As I sit in my library-chair listening to the welcome drip from the
eaves, I bethink me of the great host of English farm-teachers who in
the last century wrote and wrought so well, and wonder why their
precepts and their example should not have made a garden of that little
British island. To say nothing of the inherited knowledge of such men as
Sir Anthony Fitz-Herbert, Hugh Platt, Markham, Lord Bacon, Hartlib, and
the rest, there was Tull, who had blazed a new path between the turnip
and the wheat-drills--to fortune; there was Lord Kames, who illustrated
with rare good sense, and the daintiness of a man of letters, all the
economies of a thrifty husbandry; Sir John Sinclair proved the
wisdom of thorough culture upon tracts that almost covered counties;
Bakewell (of Dishley)--that fine old farmer in breeches and top-boots,
who received Russian princes and French marquises at his
kitchen-fireside--demonstrated how fat might be laid on sheep or cattle
for the handling of a butcher; in fact, he succeeded so far, that Dr.
Parkinson once told Paley that the great breeder had "the power of
fattening his sheep in whatever part of the body he chose, directing it
to shoulder, leg, or neck, as he thought proper,--and this," continued
Parkinson, "is the great _problem_ of his art."
"It's a lie, Sir," said Paley,--"and that's the _solution_ of it."
And yet Dr. Parkinson was very near the truth.
Besides Bakewell, there was Arthur Young, as we have seen, giving all
England the benefit of agricultural comparisons by his admirable
"Tours"; Lord Dundonald had brought his chemical knowledge to the aid
of good husbandry; Abercrombie and Speechly and Marshall had written
treatises on all that regarded good gardening. The nurseries of
Tottenham Court Road, the parterres of Chelsea, and the stoves of the
Yew Gardens were luxuriant witnesses of what the enterprising gardener
might do.
Agriculture, too, had a certain dignity given to it by the fact that
"Farmer George" (the King) had written his experiences for a journal of
Arthur Young, the Duke of Bedford was one of the foremost advocates of
improved farming, and Lord Townshend took a pride in his _sobriquet_ of
"Turnip Townshend."
Yet, for all this, at the opening of the present century, England was by
no means a garden. Over more than half the kingdom, turnips, where sown
at all, were sown broadcast. In four counties out of five, a bare fallow
was deemed essential for the recuperation of cropped lands. Barley and
oats were more often grown than wheat. Dibbling or drilling of grain,
notwithstanding Platt and Jethro Tull, were still rare. The wet
clay-lands had, for the most part, no drainage, save the open furrows
which were as old as the teachings of Xenophon; indeed, it will hardly
be credited, when I state that it is only so late as 1843 that a certain
gardener, John Reade by name, at the Derby Show of the Royal
Agricultural Society, exhibited certain cylindrical pipes, which he had
formed by wrapping damp clay around a smooth billet of wood, and with
which he "had been in the habit of draining the hot-beds of his master."
A sagacious engineer who was present, and saw these, examined them
closely, and, calling the attention of Earl Spencer (the eminent
agriculturist) to them, said, "My Lord, with them I can drain all
England."
It was not until about 1830 that the subsoil-plough of Mr. Smith of
Deanston was first contrived for special work upon the lands of
Perthshire. Notwithstanding all the brilliant successes of Bakewell,
long-legged, raw-boned cattle were admired by the majority of British
farmers at the opening of this century, and elephantine monsters of this
description were dragged about England in vans for exhibition. It was
only in 1798 that the "Smithfield Club" was inaugurated for the show of
fat cattle, by the Duke of Bedford, Lord Somerville, Arthur Young, and
others; and it was about the same period that young Jonas Webb (whose
life has latterly been illustrated by a glowing chapter from Elihu
Burritt) used to ride upon the Norfolk bucks bred by his grandfather,
and, with a quick sense of discomfort from their sharp backs, vowed,
that, when he "grew a man, he'd make better saddles for them"; and he
did, as every one knows who has ever seen a good type of the Brabaham
flock.
The Royal Agricultural Society dates from 1838. In 1835 Sir Robert Peel
presented a farmers' club at Tamworth with "two iron ploughs of the best
construction," and when he inquired after them and their work the
following year, the report was that the wooden mould-board was better:
"We tried 'em, but we be all of one mind, that the iron made the weeds
grow." And I can recall a bright morning in January of 1845, when I made
two bouts around a field in the middle of the best dairy-district of
Devonshire, at the stilts of a plough so cumbrous and ineffective that a
thrifty New-England farmer would have discarded it at sight. Nor can I
omit, in this connection, to revive, so far as I may, the image of a
small Devon farmer, who had lived, and I dare say will die, utterly
ignorant of the instructions of Tull, or of the agricultural labors of
Arthur Young: a short, wheezy, rotund figure of a man, with ruddy
face,--fastening the _h_s in his talk most blunderingly,--driving over
to the market-town every fair-day, with pretty samples of wheat or
barley in his dog-cart,--believing in the royal family like a
gospel,--limiting his reading to glances at the "Times" in the
tap-room,--looking with an evil eye upon railways, (which, in that day,
had not intruded farther than Exeter into his shire,)--distrusting
terribly the spread of "eddication": it "doan't help the work-folk any;
for, d' ye see, they've to keep a mind on their pleughing and craps; and
as for the b'ys, the big uns must mind the beasts, and the little uns's
got enough to do a-scaring the demed rooks. Gads! what hodds to them,
please your Honor, what Darby is a-dooin' up in Lunnun, or what
Lewis-Philup is a-dooin' with the Frenchers?" And the ruddy
farmer-gentleman stirs his toddy afresh, lays his right leg caressingly
over his left leg, admires his white-topped boots, and is the picture of
British complacency. I hope he is living; I hope he stirs his toddy
still in the tap-room of the inn by the pretty Erme River; but I hope
that he has grown wiser as he has grown older, and that he has given
over his wheezy curses at the engine as it hurtles past on the iron way
to Plymouth and to Penzance.
* * * * *
The work was not all done for the agriculture and the agriculturist of
England in the last century; it is hardly all done yet; it is doubtful
if it will be done so as to close investigation and ripen method in our
time. There was room for a corps of fresh workers at the opening of the
present century; nor was such a corps lacking.
About the year 1808, a certain John Christian Curwen, Member of
Parliament, and dating from Cumberland, wrote "Hints on Agricultural
Subjects," a big octavo volume, in which he suggests the steaming of
potatoes for horses, as a substitute for hay; but it does not appear
that the suggestion was well received. To his credit, however, it may be
said, that, in the same book, he urged the system of "soiling"
cattle,--a system which even now needs its earnest expounders, and which
would give full warrant for their loudest exhortation.
I notice, too, that, at about the same period, Dr. Beddoes, the friend
and early patron of Sir Humphry Davy at the Pneumatic Institution of
Bristol, wrote a book with the quaint title, "Good Advice to Husbandmen
in Harvest, and for all those who labor in Hot Berths, and for others
who will take it--in Warm Weather." And with the recollection of Davy's
description of the Doctor in my mind,--"uncommonly short and
fat,"[27]--I have felt a great interest in seeing what such a man should
have to say upon harvest-heats; but his book, so far as I know, is not
to be found in America.
A certain John Harding, of St. James Street, London, published, in 1809,
a tract upon "The Use of Sugar in Feeding Cattle," in which were set
forth sundry experiments which went to show how bullocks had been
fattened on molasses, and had been rewarded with a premium. I am
indebted for all knowledge of this anomalous tractate to the
"Agricultural Biography" of Mr. Donaldson, who seems disposed to give a
sheltering wing to the curious theory broached, and discourses upon it
with a lucidity and coherence worthy of a state-paper. I must be
permitted to quote Mr. Donaldson's language:--"The author's ideas are no
romance or chimera, but a very feasible entertainment of the
undertaking, when a social revolution permits the fruits of all climes
to be used in freedom of the burden of value that is imposed by
monopoly, and restricts the legitimate appropriation."
George Adams, in 1810, proposed "A New System of Agriculture and Feeding
Stock," of which the novelty lay in movable sheds, (upon iron
tram-ways,) for the purpose of soiling cattle. The method was certainly
original; nor can it be regarded as wholly visionary in our time, when
the iron conduits of Mr. Mechi, under the steam-thrust of the Tip-Tree
engines, are showing a percentage of profit.
Charles Drury, in the same year, recommended, in an elaborate treatise,
the steaming of straw, roots, and hay, for cattle-food,--a
recommendation which, in our time, has been put into most successful
practice.
Mowbray, who was for a long time the great authority upon Domestic Fowls
and their Treatment, published his book in 1803, which he represents as
having been compiled from the memoranda of forty years' experience.
And next, as illustrative of the rural literature of the early part of
this century, I must introduce the august name of Sir Humphry Davy. This
I am warranted in doing on two several counts: first, because he was an
accomplished fisherman and the author of "Salmonia," and next, because
he was the first scientific man of any repute who was formally invited
by a Board of Agriculture to discuss the relations of Chemistry to the
practice of farming.
Unfortunately, he was himself ignorant of practical agriculture,[28]
when called upon to illustrate its relations to chemistry; but, like an
earnest man, he set about informing himself by communication with the
best farmers of the kingdom. He delivered a very admirable series of
lectures, and it was without doubt most agreeable to the
country-gentlemen to find the great waste from their fermenting manures
made clear by Sir Humphry's retorts; but Davy was too profound and too
honest a man to lay down for farmers any chemical high-road to success.
He directed and stimulated inquiry; he developed many of the principles
which underlay their best practice; but he offered them no safety-lamp.
I think he brought more zeal to his investigations in the domain of pure
science; he loved well-defined and brilliant results; and I do not think
that he pushed his inquiries in regard to the way in which the
forage-plants availed themselves of sulphate of lime with one-half the
earnestness or delight with which he conducted his discovery of the
integral character of chlorine, or with which he saw for the first time
the metallic globules bubbling out from the electrified crust of potash.
Yet he loved the country with a rare and thorough love, as his
descriptions throughout his letters prove; and he delighted in straying
away, in the leafy month of June, to the charming place of his friend
Knight, upon the Teme in Herefordshire. His "Salmonia" is, in its way, a
pastoral; not, certainly, to be compared with the original of Walton,
lacking its simple homeliness, for which its superior scientific
accuracy can make but poor amends. I cannot altogether forget, in
reading it, that its author is a fine gentleman from London. Neither
fish, nor alders, nor eddies, nor purling shallows, can drive out of
memory the fact that Sir Humphry must be back at "The Hall" by half-past
six, in season to dress for dinner. Walton, in slouch-hat, bound about
with "leaders," sat upon the green turf to listen to a milkmaid's song.
Sir Humphry (I think he must have carried a camp-stool) recited some
verses written by "a noble lady long distinguished at court."[29]
In fact, there was always a great deal of the fine gentleman about the
great chemist,--almost too fine for the quiet tenor of a working-life.
Those first brilliant successes of his professional career at the Royal
Institution of London, before he was turned of thirty, and in which his
youth, his splendid elocution, his happy discoveries, his attractive
manner, all made him the mark for distinguished attentions, went very
far, I fancy, to carry him to that stage of social intoxication under
which he was deluded into marrying a wealthy lady of fashion, and a
confirmed blue-stocking,--the brilliant Mrs. Apreece.
Little domestic comfort ever came of the marriage. Yet he was a
chivalrous man, and took the issue calmly. It is always in his
letters,--"My dear Jane," and "God bless you! Yours affectionately." But
these expressions bound the tender passages. It was altogether a
gentlemanly and a lady-like affair. Only once, as I can find, he forgets
himself in an honest repining; it is in a letter to his brother, under
date of October 30, 1823:[30]--"To add to my annoyances, I find my
house, as usual, after the arrangements made by the mistress of it,
without female servants; but in this world we have to suffer and bear,
and from Socrates down to humble mortals, domestic discomfort seems a
sort of philosophical fate."
If only Lady Davy could have seen this Xantippe touch, I think Sir
Humphry would have taken to angling in some quiet country-place for a
month thereafter!
And even when affairs grow serious with the Baronet, and when, stricken
by the palsy, he is loitering among the mountains of Styria, he
writes,--"I am glad to hear of your perfect restoration, and with health
and the society of London, _which you are so fitted to ornament and
enjoy_, your '_viva la felicità_' is much more secure than any hope
belonging to me."
And again, "You once _talked_ of passing _this_ winter in Italy; but I
hope your plans will be entirely guided by the state of your health and
feelings. Your society would undoubtedly be a very great resource to me,
but I am so well aware of my own present unfitness for society that I
would not have you risk the chance of an uncomfortable moment on my
account."
The dear Lady Jane must have had a _penchant_ for society to leave the
poor palsied man to tumble into his tomb alone!
Yet once again, in the last letter he ever writes, dated Rome, March,
1829, he gallantly asks her to join him; it begins,--"I am still alive,
though expecting every hour to be released."
And the Lady Jane, who is washing off her fashionable humors in the
fashionable waters of Bath, writes,--"I have received, my beloved Sir
Humphry, the letter signed by your hand, with its precious wish of
tenderness. I start to-morrow, _having been detained here_ by Doctors
Babington and Clarke till to-day.... I cannot add more" (it is a letter
of half a page) "than that your fame is a deposit, and your memory a
glory, your life still a hope."
Sweet Lady Jane! Yet they say she mourned him duly, and set a proper
headstone at his grave. But, for my own part, I have no faith in that
affection which will splinter a loving heart every day of its life, and
yet, when it has ceased to beat, will make atonement with an idle swash
of tears.
* * * * *
There was a British farmer by the name of Morris Birkbeck, who about the
year 1814 wrote an account of an agricultural tour in France; and who
subsequently established himself somewhere upon our Western prairies, of
which he gave account in "Letters from Illinois," and in "Notes on a
Journey in America, from the Coast of Virginia to the Territory of
Illinois," with maps, etc. Cobbett once or twice names him as "poor
Birkbeck,"--but whether in allusion to his having been drowned in one of
our Western rivers, or to the poverty of his agricultural successes, it
is hard to determine.
In 1820 Major-General Beatson, who had been Aid to the Marquis of
Wellesley in India, published an account of a new system of farming,
which he claimed to have in successful operation at his place in the
County of Sussex. The novelty of the system lay in the fact that he
abandoned both manures and the plough, and scarified the surface to the
depth of two or three inches, after which he burned it over. The
Major-General was called to the governorship of St. Helena before his
system had made much progress. I am led to allude to the plan as one of
the premonitory hints of that rotary method which is just now enlisting
a large degree of attention in the agricultural world, and which
promises to supplant the plough on all wide stretches of land, within
the present century.
Finlayson, a brawny Scot, born in the parish of Mauchline, who was known
from "Glentuck to the Rutton-Ley" as the best man for "putting the
stone," or for a "hop, step, and leap," contrived the self-cleaning
ploughs (with circular beam) and harrows which bore his name. He was
also--besides being the athlete of Ayrshire--the author of sundry
creditable and practical works on agriculture.
But the most notable man in connection with rural literature, of this
day, was, by all odds, William Cobbett. His early history has so large a
flavor of romance in it that I am sure my readers will excuse me for
detailing it.
His grandfather was a day-laborer; he died before Cobbett was born; but
the author says that he used to visit the grandmother at Christmas and
Whitsuntide. Her home was "a little thatched cottage, with a garden
before the door. She used to give us milk and bread for breakfast, an
apple-pudding for dinner, and a piece of bread and cheese for our
supper. Her fire was made of turf cut from the neighboring heath; and
her evening light was a rush dipped in grease."[31] His father was a
small farmer, and one who did not allow his boys to grow up in idleness.
"My first occupation," he tells us, "was driving the small birds from
the turnip-seed, and the rook from the pease; when I first trudged
a-field, with my wooden bottle and my satchel swung over my shoulders, I
was hardly able to climb the gates and stiles; and at the close of the
day, to reach home was a task of infinite difficulty."
At the age of eleven he speaks of himself as occupied in clipping
box-edgings and weeding flower-beds in the garden of the Bishop of
Winchester; and while here he encounters, one day, a workman who has
just come from the famous Kew Gardens of the King. Young Cobbett is
fired by the glowing description, and resolves that he must see them,
and work upon them too. So he sets off, one summer's morning, with only
the clothes he has upon his back, and with thirteen halfpence in his
pocket, for Richmond. And as he trudges through the streets of the town,
after a hard day's walk, in his blue smock-frock, and with his red
garters tied under his knees, staring about him, he sees in the window
of a bookseller's shop the "Tale of a Tub," price threepence; it piques
his curiosity, and, though his money is nearly all spent, he closes a
bargain for the book, and, throwing himself down upon the shady side of
a hay-rick, makes his first acquaintance with Dean Swift. He read till
it was dark, without thought of supper or of bed,--then tumbled down
upon the grass under the shadow of the stack, and slept till the birds
of the Kew Gardens waked him.
He finds work, as he had determined to do; but it was not fated that he
should pass his life amid the pleasant parterres of Kew. At sixteen, or
thereabout, on a visit to a relative, he catches his first sight of the
Channel waters, and of the royal fleet riding at anchor at Spithead. And
at that sight, the "old Armada," and the "brave Rodney," and the "wooden
walls," of which he had read, come drifting like a poem into his
thought, and he vows that he will become a sailor,--maybe, in time, the
Admiral Cobbett. But here, too, the fates are against him: a kind
captain to whom he makes application suspects him for a runaway, and
advises him to find his way home.
He returns once more to the plough; "but," he says, "I was now spoiled
for a farmer." He sighs for the world; the little horizon of Farnham
(his native town) is too narrow for him; and the very next year he makes
his final escapade.
"It was on the 6th of May, 1783, that I, like Don Quixote, sallied forth
to seek adventures. I was dressed in my holiday clothes, in order to
accompany two or three lasses to Guildford fair. They were to assemble
at a house about three miles from my home, where I was to attend them;
but, unfortunately for me, I had to cross the London turnpike-road. The
stage-coach had just turned the summit of a hill, and was rattling down
towards me at a merry rate. The notion of going to London never entered
my mind till this very moment; yet the step was completely determined on
before the coach came to the spot where I stood. Up I got, and was in
London about nine o'clock in the evening."
His immediate adventure in the metropolis proves to be his instalment as
scrivener in an attorney's office. No wonder he chafes at this; no
wonder, that, in his wanderings about town, he is charmed by an
advertisement which invited all loyal and public-spirited young men to
repair to a certain "rendezvous"; he goes to the rendezvous, and
presently finds himself a recruit in one of His Majesty's regiments
which is filling up for service in British America.
He must have been an apt soldier, so far as drill went; for I find that
he rose rapidly to the grade of corporal, and thence to the position of
sergeant-major. He tells us that his early habits, his strict attention
to duty, and his native talent were the occasion of his swift promotion.
In New Brunswick, upon a certain winter's morning, he falls in with the
rosy-faced daughter of a sergeant of artillery, who was scrubbing her
pans at sunrise, upon the snow. "I made up my mind," he says, "that she
was the very girl for me.... This matter was at once settled as firmly
as if written in the book of fate."
To this end he determines to leave the army as soon as possible. But
before he can effect this, the artillery-man is ordered back to England,
and his pretty daughter goes with him. But Cobbett has closed the
compact with her, and placed in her hands a hundred and fifty pounds of
his earnings,--a free gift, and an earnest of his troth.
The very next season, however, he meets, in a sweet rural solitude of
the Province, another charmer, with whom he dallies in a lovelorn way
for two years or more. He cannot quite forget the old; he cannot cease
befondling the new. If only the "remotest rumor had come," says he, "of
the faithlessness of the brunette in England, I should have been
fastened for life in the New-Brunswick valley." But no such rumor comes,
and in due time he bids a heart-rending adieu, and recrosses the ocean
to find his first love maid-of-all-work in a gentleman's family at five
pounds a year; and she puts in his hand, upon their first interview, the
whole of the hundred and fifty pounds, untouched. This rekindles his
admiration and respect for her judgment, and she becomes his wife,--a
wife he never ceases thereafter to love and honor.
He goes to France, and thence to America. Establishing himself in
Philadelphia, he enters upon the career of authorship, with a zeal for
the King, and a hatred of Dr. Franklin and all Democrats, which give him
a world of trouble. His foul bitterness of speech finds its climax at
length in a brutal onslaught upon Dr. Rush, for which he is prosecuted,
convicted, and mulcted in a sum that breaks down his bookselling and
interrupts the profits of his authorship.
He retires to England, opens shop in Pall-Mall, and edits the
"Porcupine," which bristles with envenomed arrows discharged against all
Liberals and Democrats. Again he is prosecuted, convicted, imprisoned.
His boys, well taught in all manner of farm-work, send him, from his
home in the country, hampers of fresh fruits, to relieve the tedium of
Newgate. Discharged at length, and continuing his ribaldry in the
columns of the "Register," he flies before an Act of Parliament, and
takes new refuge in America. He is now upon Long Island, earnest as in
his youth in agricultural pursuits. The late Dr. Francis of New York
used to speak of his visits to him, and of the fine vegetables he
raised. His political opinions had undergone modification; there was not
so much declamation against democracy,--not so much angry zeal for
royalty and the state-church. Nay, he committed the stupendous absurdity
of carrying back with him to England the bones of Tom Paine, as the
grandest gift he could bestow upon his mother-land. No great ovations
greeted this strange luggage of his; I think he was ashamed of it
afterwards,--if Cobbett was ever ashamed of anything. He became
candidate for Parliament in the Liberal interest; he undertook those
famous "Rural Rides" which are a rare jumble of sweet rural scenes and
crazy political objurgation. Now he hammers the "parsons,"--now he tears
the paper-money to rags,--and anon he is bitter upon Malthus, Ricardo,
and the Scotch "Feelosofers,"--and closes his anathema with the charming
picture of a wooded "hanger," up which he toils (with curses on the
road) only to rejoice in the view of a sweet Hampshire valley, over
which sleek flocks are feeding, and down which some white stream goes
winding, and cheating him into a rare memory of his innocent boyhood. He
gains at length his election to Parliament; but he is not a man to
figure well there, with his impetuosity and lack of self-control. He can
talk by the hour to those who feel with him; but to be challenged, to
have his fierce invective submitted to the severe test of an inexorable
logic,--this limits his audacity; and his audacity once limited, his
power is gone.
But I must not forget that I have brought him into my wet-day galaxy as
a farmer. His energy, his promptitude, his habits of thrift, would have
made him one of the best of farmers. His book on gardening is even now
one of the most instructive that can be placed in the hands of a
beginner. He ignores physiology and botany, indeed; he makes crude
errors on this score; but he had an intuitive sense of the right method
of teaching. He is plain and clear, to a comma. He knows what needs to
be told; and he tells it straightforwardly. There is no better model for
agricultural writers than "Cobbett on Gardening." There is no miserable
waste of words,--no indirectness of talk; what he thinks, he prints.
His "Cottage Economy," too, is a book which every small landholder in
America should own; there is a sterling merit in it which will not be
outlived. He made a great mistake, it is true, in insisting that
Indian-corn could be grown successfully in England. But being a man who
did not yield to influences of climate himself, he did not mean that his
crops should; and if he had been rich enough, I believe that he would
have covered his farm with a glass roof, rather than yield his
conclusion that Indian-corn could be grown successfully under a British
sky.
A great, impracticable, earnest, headstrong man, the like of whom does
not appear a half-dozen times in a century. Being self-educated, he was
possessed, like nearly all self-educated men, of a complacency and a
self-sufficiency which stood always in his way. Affecting to teach
grammar, he was ignorant of all the etymology of the language; knowing
no word of botany, he classified plants by the "fearings" of his
turnip-field. He was vain to the last degree; he thought his books were
the best books in the world, and that everybody should read them. He was
industrious, restless, captious, and, although humane at heart, was the
most malignant slanderer of his time. He called a political antagonist a
"pimp," and thought a crushing argument lay in the word; he called
parsons scoundrels, and bade his boys be regular at church.
In June, 1835, while the Parliament was in session, he grew ill,--talked
feebly about politics and farming, (to his household,) "wished for 'four
days' rain' for the Cobbett corn," and on Wednesday, (16th June,)
desired to be carried around the farm, and criticized the work that had
been done,--grew feeble as evening drew on, and an hour after midnight
leaned back heavily in his chair, and died.
* * * * *
I must give a paragraph, at least, to the Rev. James Grahame, the good
Scotch parson, were it only because he wrote a poem called "British
Georgics." They are not so good as Virgil's; nor did he ever think it
himself. In fact, he published his best poem anonymously, and so
furtively that even his wife took up an early copy, which she found one
day upon her table, and, charmed with its pleasant description of
Scottish braes and burn-sides, said, "Ah! Jemmy, if ye could only mak' a
book like this!" And I will venture to say that "Jemmy" never had rarer
or pleasanter praise.
Shall we read a little, and test the worth of good Mistress Grahame's
judgment? It is a bit of the parson's walk in "The Sabbath":--
"Now, when the downward sun has left the glens,
Each mountain's rugged lineaments are traced
Upon the adverse slope, where stalks gigantic
The shepherd's shadow thrown athwart the chasm,
As on the topmost ridge he homeward hies.
How deep the hush! the torrent's channel, dry,
Presents a stony steep, the echo's haunt.
But hark a plaintive sound floating along!
'Tis from yon heath-roofed shieling; now it dies
Away, now rises full; it is the song
Which He who listens to the hallelujahs
Of choiring seraphim delights to hear;
It is the music of the heart, the voice
Of venerable age, of guileless youth,
In kindly circle seated on the ground
Before their wicker door."
Crabbe, who was as keen an observer of rural scenes, had a much better
faculty of verse; indeed, he had a faculty of language so large that it
carried him beyond the real drift of his stories. I do not _know_ the
fact, indeed; but I think, that, notwithstanding the Duke of Rutland's
patronage, Mr. Crabbe must have written inordinately long sermons. It is
strange how many good men do,--losing point and force and efficiency in
a welter of words! If there is one rhetorical lesson which it behooves
all theologic or academic professors to lay down and enforce, (if need
be with the ferule,) it is this,--Be short. It is amazing the way in
which good men lose themselves on Sunday mornings in the lapse of their
own language; and most rarely are we confronted from the pulpit with an
opinion which would not bear stripping of wordy shifts, and be all the
more comely for its nakedness.
George Crabbe wrote charming rural tales; but he wrote long ones. There
is minute observation, dramatic force, tender pathos, but there is much,
of tedious and coarse description. If by some subtile alchemy the better
qualities could be thrown down from the turbid and watery flux of his
verse, we should have an admirable pocket-volume for the country; as it
is, his books rest mostly on the shelves, and it requires a strong
breath to puff away the dust that has gathered on the topmost edges.
I think of the Reverend Mr. Crabbe as an amiable, absent-minded old
gentleman, driving about on week-days in a heavy, square-topped gig,
(his wife holding the reins,) in search of way-side gypsies, and on
Sunday pushing a discourse--which was good up to the "fourthly"--into
the "seventhly."
Charles Lamb, if he had been clerically disposed, would, I am sure, have
written short sermons; and I think that his hearers would have carried
away the gist of them clean and clear.
He never wrote anything that could be called strictly pastoral; he was a
creature of streets and crowding houses; no man could have been more
ignorant of the every-day offices of rural life; I doubt if he ever knew
from which side a horse was to be mounted or a cow to be milked, and a
sprouting bean was a source of the greatest wonderment to him. Yet, in
spite of all this, what a book those Essays of his make, to lie down
with under trees! It is the honest, lovable simplicity of his nature
that makes the keeping good. He is the Izaak Walton of London
streets,--of print-shops, of pastry-shops, of mouldy book-stalls; the
chime of Bow-bells strikes upon his ear like the chorus of a milkmaid's
song at Ware.
There is not a bit of rodomontade in him about the charms of the
country, from beginning to end; if there were, we should despise him. He
can find nothing to say of Skiddaw but that he is "a great creature";
and he writes to Wordsworth, (whose sight is failing,) on Ambleside, "I
return you condolence for your decaying sight,--not for anything there
is to see in the country, but for the miss of the pleasure of reading a
London newspaper."
And again to his friend Manning, (about the date of 1800,)--"I am not
romance-bit about _Nature_. The earth and sea and sky (when all is said)
is but as a house to dwell in. If the inmates be courteous, and good
liquors flow like the conduits at an old coronation,--if they can talk
sensibly, and feel properly, I have no need to stand staring upon the
gilded looking-glass, (that strained my friend's purse-strings in the
purchase,) nor his five-shilling print, over the mantel-piece, of old
Nabbs, the carrier. Just as important to me (in a sense) is all the
furniture of my world,--eye-pampering, but satisfies no heart. Streets,
streets, streets, markets, theatres, churches, Covent Gardens, shops
sparkling with pretty faces of industrious milliners, neat seamstresses,
ladies cheapening, gentlemen behind counters lying, authors in the
street with spectacles, lamps lit at night, pastry-cooks' and
silver-smiths' shops, beautiful Quakers of Pentonville, noise of
coaches, drowsy cry of mechanic watchmen at night, with bucks reeling
home drunk,--if you happen to wake at midnight, cries of 'Fire!' and
'Stop thief!'--inns of court with their learned air, and halls, and
butteries, just like Cambridge colleges,--old book-stalls, 'Jeremy
Taylors,' 'Burtons on Melancholy,' and 'Religio Medicis,' on every
stall. These are thy pleasures, O London-with-the-many-sins!--for these
may Keswick and her giant brood go hang!"
And again to Wordsworth, in 1830,--"Let no native Londoner imagine that
health, and rest, and innocent occupation, interchange of converse
sweet, and recreative study, can make the country anything better than
altogether odious and detestable."
Does any weak-limbed country-liver resent this honesty of speech? Surely
not, if he be earnest in his loves and faith; but, the rather, by such
token of unbounded naturalness, he recognizes under the waistcoat of
this dear, old, charming cockney the traces of close cousinship to the
Waltons, and binds him, and all the simplicity of his talk, to his
heart, for aye. There is never a hillside under whose oaks or chestnuts
I lounge upon a smoky afternoon of August, but a pocket Elia is as
coveted and as cousinly a companion as a pocket Walton, or a White of
Selborne. And upon wet days in my library, I conjure up the image of the
thin, bent old gentleman--Charles Lamb--to sit over against me, and I
watch his kindly, beaming eye, as he recites with poor stuttering
voice,--between the whiffs of his pipe,--over and over, those always new
stories of "Christ's Hospital," and the cherished "Blakesmoor," and
"Mackery End."
(No, you need not put back the book, my boy; 't is always in place.)
I never admired greatly James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd; yet he belongs
of double right in the coterie of my wet-day preachers. Bred a shepherd,
he tried farming, and he wrote pastorals. His farming (if we may believe
contemporary evidence) was by no means so good as his verse. The Ettrick
Shepherd of the "Noctes Ambrosianæ" is, I fancy, as much becolored by
the wit of Professor Wilson as any daughter of a duchess whom Sir Joshua
changed into a nymph. I think of Hogg as a sturdy sheep-tender, growing
rebellious among the Cheviot flocks, crazed by a reading of the Border
minstrelsy, drunken on books, (as his fellows were with "mountain-dew,")
and wreaking his vitality on Gaelic rhymes,--which, it is true, have a
certain blush and aroma of the heather-hills, but which never reached
the excellence that he fondly imagined belonged to them. I fancy, that,
when he sat at the laird's table, (Sir Walter's,) and called the laird's
lady by her baptismal name, and--not abashed in any presence--uttered
his Gaelic gibes for the wonderment of London guests,--that he thought
far more of himself than the world has ever been inclined to think of
him. I know that poets have a privilege of conceit, and that those who
are not poets sometimes assume it; but it is, after all, a sorry
quality by which to win the world's esteem; and when death closes the
record, it is apt to insure a large debit against the dead man.
It may not be commonly known that the Ettrick Shepherd was an
agricultural author, and wrote "Hogg on Sheep," for which, as he tells
us, he received the sum of eighty-six pounds. It is an octavo book, and
relates to the care, management, and diseases of the black-faced
mountain-breed, of which alone he was cognizant. It had never a great
reputation; and I think the sheep-farmers of the Cheviots were disposed
to look with distrust upon the teachings of a shepherd who supped with
"lords" at Abbotsford, and whose best venture in verse was in "The
Queen's Wake." A British agricultural author, speaking of him in a
pitiful way, says,--"He passed years of busy authorship, and encountered
_the usual difficulties of that penurious mode of life_."[32]
This is good; it is as good as anything of Hogg's.
I approach the name of Mr. Loudon, the author of the Encyclopædias of
Gardening and Agriculture, with far more of respect. If nothing else in
him laid claim to regard, his industry, his earnestness, his
indefatigable labor in aid of all that belonged to the progress of
British gardening or farming, would demand it. I take a pride, too, in
saying, that, notwithstanding his literary labors, he was successful as
a farmer, during the short period of his farm-holding.
Mr. Loudon was a Scotchman by birth, was educated in Edinburgh, and was
for a time under the tutelage of Mr. Dickson, the famous nurseryman of
Leith-Walk. Early in the present century he made his first appearance in
London,--published certain papers on the laying-out of the public
squares of the metropolis, and shortly after was employed by the Earl of
Mansfield in the arrangement of the palace-gardens at Scone. In 1813 and
'14 he travelled on the Continent very widely, making the gardens of
most repute the special objects of his study; and in 1822 he published
his "Encyclopædia of Gardening"; that of Agriculture followed shortly
after, and his book of Rural Architecture in 1833. But these labors,
enormous as they were, had interludes of other periodical work, and were
crowned at last by his _magnum opus_, the "Arboretum." A man of only
ordinary nerve and diligence would have taken a ten years' rest upon the
completion of only one of his ponderous octavos; and the wonder is the
greater, that London wrought in his later years under all the
disadvantages of appeals from rapacious creditors and the infirmities of
a broken constitution. Crippled, palsied, fevered, for a long period of
years, he still wrought on with a persistence that would have broken
many a strong man down, and only yielded at last to a bronchial
affection which grappled him at his work.
This author massed together an amount of information upon the subjects
of which he treated that is quite unmatched in the whole annals of
agricultural literature. Columella, Heresbach, Worlidge, and even the
writers of the "Geoponica," dwindle into insignificance in the
comparison. He is not, indeed, always absolutely accurate on historical
points;[33] but in all essentials his books are so complete as to have
made them standard works up to a time long subsequent to their issue.
* * * * *
No notice of the agricultural literature of the early part of this
century would be at all complete without mention of the Magazines and
Society "Transactions," in which alone some of the best and most
scientific cultivators communicated their experience or suggestions to
the public. Loudon was himself the editor of the "Gardener's Magazine";
and the earlier Transactions of the Horticultural Society are enriched
by the papers of such men as Knight, Van Mons, Sir Joseph Banks, Rev.
William Herbert, Messrs. Dickson, Haworth, Wedgwood, and others. The
works of individual authors lost ground in comparison with such an array
of reports from scientific observers, and from that time forth
periodical literature has become the standard teacher in what relates to
good culture. I do not know what extent of good the newly instituted
Agricultural Colleges of this country may effect; but I feel quite safe
in saying that our agricultural journals will prove always the most
effective teachers of the great mass of the farming-population. The
London Horticultural Society at an early day established the Chiswick
Gardens, and these, managed under the advice of the Society's Directors,
have not only afforded an accurate gauge of British progress in
horticulture, but they have furnished to the humblest cultivator who has
strolled through their inclosures practical lessons in the craft of
gardening, renewed from month to month and from year to year. It is to
be hoped that the American Agricultural Colleges will adopt some similar
plan, and illustrate the methods they teach upon lands which shall be
open to public inspection, and upon whose culture and its successes
systematic reports shall be annually made. Failing of this, they will
fail of the best part of their proper purpose. Nor would it be a
fruitless work, if, in connection with such experimental farm, a weekly
record were issued,--giving analyses of the artificial manures employed,
and a complete register of every field, from the date of its
"breaking-up" to the harvesting of the crop. Every new implement,
moreover, should be reported upon with unwavering impartiality, and no
advertisements should be received. I think under these conditions we
might almost look for an honest newspaper.
* * * * *
Writing thus, during these in-door hours, of country-pursuits, and of
those who have illustrated them, or who have in any way quickened the
edge with which we farmers rasp away the weeds or carve out our pastoral
entertainment, I come upon the names of a great bevy of poets, belonging
to the earlier quarter of this century, that I find it hard to pass by.
Much as I love to bring to mind, over and over again, "Ivanhoe" and
"Waverley," I love quite as much to summon to my view Walter Scott, the
woodsman of Abbotsford, with hatchet at his girdle, and the hound Maida
in attendance. I see him thinning out the saplings that he has planted
upon the Tweed banks. I know how they stand, having wandered by the hour
among them. I can fancy how the master would have lopped away the boughs
for a little looplet through which a burst of the blue Eildon Hills
should come. His favorite seat, overshadowed by an arbor-vitæ, (of which
a leaf lies pressed in the "Scotch Tourist" yonder,) was so near to the
Tweed banks that the ripple of the stream over its pebbly bottom must
have made a delightful lullaby for the toil-worn old man. But beyond
wood-craft, I could never discover that Sir Walter had any strong
agricultural inclination; nor do I think that the old gentleman had much
eye for the picturesque; no landscape-gardener of any reputation would
have decided upon such a site for such a pile as that of Abbotsford: the
spot is low; the views are not extended or varied; the very trees are
all of Scott's planting: but the master loved the murmur of the
Tweed,--loved the nearness of Melrose, and in every old bit of
sculpture that he walled into his home he found pictures of far-away
scenes that printed in vague shape of tower or abbey all his limited
horizon.
Christopher North carried his Scotch love of mountains to his home among
the English lakes. I think he counted Skiddaw something more than "a
great creature." In all respects--saving the pipes and the ale--he was
the very opposite of Charles Lamb. And yet do we love him more? A
stalwart, hearty man, with a great redundance of flesh and blood, who
could "put the stone" with Finlayson, or climb with the hardiest of the
Ben-Nevis guides, or cast a fly with the daintiest of the Low-Country
fishers,--redundant of imagination, redundant of speech, and with such
exuberance in him that we feel surfeit from the overflow, as at the
reading of Spenser's "Faërie Queene," and lay him down with a wearisome
sense of mental indigestion.
Nor yet is it so much an indigestion as a feeling of plethora, due less
to the frothiness of the condiments than to a certain fulness of blood
and brawn. The broad-shouldered Christopher, in his shooting-jacket, (a
dingy green velveteen, with pocket-pouches all stuffed,) strides away
along the skirts of Cruachan or Loch Lochy with such a tearing pace, and
greets every lassie with such a clamorous outbreak of song, and throws
such a wonderful stretch of line upon every pool, and amazes us with
such stupendous "strikes" and such a whizzing of his reel, that we
fairly lose our breath.
Not so of the "White Doe of Rylstone"; nay, we more incline to doze over
it than to lose our breath. Wilson differs from Wordsworth as Loch Awe,
with its shaggy savagery of shore, from the Sunday quietude and beauty
of Rydal-Water. The Strid of Wordsworth was bounded by the slaty banks
of the "Crystal Wharf," and the Strid of Wilson, in his best moments,
was as large as the valley of Glencoe. Yet Wordsworth loved intensely
all the more beautiful aspects of the country, and of country-life. No
angler and no gardener, indeed,--too severely and proudly meditative for
any such sleight-of-hand. The only great weight which he ever lifted, I
suspect, was one which he carried with him always,--the immense dignity
of his poetic priesthood. His home and its surroundings were fairly
typical of his tastes: a cottage, (so called,) of homely material
indeed, but with an ambitious elevation of gables and of chimney-stacks;
a velvety sheen of turf, as dapper as that of a suburban haberdasher; a
mossy urn or two, patches of flowers, but rather fragrant than showy
ones; behind him the loveliest of wooded hills, all toned down by
graceful culture, and before him the silvery mirrors of Windermere and
Rydal-Water.
We have to credit him with some rare and tender description, and
fragments of great poems; but I cannot help thinking that he fancied a
profounder meaning lay in them than the world has yet detected.
John Clare was a contemporary of Wordsworth's, and was most essentially
a poet of the fields. His father was a pauper and a cripple; not even
young Cobbett was so pressed to the glebe by the circumstances of his
birth. But the thrushes taught Clare to sing. He wrote verses upon the
lining of his hat-band. He hoarded halfpence to buy Thomson's "Seasons,"
and walked seven miles before sunrise to make the purchase. The hardest
field-toil could not repress the poetic aspirations of such a boy. By
dint of new hoardings he succeeded in printing verses of his own; but
nobody read them. He wrote other verses, which at length made him known.
The world flattered the peasant-bard of Northamptonshire. A few
distinguished patrons subscribed the means for equipping a farm of his
own. The heroine of his love-tales became its mistress; a shelf or two
of books made him rich; but in an evil hour he entered upon some
farm-speculation which broke down; a new poem was sharply criticized or
neglected; the novelty of his peasant's song was over. Disheartened and
gloomy, he was overwhelmed with despondency, and became the inmate of a
mad-house, where for forty years he has staggered idiotically toward the
rest which did not come. But even as I write I see in the British papers
that he is free at last. Poor Clare is dead.
With this sad story in mind, we may read with a zest which perhaps its
merit alone would not provoke his little sonnet of "The Thrush's
Nest":--
"Within a thick and spreading hawthorn-bush,
That overhung a mole-hill large and round,
I heard from morn to morn a merry thrush
Sing hymns, of rapture, while I drank the sound
With joy; and oft, an unintruding guest,
I watched her secret toils from day to day,--
How true she warped the moss to form her nest,
And modelled it within with wood and clay,
And by-and-by, like heath-bells gilt with dew,
There lay her shining eggs as bright as flowers,
Ink-spotted over, shells of green and blue;
And there I witnessed, in the summer hours,
A brood of Nature's minstrels chirp and fly,
Glad as the sunshine and the laughing sky."
There are pretty snatches of a Southern May in Hunt's poem of "Rimini,"
where
"sky, earth, and sea
Breathe like a bright-eyed face that laughs out openly.
'T is Nature full of spirits, waked and springing:
The birds to the delicious tune are singing,
Darting with freaks and snatches up and down,
Where the light woods go seaward from the town;
While happy faces striking through the green
Of leafy roads at every turn are seen;
And the far ships, lifting their sails of white
Like joyful hands, come up with scattery light,
Come gleaming up true to the wished-for day,
And chase the whistling brine, and swirl into the bay."
This does not sound as if it came from the prince of cockneys; and I
have always felt a certain regard for Leigh Hunt, too, by reason of the
tender story which he gives of the little garden, "_mio picciol orto_,"
that he established during his two years of prisonhood.[34]
But, after all, there was no robustness in his rural spirit,--nothing
that makes the cheek tingle, as if a smart wind had smitten it. He was
born to handle roses without thorns; I think that with a pretty boudoir,
on whose table every morning a pretty maid should arrange a pretty
nosegay, and with a pretty canary to sing songs in a gilded cage, and
pretty gold-fish to disport in a crystal vase, and basted partridges for
dinner, his love for the country would have been satisfied. He loved
Nature as a sentimental boy loves a fine woman of twice his
years,--sighing himself away in pretty phrases that flatter, but do not
touch her; there is nothing to remind, even, of the full, abounding,
fiery, all-conquering love with which a full-grown man meets and marries
a yielding maiden.
In poor John Keats, however, there _is_ something of this; and under its
heats he consumed away. For ripe, joyous outburst of all rural
fancies,--for keen apprehension of what most takes hold of the
susceptibilities of a man who loves the country,--for his coinage of all
sweet sounds of birds, all murmur of leaves, all riot and blossoming of
flowers, into fragrant verse,--he was without a peer in his day. It is
not that he is so true to natural phases in his descriptive epithets,
not that he sees all, not that he has heard all; but his heart has drunk
the incense of it, and his imagination refined it, and his fancy set it
aflow in those jocund lines which bound and writhe and exult with a
passionate love for the things of field and air.
* * * * *
I close these papers, with my eye resting upon the same stretch of
fields,--the wooded border of a river,--the twinkling roofs and spires
flanked by hills and sea,--where my eye rested when I began this story
of the old masters with Hesiod and the bean-patches of Ithaca. And I
take a pleasure in feeling that the farm-practice over all the fields
below me rests upon the cumulated authorship of so long a line of
teachers. Yon open furrow, over which the herbage has closed, carries
trace of the ridging in the "Works and Days"; the brown field of
half-broken clods is the fallow ([Greek: Neos]) of Xenophon; the drills
belong to Worlidge; their culture with the horse-hoe is at the order of
Master Tull. Young and Cobbett are full of their suggestions; Lancelot
Brown has ordered away a great straggling hedge-row; and Sir Uvedale
Price has urged me to spare a hoary maple which lords it over a
half-acre of flat land. Cato gives orders for the asparagus, and Switzer
for the hot-beds. Crescenzi directs the walling, and Smith of Deanston
the ploughing. Burns embalms all my field-mice, and Cowper drapes an urn
for me in a tangled wilderness. Knight names my cherries, and Walton,
the kind master, goes with me over the hill to a wee brook that bounds
down under hemlocks and soft maples, for "a contemplative man's
recreation." Davy long ago caught all the fermentation of my manure-heap
in his retort, and Thomson painted for me the scene which is under my
window to-day. Mowbray cures the pip in my poultry, and all the songs of
all the birds are caught and repeated to the echo in the pages of the
poets which lie here under my hand; through the prism of their verse,
Patrick the cattle-tender changes to a lithe milkmaid, against whose
ankles the buttercups nod rejoicingly, and Rosamund (which is the nurse)
wakes all Arden (which is Edgewood) with a rich burst of laughter.
And shall I not be grateful to these my patrons? And shall I count it
unworthy to pass these few in-door hours of rain in the emblazonment of
their titles?
Nor must I forget here to express my indebtedness to those kind friends
who have from time to time favored me with suggestions or corrections,
in the course of these papers, and to those others--not a few--who have
lent me rare old books of husbandry, which are not easily laid hold of.
I have discussed no works of living authors, whether of practical or
pastoral intent: at some future day I may possibly pay my compliments to
them. Meantime I cannot help interpolating in the interest of my readers
a little fragment of a letter addressed to me within the year by the
lamented Hawthorne:--"I remember long ago your speaking prospectively of
a farm; but I never dreamed of your being really much more of a farmer
than myself, whose efforts in that line only make me the father of a
progeny of weeds in a garden-patch. I have about twenty-five acres of
land, seventeen of which are a hill of sand and gravel, wooded with
birches, locusts, and pitch-pines, and apparently incapable of any other
growth; so that I have great comfort in that part of my territory. The
other eight acres are said to be the best land in Concord, and they have
made me miserable, and would soon have ruined me, if I had not
determined nevermore to attempt raising anything from them. So there
they lie along the roadside, within their broken fence, an eyesore to
me, and a laughing-stock to all the neighbors. If it were not for the
difficulty of transportation by express or otherwise, I would thankfully
give you those eight acres."
And now the fine, nervous hand, which wrought with such strange power
and beauty, is stilled forever! The eight acres can well lie neglected;
for upon a broader field, as large as humanity, and at the hands of
thousands of reapers who worked for love, he has gathered in a great
harvest of _immortelles_.