قراءة كتاب The International Monthly, Volume 4, No. 4, November 1, 1851

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The International Monthly, Volume 4, No. 4, November 1, 1851

The International Monthly, Volume 4, No. 4, November 1, 1851

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ground, exhibiting a great variety of novel excellence. One with two shares, contrived to cut two furrows at once, seemed the most useful of any recently invented. The upper share cuts and turns the sward to the depth of five inches, which is immediately buried seven inches deep by the earth turned up by the deeper share. Since it is impossible to induce one farmer in twenty to subsoil, this, as the next best thing, ought to be universally adopted.

Seed-Sowers, Corn-Planters, Reapers, Fanning-Mills, Straw-Cutters, &c., &c., were abundant, and evinced many improvements on the best of former years. A Mower with which a man, boy, and span of horses, will cut and spread ten acres per day of grass, however heavy, on tolerably level land—both cutting and spreading better than the hand-impelled scythe and stick will do—was among the new inventions; also two threshers and cleaners, each of them warranted to thresh and nearly clean, by the labor of four men, a boy, and two horses, over one hundred bushels of wheat or two hundred bushels of oats per day. The testimony of candid citizens who had used them, and the evidence of our own senses, left no doubt on our mind of the correctness of these assertions. But we do not write to commend any article, but to call attention to the great and cheering truth which underlies them all. Agriculture is a noble art, involving the knowledge of almost all the practical sciences—chemistry, geology, climatology, mechanics, &c. It is not merely progressive, but rapidly progressing, so that fifty days' labor on the same soil produce far more grain or hay now than they did half a century ago. And every year is increasing and rendering more palpable the pressing need of a Practical College, wherein Agriculture, Mechanics, and the sciences auxiliary thereto shall be ably and thoroughly taught to thousands and tens of thousands of our countrymen, who shall in turn become the disseminators of the truths thus inculcated to the youth of every county and township in the country.

And thus shall Agriculture be rendered what it should be—not only the most essential but the most intellectual and attractive among the industrial avocations of mankind.

Horace Greeley

THE VIRGINIA REAPER. Exhibited at the Crystal Palace, and the New-York State Agricultural Fair, by Cyrus H. McCormick.THE VIRGINIA REAPER. Exhibited at the Crystal Palace, and the New-York State Agricultural Fair, by Cyrus H. McCormick.

WILLIAM ROSS WALLACE.

Of the large number of young men in this country who write verses, we scarcely know of one who has a more unquestionable right to the title of poet than William Ross Wallace, who has just published, in a very handsome volume, a collection of his writings, under the title of Meditations in America. Mr. Wallace has written other things which in their day have been sufficiently familiar to the public; in what we have to say of his capacities we shall confine ourselves to the pieces which he has himself here selected as the truest exponents of his genius, and without giving them indiscriminate praise shall hope to find in them evidences of peculiar and remarkable powers, combined with a spirit eminently susceptible to the influences of nature and of ideal and moral beauty.

Mr. Wallace is a western man, and was born in Lexington, Kentucky, in the year 1819. His father was a Presbyterian minister, of good family, and marked abilities, who died soon after, leaving the future poet to the care of a mother whose chief ambition in regard to him was that he should be so trained as to be capable of the most elevated positions in society. After the usual preparatory studies, he went first to the Bloomington College, and afterwards to the South Hanover College, in Indiana, and upon graduating at the latter institution studied the law in his native city. When about twenty-two years of age, having already acquired considerable reputation in literature, by various contributions to western and southern periodicals, he came to the Atlantic states, and with the exception of a few months passed in Philadelphia, and a year and a half in Europe, he has since resided in New-York, occupied in the practice of his profession and in the pursuits of literature. Of his numerous poetical compositions, this is the first collection, and the only volume, except Alban, a Romance, intended to illustrate the influence of certain prejudices of society and principles of law on individual character and destiny, which was published in 1848.

His works generally are distinguished for a sensuous richness of style, earnestness of temper, and much freedom of speculation. Throughout the Meditations in America we perceive that he is most at home in the serious and stately rhythms and solemn fancies of such pieces as the hymn "To a Wind Going Seaward," "The Mounds of America," "The Chant of a Soul," &c.; but he occasionally writes in livelier and less peculiar measures.

The late Mr. Poe in his Marginalia refers to the following as one of the finest things in American literature; it is certainly very characteristic.

THE CHANT OF A SOUL.

My youth has gone—the glory, the delight
That gave new moons unto the night,
And put in every wind a tone
And presence that was not its own.
I can no more create,
What time the Autumn blows her solemn tromp,
And goes with golden pomp
Through our unmeasurable woods:
I can no more create, sitting in youthful state
Above the mighty floods,
And peopling glen, and wave, and air,
With shapes that are immortal. Then
The earth and heaven were fair,
While only less than gods seem'd all my fellow-men.
Oh! the delight, the gladness,
The sense yet love of madness,
The glorious choral exultations,
The far-off sounding of the banded nations,
The wings of angels at melodious sweeps
Upon the mountain's hazy steeps,—
The very dead astir within their coffin'd deeps;
The dreamy veil that wrapp'd the star and sod—
A swathe of purple, gold, and amethyst;
And, luminous behind the billowy mist,
Something that look'd to my young eyes like God.
Too late I learn I have not lived aright,
And hence the loss of that delight
Which put a moon into the moonless night
I mingled in the human maze;
I sought their horrid shrine;
I knelt before the impure blaze;
I made their idols mine.
I lost mine early love—that love of balms

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