The Recreations of a Country ParsonBoyd, Andrew Kennedy Hutchison
General
The Recreations of a Country Parson
Boyd, Andrew Kennedy Hutchison
Clergy -- Anecdotes; Country life -- England; Rural clergy -- England
And how plainly the smooth, cheerful face of the savage testified to
the healthfulness, in a physical sense; of a life devoid of worry!
If you would see the reverse of the medal, look at the anxious
faces, the knit brows, and the bald heads, of the twenty or thirty
greatest merchants whom you will see on the Exchange of Glasgow or
of Manchester. Or you may find more touching proof of the ageing
effect of worry, in the careworn face of the man of thirty with
a growing family and an uncertain income; or the thin figure and
bloodless cheek which testify to the dull weight ever resting on
the heart of the poor widow who goes out washing, and leaves her
little children in her poor garret under the care of one of eight
years old. But still, the cottages of Humboldt's 'unwrinkled
people' were, we have little doubt, much infested with vermin, and
possessed a pestilential atmosphere; and the people's freedom from
care did but testify to their ignorance, and to their lack of moral
sensibility. We must take worry, it is to be feared, along with
civilization. As you go down in the scale of civilization, you
throw off worry by throwing off the things to which it can adhere.
And in these days, in which no man would seriously think of preferring
the savage life, with its dirt, its stupidity, its listlessness,
its cruelty, the good we may derive from that life, or any life
approximating to it, is mainly that of a sort of moral alterative
and tonic. The thing itself would not suit us, and would do us no
good; but we may be the better for musing upon it. It is like a
refreshing shower-bath, it is like breathing a cool breeze after the
atmosphere of a hot-house, to dwell for a little, with half-closed
eyes, upon pictures which show us all the good of the unworried
life, and which say nothing of all the evil. We know the thing is
vain: we know it is but an idle fancy; but still it is pleasant
and refreshful to think of such a life as Byron has sketched as
the life of Daniel Boone. Not in misanthropy, but from the strong
preference of a forest life, did the Kentucky backwoodsman keep
many scores of miles ahead of the current of European population
setting onwards to the West. We shall feel much indebted to any
reader who will tell us where to find anything more delightful than
the following stanzas, to read after an essay on modern worry:--
He was not all alone: around him grew
A sylvan tribe of children of the chase;
Whose young, unwakened world was ever new,
Nor sin, nor sorrow, yet had left a trace
On her unwrinkled brow; nor could you view
A frown on Nature's or on human face:
The free-born forest found and kept them free,
And fresh as is a torrent or a tree.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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