June morning--pauses as the whistle dies into the distance, and,
wiping his brow and whetting his blade anew, questions the
country-smitten citizen, the amateur Corydon struggling with imperfect
stroke behind him, of the mystic romance of city life.

The sluggish repose of the little river images the farmer-boy's life.
He bullies his oxen, and trembles at the locomotive. His wonder and
fancy stretch towards the great world beyond the barn-yard and the
village church as the torpid stream tends towards the ocean. The
river, in fact, seems the thread upon which all the beads of that
rustic life are strung--the clew to its tranquil character. If it were
an impetuous stream, dashing along as if it claimed and required the
career to which every American river is entitled, a career it would
have. Wheels, factories, shops, traders, factory-girls, boards of
directors, dreary white lines of boarding-houses, all the signs that
indicate the spirit of the age, and of the American age, would arise
upon its margin. Some shaven magician from State Street would run up
by rail, and, from proposals, maps, schedules of stock, etc., educe a
spacious factory as easily as Aladdin's palace arose from nothing.
Instead of a dreaming, pastoral poet of a village, Concord would be a
rushing, whirling, bustling manufacturer of a town, like its thrifty
neighbor Lowell. Many a fine equipage, flashing along city ways--many
an Elizabethan-Gothic-Grecian rural retreat, in which State Street
woos Pan and grows Arcadian in summer, would be reduced, in the last
analysis, to the Concord mills. Yet if these broad river meadows grew
factories instead of corn, they might perhaps lack another harvest, of
which the poet's thought is the sickle.

"One harvest from your field
Homeward brought the oxen strong.