LEAR the brown path to meet his coulter's gleam! The lord of earth, the hero of the plough! First in the field before the reddening sun, Up the steep hillside, where the laboring train. Slants the long track, that scores the level plain, Through the moist valley, clogged with oozing clay, The patient convoy breaks its destined way; These are the hands whose sturdy labor brings This is the scholar whose immortal pen O gracious Mother, whose benignant breast No, by these hills whose banners now displayed WEARINESS can snore upon the flint, when restive sloth finds the down pillow hard. COUNTRY LIFE. HE merchant tempts me with his gold, And come into the city gay. I will not go; I won't be sold; I'll rather bear the country's cold, What is to me the city s pride? The haunt of luxury and pleasure; With common good instead of treasure. THE CITY AND THE COUNTRY. HE Reverend Robert Collyer made the remark on one occasion that during his twenty years' residence in Chicago he had not known of a single man who had come prominently to the front in any pursuit who was born and bred in a large city. The leading men in every calling-judges, lawyers, clergymen, editors, merchants, and so on-had been reared in the country, away from the follies, the vices and the enervating influences that are known to exist in all large towns. Fashion reduces all young men and women to the same dull and uninteresting level. New York is now an old city. It has produced generations of men. How few of them have ever made their mark, there or elsewhere! It cannot be said that they go into other parts of the country and there develop the higher forms of manhood. They are never heard of except in the aggregated, concrete form of "our fellow-citizens." How much of a man is due to qualities born in him, and how much to his early environment, no philosopher has been able to tell us; but it is impossible to conceive of a sagacious intellect like that of Lincoln, of a glorious mind like Webster's, emerging from the false glitter and noisy commotion of the city. We think of Washington, the patrician sage, pacing among the stately oaks of old Virginia; of Jefferson in his country-seat, and of John Adams tilling his farm in Massachusetts. These men, it is true, flourished at a time when there were no large cities in the United States. But later on we see Lincoln and Garfield reaching the topmost round of fame's ladder from the obscurity of country homes. Not one American President, from first to last, was born in a city. |