Wednesday Wisdom

The Man with the Hoe

For centuries the waves of greed and fierce ambition

Have beat, and broke about him,

Engulfing countless millions of his fellow men;

Yet, steadfast and serene amid the howling storm he stands.

He stands

And leans upon his hoe.

Contentment shining in his ruddy face,
The marks of intellect upon his brow,
A living monument to truth and honesty,
At peace with God and all mankind.

And as he leans, he reads
In tender plant and ripening grain;
In mountain and in valley,
In sunshine and in shower,
The wondrous story of creation:
Within his heart, a promise and a prayer.

"What," indeed, "to him is Plato?"
Who revels daily in the grandest work of all-
The glorious book of nature,
Written by the hand of God.
"And what to him the reaches of the peaks of song?"
He has heard the soughing breeze
Make melody among the swaying boughs;
He has listened to the song of rippling brook,
The chorus of the forest choirs has charmed his ear.
But, sweetest, softest, tenderest of all,
A symphony of heaven-
He has heard his baby's joyous coo.

"Slave to the wheel of labor?"
God gave him labor that he might have rest;
Hate, that he might know love;
Winter, that he might see the beauties of the spring.
God gave him life, but lest he tire, he sends him gentle death.
He lives and moves, and reigns a King,
And in yon vine-clad cottage sits enthroned
His royal consort and his queen.

This "is the thing God made, and gave
To have dominion over land and sea."

And he who breathes foul anarchy upon that brain
To wither it;
Who plants the germ of envy in that heart
To blacken it;
Who fans the flame of discontent
"Into a fierce and roaring sea of flame
Till earth is strewn with wrecks of homes
And whirlwinds of rebellion shake the world-"
How will the future reckon with that man
After the silence of a century?
                                      -American Agriculturist.

-John Baer's Agricultural Almanac - 1901