When my hoe tinkled against the stones, that music echoed to the woods and the sky, and was an accompaniment to my labor which yie...lded an instant and immeasurable crop. It was no longer beans that I hoed, nor I that hoed beans; and I remembered with as much pity as pride, if I remembered at all, my acquaintances who had gone to the city to attend the oratorios.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Mine was, as it were, the connecting link between wild and cultivated fields; as some states are civilized, and others half-civili...zed, and others savage or barbarous, so my field was, though not in a bad sense, a half-cultivated field. They were beans cheerfully returning to their wild and primitive state that I cultivated, and my hoe played the Ranz des Vaches for them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Those summer days which some of my contemporaries devoted to the fine arts in Boston or Rome, and others to contemplation in India..., and others to trade in London or New York, I thus, with the other farmers of New England, devoted to husbandry. Not that I wanted beans to eat, for I am by nature a Pythagorean, so far as beans are concerned, whether they mean porridge or voting, and exchanged them for rice; but, perchance, as some must work in fields if only for the sake of tropes and expression, to serve a parable-maker one day. It was on the whole a rare amusement, which, continued too long, might have become a dissipation.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
As I drew a still fresher soil about the rows with my hoe, I disturbed the ashes of unchronicled nations who in primeval years liv...ed under these heavens, and their small implements of war and hunting were brought to the light of this modern day.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I came to love my rows, my beans, though so many more than I wanted. They attached me to the earth, and so I got strength like Ant...æus. But why should I raise them? Only Heaven knows.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
But why should not the New Englander try new adventures, and not lay so much stress on his grain, his potato and grass crop, and h...is orchards,--raise other crops than these? Why concern ourselves so much about our beans for seed, and not be concerned at all about a new generation of men?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »