The Devils Pool | Page 4

radiant angel, sowing the
blessed grain in the smoking furrows with generous hand.
And the dream of a peaceful, free, poetical, laborious, simple existence
for the husbandman is not so difficult of conception that it need be
relegated to a place among chimeras. The gentle, melancholy words of
Virgil: "O how happy the life of the husbandman, if he but knew his
happiness!" is an expression of regret; but, like all regrets, it is also a
prediction. A day will come when the ploughman may be an artist, if
not to express,--which will then matter but little, perhaps,--at all events,
to feel, the beautiful. Do you believe that this mysterious intuition of
poesy does not already exist within him in the state of instinct and
vague revery? In those who have a little hoard for their protection
to-day, and in whom excess of misery does not stifle all moral and
intellectual development, pure happiness, felt and appreciated, is at the

elementary stage; and, furthermore, if poets' voices have already arisen
from the bosom of sorrow and fatigue, why should it be said that the
work of the hands excludes the exercise of the functions of the mind?
That exclusion is probably the general result of excessive toil and
profound misery; but let it not be said that when man shall work only
moderately and profitably, then there will be none but bad workmen
and bad poets. He who derives noble enjoyment from the inward
sentiment of poesy is a true poet, though he has never written a line in
his life.
My thoughts had taken this course, and I did not notice that this
confidence in man's capacity for education was strengthened in my
mind by external influences. I was walking along the edge of a field
which the peasants were preparing for the approaching sowing. The
field was an extensive one, like that in Holbein's picture. The landscape,
too, was of great extent and framed in broad lines of verdure, slightly
reddened by the approach of autumn, the lusty brown earth, where
recent rains had left in some of the furrows lines of water which
sparkled in the sun like slender silver threads. It was a blight, warm day,
and the ground, freshly opened by the sharp ploughshares, exhaled a
slight vapor. At the upper end of the field, an old man, whose broad
back and stern face recalled the man in Holbein's picture, but whose
clothing did not indicate poverty, gravely drove his old-fashioned
areau, drawn by two placid oxen, with pale yellow hides, veritable
patriarchs of the fields, tall, rather thin, with long, blunt horns,
hard-working old beasts whom long companionship has made brothers,
as they are called in our country districts, and who, when they are
separated, refuse to work with new mates and die of grief. People who
know nothing of the country call this alleged friendship of the ox for
his yoke-fellow fabulous. Let them go to the stable and look at a poor,
thin, emaciated animal, lashing his sunken sides with his restless tail,
sniffing with terror and contempt at the fodder that is put before him,
his eyes always turned toward the door, pawing the empty place beside
him, smelling the yoke and chains his companion wore, and calling him
incessantly with a pitiful bellow. The driver will say: "There's a yoke of
oxen lost; his brother's dead, and he won't work. We ought to fatten
him for killing; but he won't eat, and he'll soon starve to death."

The old ploughman was working slowly, in silence, without useless
expenditure of strength. His docile team seemed in no greater hurry
than he; but as he kept constantly at work, never turning aside, and
exerting always just the requisite amount of sustained power, his
furrow was as quickly cut as his son's, who was driving four less
powerful oxen on some harder and more stony land a short distance
away.
But the spectacle that next attracted my attention was a fine one indeed,
a noble subject for a painter. At the other end of the arable tract, a
young man of attractive appearance was driving a superb team: four
yoke of young beasts, black-coated with tawny spots that gleamed like
fire, with the short, curly heads that suggest the wild bull, the great,
wild eyes, the abrupt movements, the nervous, jerky way of doing their
work, which shows that the yoke and goad still irritate them and that
they shiver with wrath as they yield to the domination newly imposed
upon them. They were what are called oxen freshly yoked. The man
who was guiding them had to clear a field until recently used for
pasturage, and filled with venerable stumps--an athlete's task which his
energy, his youth, and his eight almost untamed beasts were