Ode to Village Life

Here's a paean to village life:

"The Joys of American Village Life in the 1800s

How different is the state of things to-day, and in our own country! Village life as it exists in America is indeed one of the happiest fruits of modern civilization. Our ancestors, familiar with the English and French villages, could never have dreamed of all the many striking differences which would appear two centuries later in the village homes of their own descendants in the New World. The idea would never have occurred to them that the remote village could ever share so freely in the enlightenment and civilization of the capital city. But steam, the great magician, serves the rustic to-day as faithfully as he serves the cockney.13

  Comforts, conveniences, new inventions, striking improvements are scarcely known in New York and Philadelphia, before they are brought to the villages, hundreds of miles in the interior. You find there every real advantage of modern life. Your house is lighted by gas -- and, if you choose, it is warmed by steam. The morning paper, with the latest telegram from Paris or London, lies on your dinner-table. The best new books, the latest number of the best magazines, reach you almost as soon as they reach the Central Park. Early vegetables from Bermuda, and early fruits from Cuba, are offered at your door. You may telegraph, if you wish it, to St. Petersburg or Calcutta, by taking up your hat and walking into the next street. This evening you may, perhaps, hear a good lecture, and to-morrow a good concert. The choice musical instrument and the fine engraving may be found in your cottage parlor.

What more can any reasonable being ask for, in the way of physical and intellectual accessories of daily life? And in addition to these advantages of modern civilization shared with the cities, there are others of far higher value, belonging more especially to country life. The blessings of pure air and pure water are luxuries, far superior to all the wines of Delmonico14, and all the diamonds of Ball & Black.15 And assuredly to all eyes but those of the blindest cockney, the groves and gardens and fields and brooks and rivers make up a frame-work for one's everyday life rather more pleasing than the dust-heaps, and omnibuses, and shop-windows of Broadway. And, happily for the rustic world, the vices, the whims and extravigances -- the fashionable sin, the pet folly - - of the hour are somewhat less prevalent, somewhat less tyrannical on the greensward than on the pavement. There is more of leisure for thought and culture and good feeling in the country than amid the whirl of a great city. True, healthful refinement of head and heart becomes more easy, more natural under the open sky and amid the fresh breeze of country life

. Probably much the largest number of the most pleasant and happiest homes in the land may be found to-day in our villages and rural towns -- homes where truth, purity, the holiest affections, the highest charities and healthful culture are united with a simplicity of life scarcely possible on our extravagant cities. And these advantages, thanks be to God, are not confined to one class. Even the poorest day-laborer in the village, if he be honest and temperate, leads a far happier and easier life than his brother in the cities. The time may come, perhaps, when the cities -- greatly diminished in size -- shall be chiefly abandoned to the drudgeries of business, to commerce and manufactures during the hours of day and deserted at night; when the families of the employers and laborers shall live alike in suburban village homes. In the present state of civilization, every hamlet within a hundred miles of a large city may be considered as one of its suburbs. In former centuries, he was a wise man who left the village for the city. To-day, he is wise who goes to the city as to a market, but has a home in the country."

The author is Susan Fenimore Cooper, the year is 1869.   [Threw in some paragraph breaks.]