The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864

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The hearts which clung to her
Have sought out other shrines, as all hearts must,
When Time, the comforter,
Has worn their grief out, and replaced their trust:
Not even neglect can stir
This little handful of forgotten dust.

Grass waves, and insects hum,
And then the snow blows bitterly across;
Strange footsteps go and come,
Breaking the dew-drops on the starry moss:
She lieth still and dumb,
And counts no longer any gain or loss.

Ah, well,--'t is better so;
Let the dust deepen as the years increase;
Of her who sleeps below
Let the name perish and the memory cease,
Since she has come to know
That which through life she vainly prayed for,--Peace!

WET-WEATHER WORK.

BY A FARMER.

VIII.--CONCLUSION.

As I sit in my library-chair listening to the welcome drip from the
eaves, I bethink me of the great host of English farm-teachers who in
the last century wrote and wrought so well, and wonder why their
precepts and their example should not have made a garden of that little
British island. To say nothing of the inherited knowledge of such men as
Sir Anthony Fitz-Herbert, Hugh Platt, Markham, Lord Bacon, Hartlib, and
the rest, there was Tull, who had blazed a new path between the turnip
and the wheat-drills--to fortune; there was Lord Kames, who illustrated
with rare good sense, and the daintiness of a man of letters, all the
economies of a thrifty husbandry; Sir John Sinclair proved the
wisdom of thorough culture upon tracts that almost covered counties;
Bakewell (of Dishley)--that fine old farmer in breeches and top-boots,
who received Russian princes and French marquises at his
kitchen-fireside--demonstrated how fat might be laid on sheep or cattle
for the handling of a butcher; in fact, he succeeded so far, that Dr.
Parkinson once told Paley that the great breeder had "the power of
fattening his sheep in whatever part of the body he chose, directing it
to shoulder, leg, or neck, as he thought proper,--and this," continued
Parkinson, "is the great _problem_ of his art."

"It's a lie, Sir," said Paley,--"and that's the _solution_ of it."

And yet Dr. Parkinson was very near the truth.

Besides Bakewell, there was Arthur Young, as we have seen, giving all
England the benefit of agricultural comparisons by his admirable
"Tours"; Lord Dundonald had brought his chemical knowledge to the aid
of good husbandry; Abercrombie and Speechly and Marshall had written
treatises on all that regarded good gardening. The nurseries of
Tottenham Court Road, the parterres of Chelsea, and the stoves of the
Yew Gardens were luxuriant witnesses of what the enterprising gardener
might do.

Agriculture, too, had a certain dignity given to it by the fact that
"Farmer George" (the King) had written his experiences for a journal of
Arthur Young, the Duke of Bedford was one of the foremost advocates of
improved farming, and Lord Townshend took a pride in his _sobriquet_ of
"Turnip Townshend."

Yet, for all this, at the opening of the present century, England was by
no means a garden. Over more than half the kingdom, turnips, where sown
at all, were sown broadcast. In four counties out of five, a bare fallow
was deemed essential for the recuperation of cropped lands. Barley and
oats were more often grown than wheat. Dibbling or drilling of grain,
notwithstanding Platt and Jethro Tull, were still rare. The wet
clay-lands had, for the most part, no drainage, save the open furrows
which were as old as the teachings of Xenophon; indeed, it will hardly
be credited, when I state that it is only so late as 1843 that a certain
gardener, John Reade by name, at the Derby Show of the Royal
Agricultural Society, exhibited certain cylindrical pipes, which he had
formed by wrapping damp clay around a smooth billet of wood, and with
which he "had been in the habit of draining the hot-beds of his master."
A sagacious engineer who was present, and saw these, examined them
closely, and, calling the attention of Earl Spencer (the eminent
agriculturist) to them, said, "My Lord, with them I can drain all
England."

It was not until about 1830 that the subsoil-plough of Mr. Smith of
Deanston was first contrived for special work upon the lands of
Perthshire. Notwithstanding all the brilliant successes of Bakewell,
long-legged, raw-boned cattle were admired by the majority of British
farmers at the opening of this century, and elephantine monsters of this
description were dragged about England in vans for exhibition. It was
only in 1798 that the "Smithfield Club" was inaugurated for the show of
fat cattle, by the Duke of Bedford, Lord Somerville, Arthur Young, and
others; and it was about the same period that young Jonas Webb (whose
life has latterly been illustrated by a glowing chapter from Elihu
Burritt) used to ride upon the Norfolk bucks bred by his grandfather,
and, with a quick sense of discomfort from their sharp backs, vowed,
that, when he "grew a man, he'd make better saddles for them"; and he
did, as every one knows who has ever seen a good type of the Brabaham
flock.

The Royal Agricultural Society dates from 1838. In 1835 Sir Robert Peel
presented a farmers' club at Tamworth with "two iron ploughs of the best
construction," and when he inquired after them and their work the
following year, the report was that the wooden mould-board was better:
"We tried 'em, but we be all of one mind, that the iron made the weeds
grow." And I can recall a bright morning in January of 1845, when I made
two bouts around a field in the middle of the best dairy-district of
Devonshire, at the stilts of a plough so cumbrous and ineffective that a
thrifty New-England farmer would have discarded it at sight. Nor can I
omit, in this connection, to revive, so far as I may, the image of a
small Devon farmer, who had lived, and I dare say will die, utterly
ignorant of the instructions of Tull, or of the agricultural labors of
Arthur Young: a short, wheezy, rotund figure of a man, with ruddy
face,--fastening the _h_s in his talk most blunderingly,--driving over
to the market-town every fair-day, with pretty samples of wheat or
barley in his dog-cart,--believing in the royal family like a
gospel,--limiting his reading to glances at the "Times" in the
tap-room,--looking with an evil eye upon railways, (which, in that day,
had not intruded farther than Exeter into his shire,)--distrusting
terribly the spread of "eddication": it "doan't help the work-folk any;
for, d' ye see, they've to keep a mind on their pleughing and craps; and
as for the b'ys, the big uns must mind the beasts, and the little uns's
got enough to do a-scaring the demed rooks. Gads! what hodds to them,
please your Honor, what Darby is a-dooin' up in Lunnun, or what
Lewis-Philup is a-dooin' with the Frenchers?" And the ruddy
farmer-gentleman stirs his toddy afresh, lays his right leg caressingly
over his left leg, admires his white-topped boots, and is the picture of
British complacency. I hope he is living; I hope he stirs his toddy
still in the tap-room of the inn by the pretty Erme River; but I hope
that he has grown wiser as he has grown older, and that he has given
over his wheezy curses at the engine as it hurtles past on the iron way
to Plymouth and to Penzance.

* * * * *

The work was not all done for the agriculture and the agriculturist of
England in the last century; it is hardly all done yet; it is doubtful
if it will be done so as to close investigation and ripen method in our
time. There was room for a corps of fresh workers at the opening of the
present century; nor was such a corps lacking.

About the year 1808, a certain John Christian Curwen, Member of
Parliament, and dating from Cumberland, wrote "Hints on Agricultural
Subjects," a big octavo volume, in which he suggests the steaming of
potatoes for horses, as a substitute for hay; but it does not appear
that the suggestion was well received. To his credit, however, it may be
said, that, in the same book, he urged the system of "soiling"
cattle,--a system which even now needs its earnest expounders, and which
would give full warrant for their loudest exhortation.

I notice, too, that, at about the same period, Dr. Beddoes, the friend
and early patron of Sir Humphry Davy at the Pneumatic Institution of
Bristol, wrote a book with the quaint title, "Good Advice to Husbandmen
in Harvest, and for all those who labor in Hot Berths, and for others
who will take it--in Warm Weather." And with the recollection of Davy's
description of the Doctor in my mind,--"uncommonly short and
fat,"[27]--I have felt a great interest in seeing what such a man should
have to say upon harvest-heats; but his book, so far as I know, is not
to be found in America.

A certain John Harding, of St. James Street, London, published, in 1809,
a tract upon "The Use of Sugar in Feeding Cattle," in which were set
forth sundry experiments which went to show how bullocks had been
fattened on molasses, and had been rewarded with a premium. I am
indebted for all knowledge of this anomalous tractate to the
"Agricultural Biography" of Mr. Donaldson, who seems disposed to give a
sheltering wing to the curious theory broached, and discourses upon it
with a lucidity and coherence worthy of a state-paper. I must be
permitted to quote Mr. Donaldson's language:--"The author's ideas are no
romance or chimera, but a very feasible entertainment of the
undertaking, when a social revolution permits the fruits of all climes
to be used in freedom of the burden of value that is imposed by
monopoly, and restricts the legitimate appropriation."

George Adams, in 1810, proposed "A New System of Agriculture and Feeding
Stock," of which the novelty lay in movable sheds, (upon iron
tram-ways,) for the purpose of soiling cattle. The method was certainly
original; nor can it be regarded as wholly visionary in our time, when
the iron conduits of Mr. Mechi, under the steam-thrust of the Tip-Tree
engines, are showing a percentage of profit.

Charles Drury, in the same year, recommended, in an elaborate treatise,
the steaming of straw, roots, and hay, for cattle-food,--a
recommendation which, in our time, has been put into most successful
practice.

Mowbray, who was for a long time the great authority upon Domestic Fowls
and their Treatment, published his book in 1803, which he represents as
having been compiled from the memoranda of forty years' experience.

And next, as illustrative of the rural literature of the early part of
this century, I must introduce the august name of Sir Humphry Davy. This
I am warranted in doing on two several counts: first, because he was an
accomplished fisherman and the author of "Salmonia," and next, because
he was the first scientific man of any repute who was formally invited
by a Board of Agriculture to discuss the relations of Chemistry to the
practice of farming.

Unfortunately, he was himself ignorant of practical agriculture,[28]
when called upon to illustrate its relations to chemistry; but, like an
earnest man, he set about informing himself by communication with the
best farmers of the kingdom. He delivered a very admirable series of
lectures, and it was without doubt most agreeable to the
country-gentlemen to find the great waste from their fermenting manures
made clear by Sir Humphry's retorts; but Davy was too profound and too
honest a man to lay down for farmers any chemical high-road to success.
He directed and stimulated inquiry; he developed many of the principles
which underlay their best practice; but he offered them no safety-lamp.
I think he brought more zeal to his investigations in the domain of pure
science; he loved well-defined and brilliant results; and I do not think
that he pushed his inquiries in regard to the way in which the
forage-plants availed themselves of sulphate of lime with one-half the
earnestness or delight with which he conducted his discovery of the
integral character of chlorine, or with which he saw for the first time
the metallic globules bubbling out from the electrified crust of potash.

Yet he loved the country with a rare and thorough love, as his
descriptions throughout his letters prove; and he delighted in straying
away, in the leafy month of June, to the charming place of his friend
Knight, upon the Teme in Herefordshire. His "Salmonia" is, in its way, a
pastoral; not, certainly, to be compared with the original of Walton,
lacking its simple homeliness, for which its superior scientific
accuracy can make but poor amends. I cannot altogether forget, in
reading it, that its author is a fine gentleman from London. Neither
fish, nor alders, nor eddies, nor purling shallows, can drive out of
memory the fact that Sir Humphry must be back at "The Hall" by half-past
six, in season to dress for dinner. Walton, in slouch-hat, bound about
with "leaders," sat upon the green turf to listen to a milkmaid's song.
Sir Humphry (I think he must have carried a camp-stool) recited some
verses written by "a noble lady long distinguished at court."[29]

In fact, there was always a great deal of the fine gentleman about the
great chemist,--almost too fine for the quiet tenor of a working-life.
Those first brilliant successes of his professional career at the Royal
Institution of London, before he was turned of thirty, and in which his
youth, his splendid elocution, his happy discoveries, his attractive
manner, all made him the mark for distinguished attentions, went very
far, I fancy, to carry him to that stage of social intoxication under
which he was deluded into marrying a wealthy lady of fashion, and a
confirmed blue-stocking,--the brilliant Mrs. Apreece.

Little domestic comfort ever came of the marriage. Yet he was a
chivalrous man, and took the issue calmly. It is always in his
letters,--"My dear Jane," and "God bless you! Yours affectionately." But
these expressions bound the tender passages. It was altogether a
gentlemanly and a lady-like affair. Only once, as I can find, he forgets
himself in an honest repining; it is in a letter to his brother, under
date of October 30, 1823:[30]--"To add to my annoyances, I find my
house, as usual, after the arrangements made by the mistress of it,
without female servants; but in this world we have to suffer and bear,
and from Socrates down to humble mortals, domestic discomfort seems a
sort of philosophical fate."

If only Lady Davy could have seen this Xantippe touch, I think Sir
Humphry would have taken to angling in some quiet country-place for a
month thereafter!

And even when affairs grow serious with the Baronet, and when, stricken
by the palsy, he is loitering among the mountains of Styria, he
writes,--"I am glad to hear of your perfect restoration, and with health
and the society of London, _which you are so fitted to ornament and
enjoy_, your '_viva la felicita_' is much more secure than any hope
belonging to me."

And again, "You once _talked_ of passing _this_ winter in Italy; but I
hope your plans will be entirely guided by the state of your health and
feelings. Your society would undoubtedly be a very great resource to me,
but I am so well aware of my own present unfitness for society that I
would not have you risk the chance of an uncomfortable moment on my
account."

The dear Lady Jane must have had a _penchant_ for society to leave the
poor palsied man to tumble into his tomb alone!

Yet once again, in the last letter he ever writes, dated Rome, March,
1829, he gallantly asks her to join him; it begins,--"I am still alive,
though expecting every hour to be released."

And the Lady Jane, who is washing off her fashionable humors in the
fashionable waters of Bath, writes,--"I have received, my beloved Sir
Humphry, the letter signed by your hand, with its precious wish of
tenderness. I start to-morrow, _having been detained here_ by Doctors
Babington and Clarke till to-day.... I cannot add more" (it is a letter
of half a page) "than that your fame is a deposit, and your memory a
glory, your life still a hope."

Sweet Lady Jane! Yet they say she mourned him duly, and set a proper
headstone at his grave. But, for my own part, I have no faith in that
affection which will splinter a loving heart every day of its life, and
yet, when it has ceased to beat, will make atonement with an idle swash
of tears.

* * * * *

There was a British farmer by the name of Morris Birkbeck, who about the
year 1814 wrote an account of an agricultural tour in France; and who
subsequently established himself somewhere upon our Western prairies, of
which he gave account in "Letters from Illinois," and in "Notes on a
Journey in America, from the Coast of Virginia to the Territory of
Illinois," with maps, etc. Cobbett once or twice names him as "poor
Birkbeck,"--but whether in allusion to his having been drowned in one of
our Western rivers, or to the poverty of his agricultural successes, it
is hard to determine.

In 1820 Major-General Beatson, who had been Aid to the Marquis of
Wellesley in India, published an account of a new system of farming,
which he claimed to have in successful operation at his place in the
County of Sussex. The novelty of the system lay in the fact that he
abandoned both manures and the plough, and scarified the surface to the
depth of two or three inches, after which he burned it over. The
Major-General was called to the governorship of St. Helena before his
system had made much progress. I am led to allude to the plan as one of
the premonitory hints of that rotary method which is just now enlisting
a large degree of attention in the agricultural world, and which
promises to supplant the plough on all wide stretches of land, within
the present century.

Finlayson, a brawny Scot, born in the parish of Mauchline, who was known
from "Glentuck to the Rutton-Ley" as the best man for "putting the
stone," or for a "hop, step, and leap," contrived the self-cleaning
ploughs (with circular beam) and harrows which bore his name. He was
also--besides being the athlete of Ayrshire--the author of sundry
creditable and practical works on agriculture.

But the most notable man in connection with rural literature, of this
day, was, by all odds, William Cobbett. His early history has so large a
flavor of romance in it that I am sure my readers will excuse me for
detailing it.

His grandfather was a day-laborer; he died before Cobbett was born; but
the author says that he used to visit the grandmother at Christmas and
Whitsuntide. Her home was "a little thatched cottage, with a garden
before the door. She used to give us milk and bread for breakfast, an
apple-pudding for dinner, and a piece of bread and cheese for our
supper. Her fire was made of turf cut from the neighboring heath; and
her evening light was a rush dipped in grease."[31] His father was a
small farmer, and one who did not allow his boys to grow up in idleness.
"My first occupation," he tells us, "was driving the small birds from
the turnip-seed, and the rook from the pease; when I first trudged
a-field, with my wooden bottle and my satchel swung over my shoulders, I
was hardly able to climb the gates and stiles; and at the close of the
day, to reach home was a task of infinite difficulty."

At the age of eleven he speaks of himself as occupied in clipping
box-edgings and weeding flower-beds in the garden of the Bishop of
Winchester; and while here he encounters, one day, a workman who has
just come from the famous Kew Gardens of the King. Young Cobbett is
fired by the glowing description, and resolves that he must see them,
and work upon them too. So he sets off, one summer's morning, with only
the clothes he has upon his back, and with thirteen halfpence in his
pocket, for Richmond. And as he trudges through the streets of the town,
after a hard day's walk, in his blue smock-frock, and with his red
garters tied under his knees, staring about him, he sees in the window
of a bookseller's shop the "Tale of a Tub," price threepence; it piques
his curiosity, and, though his money is nearly all spent, he closes a
bargain for the book, and, throwing himself down upon the shady side of
a hay-rick, makes his first acquaintance with Dean Swift. He read till
it was dark, without thought of supper or of bed,--then tumbled down
upon the grass under the shadow of the stack, and slept till the birds
of the Kew Gardens waked him.

He finds work, as he had determined to do; but it was not fated that he
should pass his life amid the pleasant parterres of Kew. At sixteen, or
thereabout, on a visit to a relative, he catches his first sight of the
Channel waters, and of the royal fleet riding at anchor at Spithead. And
at that sight, the "old Armada," and the "brave Rodney," and the "wooden
walls," of which he had read, come drifting like a poem into his
thought, and he vows that he will become a sailor,--maybe, in time, the
Admiral Cobbett. But here, too, the fates are against him: a kind
captain to whom he makes application suspects him for a runaway, and
advises him to find his way home.

He returns once more to the plough; "but," he says, "I was now spoiled
for a farmer." He sighs for the world; the little horizon of Farnham
(his native town) is too narrow for him; and the very next year he makes
his final escapade.

"It was on the 6th of May, 1783, that I, like Don Quixote, sallied forth
to seek adventures. I was dressed in my holiday clothes, in order to
accompany two or three lasses to Guildford fair. They were to assemble
at a house about three miles from my home, where I was to attend them;
but, unfortunately for me, I had to cross the London turnpike-road. The
stage-coach had just turned the summit of a hill, and was rattling down
towards me at a merry rate. The notion of going to London never entered
my mind till this very moment; yet the step was completely determined on
before the coach came to the spot where I stood. Up I got, and was in
London about nine o'clock in the evening."

His immediate adventure in the metropolis proves to be his instalment as
scrivener in an attorney's office. No wonder he chafes at this; no
wonder, that, in his wanderings about town, he is charmed by an
advertisement which invited all loyal and public-spirited young men to
repair to a certain "rendezvous"; he goes to the rendezvous, and
presently finds himself a recruit in one of His Majesty's regiments
which is filling up for service in British America.

He must have been an apt soldier, so far as drill went; for I find that
he rose rapidly to the grade of corporal, and thence to the position of
sergeant-major. He tells us that his early habits, his strict attention
to duty, and his native talent were the occasion of his swift promotion.
In New Brunswick, upon a certain winter's morning, he falls in with the
rosy-faced daughter of a sergeant of artillery, who was scrubbing her
pans at sunrise, upon the snow. "I made up my mind," he says, "that she
was the very girl for me.... This matter was at once settled as firmly
as if written in the book of fate."

To this end he determines to leave the army as soon as possible. But
before he can effect this, the artillery-man is ordered back to England,
and his pretty daughter goes with him. But Cobbett has closed the
compact with her, and placed in her hands a hundred and fifty pounds of
his earnings,--a free gift, and an earnest of his troth.

The very next season, however, he meets, in a sweet rural solitude of
the Province, another charmer, with whom he dallies in a lovelorn way
for two years or more. He cannot quite forget the old; he cannot cease
befondling the new. If only the "remotest rumor had come," says he, "of
the faithlessness of the brunette in England, I should have been
fastened for life in the New-Brunswick valley." But no such rumor comes,
and in due time he bids a heart-rending adieu, and recrosses the ocean
to find his first love maid-of-all-work in a gentleman's family at five
pounds a year; and she puts in his hand, upon their first interview, the
whole of the hundred and fifty pounds, untouched. This rekindles his
admiration and respect for her judgment, and she becomes his wife,--a
wife he never ceases thereafter to love and honor.

He goes to France, and thence to America. Establishing himself in
Philadelphia, he enters upon the career of authorship, with a zeal for
the King, and a hatred of Dr. Franklin and all Democrats, which give him
a world of trouble. His foul bitterness of speech finds its climax at
length in a brutal onslaught upon Dr. Rush, for which he is prosecuted,
convicted, and mulcted in a sum that breaks down his bookselling and
interrupts the profits of his authorship.

He retires to England, opens shop in Pall-Mall, and edits the
"Porcupine," which bristles with envenomed arrows discharged against all
Liberals and Democrats. Again he is prosecuted, convicted, imprisoned.
His boys, well taught in all manner of farm-work, send him, from his
home in the country, hampers of fresh fruits, to relieve the tedium of
Newgate. Discharged at length, and continuing his ribaldry in the
columns of the "Register," he flies before an Act of Parliament, and
takes new refuge in America. He is now upon Long Island, earnest as in
his youth in agricultural pursuits. The late Dr. Francis of New York
used to speak of his visits to him, and of the fine vegetables he
raised. His political opinions had undergone modification; there was not
so much declamation against democracy,--not so much angry zeal for
royalty and the state-church. Nay, he committed the stupendous absurdity
of carrying back with him to England the bones of Tom Paine, as the
grandest gift he could bestow upon his mother-land. No great ovations
greeted this strange luggage of his; I think he was ashamed of it
afterwards,--if Cobbett was ever ashamed of anything. He became
candidate for Parliament in the Liberal interest; he undertook those
famous "Rural Rides" which are a rare jumble of sweet rural scenes and
crazy political objurgation. Now he hammers the "parsons,"--now he tears
the paper-money to rags,--and anon he is bitter upon Malthus, Ricardo,
and the Scotch "Feelosofers,"--and closes his anathema with the charming
picture of a wooded "hanger," up which he toils (with curses on the
road) only to rejoice in the view of a sweet Hampshire valley, over
which sleek flocks are feeding, and down which some white stream goes
winding, and cheating him into a rare memory of his innocent boyhood. He
gains at length his election to Parliament; but he is not a man to
figure well there, with his impetuosity and lack of self-control. He can
talk by the hour to those who feel with him; but to be challenged, to
have his fierce invective submitted to the severe test of an inexorable
logic,--this limits his audacity; and his audacity once limited, his
power is gone.

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