of earth, which we so constantly belabored and turned over and over, were never etherealized into thought.Our thoughts, on the contrary, were fast becoming cloddish.Our labor symbolized nothing, and left us mentally sluggish in the dusk of the evening.Intellectual activity is incompatible with any large amount of bodily exercise.The yeoman and the scholar--the yeoman and the man of finest moral culture, though not the man of sturdiest sense and integrity--are two distinct individuals, and can never be melted or welded into one substance.
Zenobia soon saw this truth, and gibed me about it, one evening, as Hollingsworth and I lay on the grass, after a hard day's work.
"I am afraid you did not make a song today, while loading the hay-cart,"said she, "as Burns did, when he was reaping barley.""Burns never made a song in haying-time," I answered very positively.
"He was no poet while a farmer, and no farmer while a poet.""And on the whole, which of the two characters do you like best?" asked Zenobia."For I have an idea that you cannot combine them any better than Burns did.Ah, I see, in my mind's eye, what sort of an individual you are to be, two or three years hence.Grim Silas Foster is your prototype, with his palm of soleleather, and his joints of rusty iron (which all through summer keep the stiffness of what he calls his winter's rheumatize), and his brain of--I don't know what his brain is made of, unless it be a Savoy cabbage; but yours may be cauliflower, as a rather more delicate variety.Your physical man will be transmuted into salt beef and fried pork, at the rate, I should imagine, of a pound and a half a day; that being about the average which we find necessary in the kitchen.You will make your toilet for the day (still like this delightful Silas Foster) by rinsing your fingers and the front part of your face in a little tin pan of water at the doorstep, and teasing your hair with a wooden pocketcomb before a seven-by-nine-inch looking-glass.
Your only pastime will be to smoke some very vile tobacco in the black stump of a pipe.""Pray, spare me!" cried I."But the pipe is not Silas's only mode of solacing himself with the weed.""Your literature," continued Zenobia, apparently delighted with her description, "will be the 'Farmer's Almanac;' for I observe our friend Foster never gets so far as the newspaper.When you happen to sit down, at odd moments, you will fall asleep, and make nasal proclamation of the fact, as he does; and invariably you must be jogged out of a nap, after supper, by the future Mrs.Coverdale, and persuaded to go regularly to bed.And on Sundays, when you put on a blue coat with brass buttons, you will think of nothing else to do but to go and lounge over the stone walls and rail fences, and stare at the corn growing.And you will look with a knowing eye at oxen, and will have a tendency to clamber over into pigsties, and feel of the hogs, and give a guess how much they will weigh after you shall have stuck and dressed them.Already I have noticed you begin to speak through your nose, and with a drawl.Pray, if you really did make any poetry to-day, let us hear it in that kind of utterance!""Coverdale has given up making verses now," said Hollingsworth, who never had the slightest appreciation of my poetry."Just think of him penning a sonnet with a fist like that! There is at least this good in a life of toil, that it takes the nonsense and fancy-work out of a man, and leaves nothing but what truly belongs to him.If a farmer can make poetry at the plough-tail, it must be because his nature insists on it; and if that be the case, let him make it, in Heaven's name!""And how is it with you?" asked Zenobia, in a different voice; for she never laughed at Hollingsworth, as she often did at me."You, I think, cannot have ceased to live a life of thought and feeling.""I have always been in earnest," answered Hollingsworth."I have hammered thought out of iron, after heating the iron in my heart! It matters little what my outward toil may be.Were I a slave, at the bottom of a mine, I should keep the same purpose, the same faith in its ultimate accomplishment, that I do now.Miles Coverdale is not in earnest, either as a poet or a laborer.""You give me hard measure, Hollingsworth," said I, a little hurt."Ihave kept pace with you in the field; and my bones feel as if I had been in earnest, whatever may be the case with my brain!""I cannot conceive," observed Zenobia with great emphasis,--and, no doubt, she spoke fairly the feeling of the moment,--" I cannot conceive of being so continually as Mr.Coverdale is within the sphere of a strong and noble nature, without being strengthened and ennobled by its influence!"This amiable remark of the fair Zenobia confirmed me in what I had already begun to suspect, that Hollingsworth, like many other illustrious prophets, reformers, and philanthropists, was likely to make at least two proselytes among the women to one among the men.Zenobia and Priscilla!
These, I believe (unless my unworthy self might be reckoned for a third), were the only disciples of his mission; and I spent a great deal of time, uselessly, in trying to conjecture what Hollingsworth meant to do with them--and they with him!
