for the
privations?

To the literary reader the doubt will arise, whether the writer of this
work might not have more profitably employed his time, during the last
ten years, in creating thoughts than in "improving" land,--in diffusing
information than in selling milk. As a poetic, scientific, and practical
farmer, he has doubtless silenced all cynic doubts of his capacity to
make four or six per cent. on the capital he invested in land; but it is
plain, that, without capital, he might have made three or four times as
much by the genial exercise of his literary power. The talent exercised
on his farm we must, therefore, consider from a financial point of view
to have been more or less wasted. As a "gentleman-farmer," he might
easily have repaired from his study all the losses which his trained
subordinates of the garden and the field incurred from the lack of his
constant superintendence. Everything which a man of mind could want in a
country-residence might have been obtained without his personal
oversight of every minute detail, and the net result of the gains of the
year would have been greater, if, instead of riding daily into New Haven
to sell his milk, he had stayed quietly in his study to write for the
magazines. This calculation we have made from a rigid scrutiny of the
figures in which the author sums up, year after year, his gains.

We have been provoked into this comparison by the evident glee with
which Ik Marvel parades the results of his agricultural labors. So
earnest is he to show that a man of genius can make money by farming,
that he is inclined to overlook the distinction between the work of an
ordinary and that of an extraordinary mind. Waiving this consideration,
we have nothing to object to his ten years' seclusion from literature.
That seclusion has brought him into contact with the rough realities of
a farmer's life, has enabled him personally to inspect every process of
agriculture, and furnish his mind with an entirely new class of facts.
The result is a book whose merit can hardly be overpraised. It should be
in every farmer's library, as a volume full of practical advice to aid
his daily work, and full of ennobling suggestions to lift his calling
into a kind of epic dignity. As a book for the generality of readers, it
far exceeds any previous work of the author in force, naturalness, and
beauty, in vividness of description and richness of style, and in that
indefinable element of genius whi