and learning, who, sadly aware of the conditions on which he holds his mental vitality, cannot resist the hourly temptation to ignore them.  Add to these native characteristics the frequent fact that such a man must make merchandise of his attainments, must toil under the perpetual menace of destitution; and what hope remains that his blood will keep the true rhythm, that his nerves will play as Nature bade them, that his sinews will bide the strain of exceptional task?  Such a man may gaze with envy at those who “sweat in the eye of Phoebus,” but he knows that no choice was offered him.  And if life has so far been benignant as to grant him frequent tranquillity of studious hours, let him look from the reapers to the golden harvest, and fare on in thankfulness.

XVII.

That a labourer in the fields should stand very much on the level of the beast that toils with him, can be neither desirable nor necessary.  He does so, as a matter of fact, and one hears that only the dullest-witted peasant will nowadays consent to the peasant life; his children, taught to read the newspaper, make what haste they can to the land of promise—­where newspapers are printed.  That here is something altogether wrong it needs no evangelist to tell us; the remedy no prophet has as yet even indicated.  Husbandry has in our time been glorified in eloquence which for the most part is vain, endeavouring, as it does, to prove a falsity—­that the agricultural life is, in itself, favourable to gentle emotions, to sweet thoughtfulness, and to all the human virtues.  Agriculture is one of the most exhausting forms of toil, and, in itself, by no means conducive to spiritual development; that it played a civilizing part in the history of the world is merely due to the fact that, by creating wealth, it freed a portion of mankind from the labour of the plough.  Enthusiasts have tried the experiment of turning husbandman; one of them writes of his experience in notable phrase.

“Oh, labour is the curse of the world, and nobody can meddle with it without becoming proportionately brutified.  Is it a praiseworthy matter that I have spent five golden months in providing food for cows and horses?  It is not so.”

Thus Nathaniel Hawthorne, at Brook Farm.  In the bitterness of his disillusion he went too far.  Labour may be, and very often is, an accursed and a brutalizing thing, but assuredly, it is not the curse of the world; nay, it is the world’s supreme blessing.  Hawthorne had committed a folly, and he paid for it in loss of mental balance.  For him, plainly, it was no suitable task to feed cows and horses; yet many a man would perceive the nobler side of such occupation, for it signifies, of course, providing food for mankind.  The interest of this quotation lies in the fact that, all unconsciously, so intelligent a man as Hawthorne had been reduced to the mental state of our agricultural labourers