But my present object is simply to give what may be called the natural history of metaphor, comparison, image, trope, and the like, whether imagery be employed by an uneducated husbandman, or by a great orator and writer.  Many readers may recollect the anecdote of the New Hampshire farmer, who was once complimented on the extremely handsome appearance of a horse which he was somewhat sullenly urging on to perform its work.  “Yaas,” was the churlish reply, “the critter looks well enough, but then he is as slow as—­as—­as—­well, as slow as cold molasses.”  This perfectly answers to Bacon’s definition of imagination, as “thought immersed in matter.”  The comparison is exactly on a level with the experience of the person who used it.  He had seen his good wife, on so many bitter winter mornings, when he was eager for his breakfast, turn the molasses-jug upside down, and had noted so often the reluctance of the congealed sweetness to assume its liquid nature, that the thing had become to him the visible image of the abstract notion of slowness of movement.  An imaginative dramatist or novelist, priding himself on the exactness with which he represented character, could not have invented a more appropriate comparison to be put into the mouth of an imagined New England farmer.

The only objection to such rustic poets is, that a comparatively few images serve them for a lifetime; and one tires of such “originals” after a few days’ conversation has shown the extremely limited number of apt illustrations they have added to the homely poetry of agricultural life.  The only person, belonging to this class, that I ever met, who possessed an imagination which was continually creative in quaint images, was a farmer by the name of Knowlton, who had spent fifty years in forcing some few acres of the rocky soil of Cape Ann to produce grass, oats, potatoes, and, it may be added, those ugly stone walls which carefully distinguish, at the cape, one patch of miserable sterile land from another.  He was equal, in quickness of imaginative illustration, to the whole crowd of clergymen, lawyers, poets, and artists, who filled the boarding-houses of “Pigeon Cove”; and he was absolutely inexhaustible in fresh and original imagery.  On one hot summer day, the continuation of fourteen hot summer days, when there was fear all over Cape Ann that the usual scanty crops would be withered up by the intense heat, and the prayer for rain was in almost every farmer’s heart, I met Mr. Knowlton, as he was looking philosophically over one of his own sun-smitten fields of grass.  Thinking that I was in full sympathy with his own feeling at the dolorous prospect before his eyes, I said, in accosting him, that it was bad weather for the farmers.  He paused for half a minute; and then his mind flashed back on an incident of his weekly experience,—­that of his wife “ironing” the somewhat damp clothes of the Monday’s “washing,”—­and he replied:  “I see you’ve been talking with our farmers, who are too stupid to know what’s for their good.  Ye see the spring here was uncommonly rainy, and the ground became wet and cold; but now, for the last fortnight, God has been putting his flat-iron over it, and ’twill all come out right in the end.”