The complete works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Society and solitude [Vol. 7]

also, as were even the few residents who did business in Boston. So was Mr. Emerson, though in his essay on Prudence he admitted that "whoever sees my garden discovers that I must have some other garden." His poem "My Garden" tells of the latter, which yielded abundantly, but, that he had a right to talk to farmers as one of them, witness the printed Report of the Agricultural Society of 1858, which contains not only the Address in its first form, but the recommendation that R. W. Emerson and O. Farnsworth each receive $1.00 as a gratuity for single dishes of pears; better yet, R. W. Emerson is awarded third premium of $3.00 for Sage grapes. His neighbors, the Concord farmers, returned his salute with courtesy and respect when they met him on the roads or in their wood-lots, and most of them liked to hear him read one or more lectures in the Lyceum each winter, as did the people of the villages around. Mr. Emerson once said that his farming, "like the annual ploughing of the Emperor of China, had a certain emblematic air," but he knew how to find emblems and parables in the field, and proved in his lecturing that common people loved symbols. His neighbors gathered in their crops, but he, unknown to them, had reaped a harvest in their fields of which he tells in his poem "The Apology." This was his best crop, for he was unhandy with the spade. While his garden was small, he worked it with advice and help of his good friends George Bradford and Henry Thoreau, but as his farm increased, it was managed for a time by Mr. Edmund Hosmer. Of this neighbor Mr. Emerson gave a pleasant account in the Dial paper "Agriculture of Massachusetts," included in the volume Natural History of Intellect. After 1850 the ten-acre farm was managed and worked for him in succession by two excellent and devoted Irishmen, who left him free from its care to mind his own affairs as the interpreter.