In looking at the life of the New England farmer, the first fact that strikes us is, that it is actually a very different thing from what it might be and ought to be.  There dwells in every mind, through all callings and all professions, the idea that the farmer’s life is, or may be, is, or should be, the truest and sweetest life that man can live.  The merchant may win all the prizes of trade, the professional man may achieve triumphs beyond his hopes, the author may find his name upon every lip, and his works accounted among the nation’s treasures, and all may move amid the whirl and din of the most inspiring life, yet there will come to every one, in quiet evening-hours, the vision of the old homestead, long since forsaken; or the imagination will weave a picture of its own,—­a picture of rural life, so homely, yet so beautiful, that the heart will breathe a sigh upon it, the eye will drop a tear upon it, and the voice will say, “It were better so!”

In a city like Boston there are farms enough imagined every year to make another New England.  Could the fairest fancies of that congeries of minds be embodied and exhibited, we should see green meadows sparkling with morning dew,—­silver-slippered rivulets skipping into musical abysses,—­quiet pasture-lands shimmering so sleepily in the sun that the lazy flocks and herds forget to graze, and lie winking and ruminating under the trees,—­and yellow fields of grain, along the hill-sides, billowy in the breeze, and bending before the shadows of the clouds that sail above them.  And mingling and harmonizing with these visions, we should hear the lowing of kine, and the tinkle of the bell that leads the flock, and the shout of the boy behind the creeping plough, and the echoes of the axe, and the fall of the tree in the distant forest, and the rhythmical clangor, softened into a metallic whisper by the distance, of the mowers whetting their scythes.  With these visions and these sounds there would come to the minds which give them birth convictions that rural life is the best life, and resolutions that, by-and-by, in some golden hour, when the sun of life begins to lengthen the eastward shadows, that life shall be enjoyed, and that the soul shall pass at last from the quiet scenes of Nature into those higher scenes which they symbolize.  There is a thought in all this that the farm is nearer heaven than the street,—­a reminiscence of the first estate, when man was lord of Eden; and this thought, old as art and artificial life, cannot be rooted out of the mind.  It has a life of its own, independent of reason, above instinct, among the quickest intuitions of the soul.