ce, as truth or justice, though the slightest amount or new
variety of it, along the road. Our ambassadors should be instructed to
send home such seeds as these, and Congress help to distribute them over
all the land. We should never stand upon ceremony with sincerity. We
should never cheat and insult and banish one another by our meanness, if
there were present the kernel of worth and friendliness. We should not
meet thus in haste. Most men I do not meet at all, for they seem not to
have time; they are busy about their beans. We would not deal with a man
thus plodding ever, leaning on a hoe or a spade as a staff between his
work, not as a mushroom, but partially risen out of the earth, something
more than erect, like swallows alighted and walking on the ground:--

"And as he spake, his wings would now and then
Spread, as he meant to fly, then close again--"

so that we should suspect that we might be conversing with an angel.
Bread may not always nourish us; but it always does us good, it even
takes stiffness out of our joints, and makes us supple and buoyant, when
we knew not what ailed us, to recognize any generosity in man or Nature,
to share any unmixed and heroic joy.

Ancient poetry and mythology suggest, at least, that husbandry was once
a sacred art; but it is pursued with irreverent haste and heedlessness
by us, our object being to have large farms and large crops merely.
We have no festival, nor procession, nor ceremony, not excepting our
cattle-shows and so-called Thanksgivings, by which the farmer expresses
a sense of the sacredness of his calling, or is reminded of its sacred
origin. It is the premium and the feast which tempt him. He sacrifices
not to Ceres and the Terrestrial Jove, but to the infernal Plutus
rather. By avarice and selfishness, and a grovelling habit, from which
none of us is free, of regarding the soil as property, or the means
of acquiring property chiefly, the landscape is deformed, husbandry is
degraded with us, and the farmer leads the meanest of lives. He knows
Nature but as a robber. Cato says that the profits of agriculture are
particularly pious or just (maximeque pius quaestus), and according
to Varro the old Romans "called the same earth Mother and Ceres, and
thought that they who cultivated it led a pious and useful life, and
that they alone were left of the race of King Saturn."

We are wont to forget that the sun looks on our cultivated fields and
on the