'Tis the trade-wind of my soul, Wafting life to make it whole: All the night it joyward blew, Though I neither hoped nor knew. Fresher blow me out to sea, Morning-tost I fain would be, Sweep my deck and pile it high With the ingots of the sky. Give me freight to carry round To a place with night that's drowned, That the Gulf-Stream of the day Glitter then my Milky-Way. WET-WEATHER WORK. BY A FARMER. II. Snowing: the checkered fields below are traceable now only by the brown lines of fences and the sparse trees that mark the hedge-rows. The white of the houses and of the spires of the town is seen dimly through the snow, and seems to waver and shift position like the sails and spars of ships seen through fog. And straightway upon this image of ships and swaying spars I go sailing back to the farm-land of the past, and sharpen my pen for another day's work among _The Old Farm-Writers_. I suspect Virgil was never a serious farmer. I am confident he never had one of those callosities upon the inner side of his right thumb which come of the lower thole of a scythe-snath, after a week's mowing. But he had that quick poet's eye which sees at a glance what other men see only in a day. Not a shrub or a tree, not a bit of fallow ground or of nodding lentils escaped his observation; not a bird or a bee; not even the mosquitoes, which to this day hover pestiferously about the low-lying sedge-lands of Mantua. His first pastoral, little known now, and rarely printed with his works, is inscribed _Culex_.[13] Young Virgil appears to have been of a delicate constitution, and probably left the fever-bearing regions of the Mincio for the higher plain of Milan for sanitary reasons, as much as the other,--of studying, as men of his parts did study, Greek and philosophy. There is a story, indeed, that he studied and practised farriery, as his father had done before him; and Jethro Tull, in his crude onslaught upon what he calls the Virgilian husbandry, (chap. ix.,) intimates that a farrier could be no way fit to lay down the rules for good farm-practice. But this story of his having been a horse-doctor rests, so far as I can discover, only on this flimsy tradition,--that the young poet, on his way to the South of Italy, after leaving Milan and Mantua, fell in at Rome with the master-of-horse to Octavianus, and gave such shrewd hints to that official in regard to the points and failings of certain favorite horses of the Roman Triumvir (for Octavianus had not as yet assumed the purple) as to gain a presentation to the future Augustus, and rich marks of his favor. It is certain that the poet journeyed to the South, and that thenceforward the glorious sunshine of Baiæ and of the Neapolitan shores gave a color to his poems and to his life.