bread at the end of the day is the only reward and the only profit of such laborious toil.  The wealth that covers the ground, the crops, the fruit, the proud cattle fattening on the long grass, are the property of a few, and the instruments of fatigue and slavery of the majority.  As a general rule, the man of leisure does not love, for themselves, the fields, or the meadows, or the spectacle of nature, or the superb beasts that are to be converted into gold pieces for his use.  The man of leisure comes to the country in search of a little air and health, then returns to the city to spend the fruit of his vassal’s toil.

The man of toil, for his part, is too crushed, too wretched, and too frightened concerning the future, to enjoy the beauties of the landscape and the charms of rustic life.  To him also the golden fields, the lovely meadows, the noble animals, represent bags of crowns, of which he will have only a paltry share, insufficient for his needs, and yet those cursed bags must be filled every year to satisfy the master and pay for the privilege of living sparingly and wretchedly on his domain.

And still nature is always young and beautiful and generous.  She sheds poetry and beauty upon all living things, upon all the plants that are left to develop in their own way.  Nature possesses the secret of happiness, and no one has ever succeeded in wresting it from her.  He would be the most fortunate of men who, possessing the science of his craft and working with his hands, deriving happiness and liberty from the exercise of his intelligent strength, should have time to live in the heart and the brain, to understand his work, and to love the work of God.  The artist has enjoyment of that sort in contemplating and reproducing the beauties of Nature; but, when he sees the suffering of the men who people this paradise called the earth, the just, kind-hearted artist is grieved in the midst of his enjoyment.  Where the mind, heart, and arms work in concert under the eye of Providence, true happiness would be found, and a holy harmony would exist between the munificence of God and the delights of the human soul.  Then, instead of piteous, ghastly Death walking in his furrow, whip in hand, the painter of allegories could place beside the ploughman a radiant angel, sowing the blessed grain in the smoking furrows with generous hand.

And the dream of a peaceful, free, poetical, laborious, simple existence for the husbandman is not so difficult of conception that it need be relegated to a place among chimeras.  The gentle, melancholy words of Virgil:  “O how happy the life of the husbandman, if he but knew his happiness!” is an expression of regret; but, like all regrets, it is also a prediction.  A day will come when the ploughman may be an artist, if not to express,—­which will then matter but little, perhaps,—­at all events, to feel, the beautiful.  Do you believe that this mysterious intuition of poesy does not already exist