One who sees that sight may find a new meaning and beauty in the mystic words, ‘I am the vine, ye are the branches.’ It is not merely the connection between branch and stem, common to all trees; not merely the exhilarating and seemingly inspiring properties of the grape, which made the very heathens look upon it as the sacred and miraculous fruit, the special gift of God; not merely the pruning out of the unfruitful branches, to be burned as fire-wood, or—after the old Roman fashion, which I believe endures still in these parts—buried as manure at the foot of the parent stem; not merely these, but the seeming death of the vine, shorn of all its beauty, its fruitfulness, of every branch and twig which it had borne the year before, and left unsightly and seemingly ruined, to its winter’s sleep; and then bursting forth again, by an irresistible inward life, into fresh branches spreading and trailing far and wide, and tossing their golden tendrils to the sun. This thought, surely—the emblem of the living Church springing from the corpse of the dead Christ, who yet should rise and be alive for evermore—enters into, it may be forms an integral part of, the meaning of, that prophecy of all prophecies. One ought to look, with something of filial reverence, on the agriculture of the district into which we are penetrating; for it is the parent of our own. From hence, or strictly speaking from the Mediterranean shore beyond us, spread northward and westward through France, Belgium, and Britain, all the tillage which we knew—at least till a hundred years ago—beyond the primæval plan of clearing, or surface-burning, the forests, growing miserable white crops as long as they would yield, and then letting the land relapse, for twenty years, into miserable pasture. This process (which lingered thirty years ago in remote parts of Devon), and nothing better, seems to have been that change of cultivated lands which Tacitus ascribes to the ancient Germans. Rotation of crops, in any true sense, came to us from Provence and Languedoc; and with it, subsoiling; irrigation; all our artificial grasses, with lucerne at the head of the list; our peas and beans; some of our most important roots; almost all our garden flowers, vegetables, fruits, the fig, the mulberry, the vine—(the olive and the maize came with them from the East, but dared go no further north)—and I know not what more; till we may say, that—saving subsoil-draining, which their climate does not need—the ancestors of these good folks were better farmers fifteen hundred years ago, than too many of our countrymen are at this day.