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LEAR the brown path to meet his coulter's gleam!
Lo! on he comes, behind his smoking team,
With toil's bright dew-drops on his sunburnt
brow,

The lord of earth, the hero of the plough!

First in the field before the reddening sun,
Last in the shadows when the day is done,
Line after line, along the bursting sod,
Marks the broad acres where his feet have trod.
Still where he treads the stubborn clods divide,
The smooth, fresh furrow opens deep and wide;
Matted and dense the tangled turf upheaves,
Mellow and dark the ridgy corn-field cleaves;

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;
At every turn the loosening chains resound,
The swinging ploughshare circles glistening round,
Till the wide field one billowy waste appears,
And wearied hands unbind the panting steers.

These are the hands whose sturdy labor brings
The peasant's food, the golden pomp of kings;
This is the page whose letters shall be seen,
Changed by the sun to words of living green;

This is the scholar whose immortal pen
Spells the first lesson hunger taught to men;
These are the lines that heaven-commanded Toil
Shows on his deed, -the charter of the soil!

O gracious Mother, whose benignant breast
Wakes us to life, and lulls us all to rest,
How thy sweet features, kind to every clime,
Mock with their smile the wrinkled front of Time!
We stain thy flowers,-they blossom o'er the dead;
We rend thy bosom, and it gives us bread;
O'er the red field that trampling strife has torn,
Waves the green plumage of thy tasselled corn;
Our maddening conflicts scar thy fairest plain,
Still thy soft answer is the growing grain.
Yet, O our Mother, while uncounted charms
Steal round our hearts in thine embracing arms,
Let not our virtues in thy love decay,
And thy fond sweetness waste our strength away.

No, by these hills whose banners now displayed
In blazing cohorts Autumn has arrayed;
By yon twin summits, on whose splintery crests
The tossing hemlocks hold the eagles' nests;
By these fair plains the mountain circle screens,
And feeds with streamlets from its dark ravines,
True to their home, these faithful arms shall toil
To crown with peace their own untainted soil;
And, true to God, to freedom, to mankind,
If her chained ban-dogs Faction shall unbind,
These stately forms, that, bending even now,
Bowed their strong manhood to the humble plough,
Shall rise erect, the guardians of the land,
The same stern iron in the same right hand,
Till o'er their hills the shouts of triumph run,
The sword has rescued what the ploughshare won!
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES.

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WEARINESS can snore upon the flint, when restive sloth finds the down pillow hard.

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COUNTRY LIFE.

HE merchant tempts me with his gold,
The gold he worships night and day;
He bids me leave this dreary wold,

And come into the city gay.

I will not go; I won't be sold;
I scorn his pleasures and array;

I'll rather bear the country's cold,
Than from its freedom walk away.

What is to me the city s pride?

The haunt of luxury and pleasure;
Those fields and hills, this wild brookside,
To me are better beyond measure.
Mid country scenes I'll still abide;
With country life and country leisure,
Content, whatever may betide,

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.

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