thought so, he was so sincere and earnest in his belief, but they never thought he would so carry it out, or they would have confined him before he left home. Dolon was in a retired state, as if thinking or lost, but a youth's reflection is the person in a passive relation to his nature, as if the personality had aerially vanished, unseen, like the raising of an eyelid, and the Being had incarnated itself in human form, like the soul of man in Jesus, and had become the person. Men in absence of mind are somewhat youthlike, though their Being-Nature is less free and full and formed than in youth, and they are as if their personality were folded aside, and they were quietly getting at their Being, while a youth is freshly individual, and his Being comes out as if his nature, and personality disappears, as a soul from the body at death. The youth instinctively, unconsciously, waits before his Being for his nature to act through it, and the Being not merely assists him, but comes beside him and spiritually over him, like one who answers the call or want of a child by going to it and doing all for it. Dolon went home with the others, and was serious all the evening. Youth's seriousness is a state of himself, and not as a man's, himself in a state; his nature is affected as is the temperature of water by the condition of the sky, but its form remains a form, and its relations continue in all its parts, though all are modified yet in equal proportion, and it recedes together and in order, like a highly disciplined army. The youth neither introverts or extraverts, but is as he is affected. Dolon continued in this state, and was all the three next days in Nature, and toward the sunset, sat as usual upon the rock, and they were the nights of the new moon. Something had met him which required the conformation of his nature to meet, and which in men would have given need of a high consciousness, as the sleeper in the dark, awaked by something which has touched him, or is near him, cannot sleep again till he ascertains it, and he looks about in the dark with eyes which, though open, cannot see till they are used to the darkness. The crazy man as a fact, combined with Dolon's condition from the general experience of his humanity, of which this event was crisis-like, had made this impression on him as if his nature was relat ed to them as to things which, as inner principles, acted upon it; and this was the first intellectual development of a youth who had lived in Nature, and been a Being of Nature, but whose relations also comprehended men as they are, as, his parents, the school, and this crazy man, and whose nature partook of this modified humanity, though it so naturalized it by being a form of it, such as it was, as if a primitive condition, like air and water, which remain elements, though their essences are in different proportions from those of the optimum, and a lake enclosing hills, rocks, and cataracts; whereas men are forms of the original humanity which has become incomplete and disharmonized by the disproportionate development of parts, like a full-formed tree whose sap ceases to equally circulate. It was a relation of his nature, not of his intellect, which looks out of one's nature as from an observatory; its consciousness was in the relation of his Being to the Nature which thus was around him, as a blind man's sense is in his feelings. As a person, Dolon had a kind of instinctive quiet consciousness, as if God had put into his soul a celestial flower-plant on which were heavenly little fairies, and the consciousness was a feeling of an experience, like natural effects, going on within him; the life lives within him, and he neither sees, orders, or interferes with it. He did not think, though it was as if thoughts were taking forms within him, and taking their place as forms in the fresh spiritual inworld of his humanity. He was quiet and passive, and himself, as though there was an opening in the state of his humanity, and the forms there were shone upon by the sky, but the opening was of his own nature, like the cleft in a rock, and though the forms rose near the surface, did not rise beyond a level with himself, like stars brightly appearing in heaven. He was in Nature, and at unity with it, though he was as if there was something instinctively engaging him, like a child keeping by its mother's side, with its hand in hers, while it has a certain care of doing or seeing something, it has not defined to itself what. The experience going on within him was as if Poetry which he heard, and was quietly and really related to, as to a tale which a child realizes, (so far as it does realize, the effect upon him taking care of itself;) and what in men would be thought and consciousness, was in Dolon the Poet, whose effect, however, was deeper by being within him, and being him. Thought and consciousness may be conditions of the Being in a certain state, to which the Person is passive, having a life towards the life which thus outwardly comes to him. His being was, unconsciously, before the Great Mystery of Nature, the Universe, Truth, Man, God. It was acting below an instinctive sense of his childhood's relation to nature in his fairy faith, and his life, (and for the first time he felt his fairy relation had gone;) of the Mythologies which had been faiths to men somewhat like his fairy faith, and of their bearing on Nature; of this Nature with its self-derived-like life, and its invisible, unformed, in effect unreal God or Gods; of the crazy man's belief in that which had been ages before a belief, and of the difference between his outward and inward relation to it, in which Dolon acknowledged the sanity and insanity of the man, at the same time; of the difference between this man's and his own relation to the Mythology; of belief and its subjects, and of faith. While all this experience was taking place, Dolon had the self-possession and patience and repose, the being of Life. Even a child's plaintiveness is sometimes tragically serene and possessed. As Dolon sat on the rock in the bright soft moonlight, on the evening of the third day, his face as it were transfigured, he thought he heard a sound, like the voice of a man engaged in low prayer and invocation; but as he listened, it stopped, and the trees were murmuring in the gentle night-breeze, and he did not know that the crazy man, who had been fasting all day as before a great sacrifice, was performing an ante-sacrificial service in the cave below. Presently he heard a rustling on the dry-leaved ground, and there was a bowing of the trees as of an audience gathered to welcome. There was a sound behind him of something ascending the rock, and looking, he saw just rising from the rock, in the face of the moon, the man, whom he instantly recognised as if he knew, dressed in a surplice-like robe, gathered in at the waist by a white tasseled girdle, and a wreath of laurel and wild lilies of the valley on his left arm. A repose was on his spiritual expressive face, but there was a character in it which showed it was not primitive, soul's repose. Their faces faced, but he did not look at Dolon as before, though the same expression was in reserve in his face, but as one who was earnestly, reverently, and composedly, to do something. He took the wreath from his arm, and approaching, laid his hand on Dolon's head, on which he put the wreath, looking earnestly up to heaven, and taking a sacrificial knife from his girdle, plunged it in Dolon's breast. For a moment, as if looking from an absent sense, he bent over the body, which had fallen backwards on the rock and lay facing heaven, and then with his hands clasped on his breast, slowly and solemnly descended, and threw himself prostrate before the rock as before an altar. N. AGRICULTURE OF MASSACHUSETTS. In an afternoon in April, after a long walk, I traversed an orchard where two boys were grafting apple trees, and found the Farmer in his corn field. He was holding the plough, and his son driving the oxen. This man always impresses me with respect, he is so manly, so sweet-tempered, so faithful, so disdainful of all appearances, excellent and reverable in his old weather-worn cap and blue frock bedaubed with the soil of the field, so honest withal, that he always needs to be watched lest he should cheat himself. I still remember with some shame, that in some dealing we had together a long time ago, I found that he had been looking to my interest in the affair, and I had been looking to my interest, and nobody had looked to his part. As I drew near this brave laborer in the midst of his own acres, I could not help feeling for him the highest respect. Here is the Cæsar, the Alexander of the soil, conquering and to conquer, after how many and many a hard-fought summer's day and winter's day, not like Napoleon hero of sixty battles only, but of six thousand, and out of every one he has come victor; and here he stands, with Atlantic strength and cheer, invincible still. These slight and useless citylimbs of ours will come to shame before this strong soldier, What for his have done their own work and ours too. good this man has, or has had, he has earned. No rich father or father-in-law left him any inheritance of land or money. He borrowed the money with which he bought his farm, and has bred up a large family, given them a good education, and improved his land in every way year by year, and this without prejudice to himself the landlord, for here he is, a man every inch of him, and reminds us of the hero of the Robinhood ballad, "Much, the miller's son, There was no inch of his body But it was worth a groom." Innocence and justice have written their names on his brow. Toil has not broken his spirit. His laugh rings with the sweetness and hilarity of a child; yet he is a man of a strongly intellectual taste, of much reading, and of an erect good sense and independent spirit, which can neither brook usurpation nor falsehood in any shape. I walked up and down, the field, as he ploughed his furrow, and we talked as we walked. Our conversation naturally turned on the season and its new labors. He had been reading the Report of the Agricultural Survey of the Commonwealth, and had found good things in it; but it was easy to see that he felt towards the author much as soldiers do towards the historiographer who follows the camp, more good nature than reverence for the gownsman. The First Report, he said, is better than the last, as I observe the first sermon of a minister is often his best, for every man has one thing which he specially wishes to say, and that comes out at first. But who is this book written for? Not for farmers; no pains are taken to send it to them; it was by accident that this copy came into my hands for a few days. And it is not for them. They could not afford to follow such advice as is given here; they have sterner teachers; their own business teaches them better. No; this was written for the literary men. But in that case, the State should not be taxed to pay for it. Let us see. The account of the maple sugar, — that is very good and entertaining, and, I suppose, true. The story of the farmer's daughter, whom education had spoiled for everything useful on a farm, that is good too, - |