My Farm of Edgewood.  A Country Book.  By the Author of “Reveries of a Bachelor.”  New York:  Charles Scribner. 12mo.

When “Ik Marvel” ten years ago turned farmer, a good proportion of the reading public supposed that his experiment would combine the defects of gentleman- and poet-farming, and that he would escape the bankruptcy of Shenstone only by possessing the purse of Astor.  That a man of refined sentiments, elegant tastes, wide cultivation, and humane and tender genius, given, moreover, to indulgences in “Reveries” and the “Dream-Life,” should succeed in the real business of agriculture, seemed a monstrous supposition to those cockney idealists who consider the cultivation of the mind incompatible with the cultivation of the ground, who cannot bring, by any theory of the association of ideas, practical talent into neighborly good-will with lofty aspirations, and who necessarily connect the government of brutes with an imbruted intelligence.  The book we have under review is a blunt contradiction to objectors of the literary class.  That it is practical, the coarsest farmer must admit; that its practicality is not purchased by any mean and unwise concessions to “popular prejudice,” the most sensitive litterateur will concede; and that the whole representation constitutes a most charming book, all readers will be eager to pronounce.  Indeed, the critic of the volume is somewhat puzzled to harmonize the fine rhythm of the periods, and the superb propriety of the tone, with the subject-matter.  The bleakest and most ghastly aspects of Nature,—­the most prosaic facts of the farmer’s life,—­Irish servants and compost-heaps,—­cows which try to consume their own milk,—­beehives which send forth swarms to sting the children of the house, and give no honey,—­soils which refuse to bear the products which intelligence has anticipated,—­all are transformed into “something rich and strange” by the poet’s alchemy, without any sacrifice of truth, or the insertion of details which a farmer would disavow as inaccurate or sentimental.  The “Ik” is a full counterpoise to the “Marvel,” even to the most literal reader of the volume, though it is certain that no book has ever before appeared in our country in which the farmer-life of New England has assumed so poetic a form.  The “chiel” among the agriculturists “taking notes” will be more likely to seduce than to warn; and if the record of his eventual triumphs be received as gospel truth, we must expect a vast emigration of the men of mind from the cities to the country.  Who would not cheerfully encounter all the vexations attending a settlement in “My Farm in Edgewood” for the compensations so bountifully provided for the privations?