Page:Thoreau - His Home, Friends and Books (1902).djvu/323

Rh like blue, she never banishes it entirely, but has created evergreens." After the manner of the earlier naturalists, Thoreau apotheosized farming as the true pursuit that was accordant with nature. He sought to elevate it from mere manual task to the plane of poetic living. His letters and journal-comments show his discouraged efforts to make the real and ideal coalesce on this theme. He met, in individual philosophy, the same contradictions and irritations that assailed the farmer-philosophers at Brook Farm and at St. George's Guild. He alludes with regret to the horny hands of the farmer and his proneness to become merely a machine for agricultural tasks, callous to his unexcelled opportunities for nature-culture. He never despairs, however, of raising the farmer into a poet of the highest type. To the Concord farmers, or to the sturdy yeomen of chance acquaintance, Thoreau was ever a friendly and practical adviser. Eager to learn from them, he, in turn, suggested improvements for their gardens, surveyed their lands, and analyzed their soils. The New England homesteads represented to him the true "Arcadian life." It was as a result of his contact with nature, and farm-life over which she presided, that he wrote those cheery, whimsical lines, "The Respectable Folks,"