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154 I am always interested in Thoreau’s “poetical farmer,” not because I recommend his kind of farming, but because of his philosophical point of view:8 [George] Minott is perhaps the most poetical farmer, the one who most realizes to me the poetry of the farmer’s life, that I know. He does nothing with haste and drudgery, but everything as if he loved it. He makes the most of his labor, and takes infinite satisfaction in every part of it. He is not looking forward to the sale of his crops, but he is paid by the constant satisfaction which his labor yields to him. He has not too much land to trouble him, too much work to do, no hired man nor boy, but simply to amuse himself and live. He cares not so much to raise a large crop as to do his work well. He knows every pin and nail in his barn. If any part of it is to be floored, he lets no hired man rob him of that amusement, but he goes slowly to the woods, and at his leisure selects a pitch pine tree, cuts it, and hauls it or gets it hauled to the mill, and so he knows the history of his barn floor. Farming is an amusement which has lasted him longer than gunning or fishing. He is never in a hurry to get his garden planted, and yet it is always planted soon enough, and none in the town is kept so beautifully clean. He always prophesies a failure of his crops, and yet is satisfied with what he gets. His barn floor is fastened down with oak pins, and he prefers them to iron spikes, which he says will rust and give way. He handles and amuses himself with every ear of his corn crop as much as a child with its playthings, so his small crop goes a great way. He might well cry if it were carried to market. The seed of weeds is no longer in his soil. He loves to walk in a swamp in windy weather, and hear the wind groan through the pines. He indulges in no luxury of food, or dress, or furniture, yet he is not penurious , but merely simple. If his sister dies before him, he may have to go to the almshouse in his old age, yet he is not poor, for he does not want riches. Country and City 8. This excerpt begins on page 131 of the lengthy chapter titled “Country and City” from Outlook to Nature (New York: Macmillan, 1905). This passage runs through the conclusion of the original “Country and City” chapter on page 142. “Country and City” 155 Therefore I preach the open country, because it is natural and without affectation. There is very much in the city that we need, but this is so well accepted that there is no occasion to emphasize it: we need to emphasize the things that are free and that are remote from contention and noise.9 I preach the plain and frugal living of the plain people. Yesterday the bill of fare that was put before me at the hotel contained, by actual count, the names of 567 articles. To judge by the names, most of them were inedible. Ten articles are sufficient, and twenty are luxury. I preach the steadiness of country life, its freedom from speculativeness and from great temptation to evildoing. We need the example of all simple and direct lives, even if we lose some of the “polished” manners. We need the freshness and the spontaneity, and the power to rely on oneself. The day of homespun is past, and the day of the machine has come: danger is that the machine and the formal affairs shall come between us and the essentials. We are too likely to work by proxy and through servants. With the increasing complexities of civilization, it may be impossible to simplify the machinery of our political life; yet we all have the desire to do so, and we feel that the more direct the institutions the more efficient and enduring they are. The native institutions have largely determined the methods and points of view in great geographical regions; the New England town meeting, with its ideal democracy; the southern courthouse, with its social stratification; the central west schoolhouse, repeating the democracy of New England but with freer individualism; the arid...

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