Henry David Thoreau
 


   Walking


    I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as 
contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil - to  regard  man  as  an 
inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society. 
I wish to make an extreme statement, if so I may make an emphatic  one,  for 
there are enough champions of civilization:  the  minister  and  the  school
committee and every one of you will take care of that.

    I have met with but one or two persons in the  course  of  my  life  who 
understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks - who had a  genius, 
so to speak, for SAUNTERING, which word is beautifully  derived  "from  idle 
people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and  asked  charity, 
under pretense of going a la Sainte Terre,"  to  the  Holy  Land,  till  the 
children exclaimed, "There goes  a  Sainte-Terrer,"  a  Saunterer,  a  Holy-
Lander. They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they  pretend, 
are indeed mere  idlers  and  vagabonds;  but  they  who  do  go  there  are 
saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean. Some,  however,  would  derive 
the word from sans terre without land or a home, which,  therefore,  in  the 
good sense, will mean, having  no  particular  home,  but  equally  at  home 
everywhere. For this is the secret of successful  sauntering.  He  who  sits 
still in a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of  all;  but  the
saunterer, in the good sense, is no more vagrant than the meandering  river, 
which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course  to  the  sea. 
But I prefer the first, which, indeed, is the most probable derivation.  For 
every walk is a sort of crusade, preached by some Peter the Hermit in us, to 
go forth and reconquer this Holy Land from the hands of the Infidels.

    It is true, we  are  but  faint-hearted  crusaders,  even  the  walkers, 
nowadays,  who  undertake  no  persevering,  never-ending  enterprises.  Our 
expeditions are but tours, and come  round  again  at  evening  to  the  old 
hearth-side from which we set out. Half the walk is but retracing our steps. 
We should go forth on the shortest walk, perchance, in the spirit of undying 
adventure, never to return - prepared to send back our embalmed hearts  only 
as relics to our desolate kingdoms. If you are ready  to  leave  father  and 
mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and  friends,  and  never 
see them again - if you have paid  your  debts,  and  made  your  will,  and 
settled all your affairs, and are a free  man  -  then  you  are  ready  for 
a walk.

    To come down to my own experience, my companion and I, for  I  sometimes 
have a companion, take pleasure in fancying ourselves knights of a  new,  or 
rather an old, order - not Equestrians or Chevaliers, not Ritters or Riders, 
but Walkers, a  still  more  ancient  and  honorable  class,  I  trust.  The 
Chivalric and heroic spirit which once belonged to the Rider  seems  now  to 
reside in, or perchance to have subsided into, the Walker - not the  Knight,
but Walker, Errant. He is a sort of fourth estate,  outside  of  Church  and 
State and People.

    We have felt that we almost alone hereabouts practiced this  noble  art; 
though, to tell the truth, at least  if  their  own  assertions  are  to  be 
received, most of my townsmen would fain walk sometimes, as I do,  but  they 
cannot. No wealth can buy the requisite leisure, freedom,  and  independence 
which are the capital in this profession. It comes only by the grace of God. 
It requires a direct dispensation from Heaven to become a walker.  You  must 
be born into the family of the Walkers. Ambulator nascitur, non fit. Some of 
my townsmen, it is true, can remember and have described to  me  some  walks 
which they took ten years ago, in which they were  so  blessed  as  to  lose 
themselves for half an hour in the woods; but I know  very  well  that  they 
have confined themselves to the highway  ever  since,  whatever  pretensions 
they may make to belong to this select class. No doubt  they  were  elevated 
for a moment as by the reminiscence of a previous state of  existence,  when 
even they were foresters and outlaws.

         "When he came to grene wode,
         In a mery mornynge,
         There he herde the notes small
         Of byrdes mery syngynge.

         "It is ferre gone, sayd Robyn,
         That I was last here;
         Me Lyste a lytell for to shote
         At the donne dere."

    I think that I cannot preserve my health and  spirits,  unless  I  spend 
four hours a day at least - and it is commonly more than that  -  sauntering 
through the woods and over the hills and fields, absolutely  free  from  all 
worldly engagements. You may safely say, A penny for  your  thoughts,  or  a 
thousand pounds. When  sometimes  I  am  reminded  that  the  mechanics  and 
shopkeepers stay in their shops not only  all  the  forenoon,  but  all  the 
afternoon too, sitting with crossed legs, so many of them - as if  the  legs 
were made to sit upon, and not to stand or walk  upon - I  think  that  they 
deserve some credit for not having all committed suicide long ago.

    I, who cannot stay in my chamber for a single day without acquiring some 
rust, and when sometimes I have stolen forth for  a  walk  at  the  eleventh 
hour, or four o'clock in the afternoon, too late to redeem the day, when the 
shades of night were already beginning to be mingled with the daylight, have 
felt as if I had committed some sin to be atoned for, - I confess that I  am
astonished  at  the  power  of  endurance,  to  say  nothing  of  the  moral 
insensibility, of my neighbors who confine themselves to shops  and  offices 
the whole day for weeks and months, aye, and years almost together.  I  know 
not what manner of stuff they are of - sitting there now at three o'clock in 
the afternoon, as if it were three o'clock in  the  morning.  Bonaparte  may 
talk of the three-o'clock-in-the-morning courage, but it is nothing  to  the
courage which can sit down cheerfully at this hour  in  the  afternoon  over 
against one's self whom you have known all the  morning,  to  starve  out  a 
garrison to whom you are bound by such strong ties  of  sympathy.  I  wonder 
that about this time, or say between four and five o'clock in the afternoon, 
too late for the morning papers and too early for the evening ones, there is 
not a general explosion heard up and down the street, scattering a legion of 
antiquated and house-bred notions and whims to the four winds for an airing-
and so the evil cure itself.

    How womankind, who are confined to the house still more than men,  stand 
it I do not know; but I have ground to suspect that  most  of  them  do  not 
STAND it at all. When, early in a summer afternoon, we have been shaking the 
dust of the village from the skirts of our garments, making haste past those 
houses with purely Doric or Gothic fronts, which have such an air of  repose 
about them, my companion whispers that  probably  about  these  times  their
occupants are all gone to bed. Then it is that I appreciate the  beauty  and 
the glory of architecture, which itself never turns in, but  forever  stands 
out and erect, keeping watch over the slumberers.

    No doubt temperament, and, above all, age, have a good deal to  do  with 
it. As a man grows older,  his  ability  to  sit  still  and  follow  indoor 
occupations increases. He grows vespertinal in his habits as the evening  of 
life approaches, till at last he comes forth only just before  sundown,  and 
gets all the walk that he requires in half an hour.

    But the walking of which I speak  has  nothing  in  it  akin  to  taking
exercise, as it is called, as the  sick  take  medicine  at  stated  hours - 
as the Swinging of dumb-bells or chairs; but is itself  the  enterprise  and 
adventure of the day. If you would get exercise, go in search of the springs 
of life. Think of a man's swinging dumbbells  for  his  health,  when  those 
springs are bubbling up in far-off pastures unsought by him!

    Moreover, you must walk like a camel, which is said to be the only beast 
which ruminates when walking. When a traveler asked Wordsworth's servant  to 
show him her master's study, she answered, "Here is  his  library,  but  his 
study is out of doors."

    Living much out of doors, in the sun and wind,  will  no  doubt  produce 
a certain roughness of character - will cause a thicker cuticle to grow over 
some of the finer qualities of our nature, as on the face and hands,  or  as 
severe manual labor robs the hands of some of their delicacy  of  touch.  So 
staying in the house,  on  the  other  hand,  may  produce  a  softness  and 
smoothness, not to  say  thinness  of  skin,  accompanied  by  an  increased
sensibility to certain impressions. Perhaps we should be more susceptible to 
some influences important to our intellectual and moral growth, if  the  sun 
had shone and the wind blown on us a little less; and no doubt it is a  nice 
matter to proportion rightly the thick and thin skin. But methinks that is a 
scurf that will fall off fast enough - that the  natural  remedy  is  to  be 
found in the proportion which the night bears to the day, the winter to  the 
summer, thought to experience. There will  be  so  much  the  more  air  and 
sunshine in our thoughts. The callous palms of the  laborer  are  conversant 
with finer tissues of self-respect and  heroism,  whose  touch  thrills  the 
heart, than the languid fingers of idleness.  That  is  mere  sentimentality 
that lies abed by day and thinks itself white, far from the tan  and  callus 
of experience.

    When we walk, we naturally go to the fields and woods: what would become 
of us, if we walked only  in  a  garden  or  a  mall?  Even  some  sects  of 
philosophers have felt the necessity of importing the woods  to  themselves, 
since they did not go to the  woods.  "They  planted  groves  and  walks  of 
Platanes," where they took subdiales ambulationes in porticos  open  to  the 
air. Of course it is of no use to direct our steps to the woods, if they  do 
not carry us thither. I am alarmed when it happens that I have walked a mile
into the woods bodily, without getting there in spirit. In my afternoon walk 
I would fain forget  all  my  morning  occupations  and  my  obligations  to 
Society. But it sometimes  happens  that  I  cannot  easily  shake  off  the 
village. The thought of some work will run in my head and I am not where  my 
body is - I am out of my senses. In my walks  I  would  fain  return  to  my 
senses. What business have I in the woods, if I am thinking of something out 
of the woods? I suspect myself, and cannot help a shudder when I find myself 
so implicated even in what are called good works - for  this  may  sometimes 
happen.

    My vicinity affords many good walks; and though for so many years I have 
walked almost every day, and sometimes for several days together, I have not 
yet exhausted them. An absolutely new prospect is  a  great  happiness,  and 
I can still get this any afternoon. Two or three hours' walking  will  carry 
me to as strange a country as I expect ever to see. A single farmhouse which 
I had not seen before is sometimes as good as the dominions of the  King  of 
Dahomey. There is in  fact  a  sort  of  harmony  discoverable  between  the 
capabilities of the landscape within a circle of ten miles' radius,  or  the 
limits of an afternoon walk, and the threescore years and ten of human life. 
It will never become quite familiar to you.

    Nowadays almost all man's improvements, so called, as  the  building  of 
houses and the cutting down of the forest and of  all  large  trees,  simply 
deform the landscape, and make it more and more tame and cheap. A people who 
would begin by burning the fences and let the forest stand! I saw the fences 
half consumed, their ends lost in  the  middle  of  the  prairie,  and  some 
worldly miser with a surveyor looking after his  bounds,  while  heaven  had
taken place around him, and he did not see the angels going to and fro,  but 
was looking for an old post-hole in the midst of paradise. I  looked  again, 
and saw him standing in the middle of a boggy  Stygian  fen,  surrounded  by 
devils, and he had found his bounds without a doubt,  three  little  stones, 
where a stake had been driven, and looking nearer, I saw that the Prince  of
Darkness was his surveyor.

    I can easily walk ten, fifteen, twenty, any number of miles,  commencing 
at my own door, without going by any house, without crossing a  road  except 
where the fox and the mink do: first along by the river, and then the brook, 
and then the meadow and the woodside. There are square miles in my  vicinity 
which have no inhabitant. From many a hill I can see  civilization  and  the
abodes of man afar. The farmers and their works are  scarcely  more  obvious 
than woodchucks and their burrows. Man and his affairs, church and state and 
school, trade and commerce, and manufactures and agriculture even  politics, 
the most alarming of them all - I am pleased to see how  little  space  they 
occupy in the landscape. Politics is but a  narrow  field,  and  that  still 
narrower highway yonder  leads  to  it.  I  sometimes  direct  the  traveler 
thither. If you would go to the political world,  follow  the  great  road - 
follow that market-man, keep his dust in your eyes, and  it  will  lead  you 
straight to it; for it, too, has its place merely, and does not  occupy  all 
space. I pass from it as from a bean  field  into  the  forest,  and  it  is 
forgotten. In one half-hour I can walk off to some portion  of  the  earth's 
surface where a man does not stand from  one  year's  end  to  another,  and 
there, consequently, politics are not, for they are but as  the  cigar-smoke 
of a man.

    The village is the place to which the roads tend, a sort of expansion of 
the highway, as a lake of a river. It is the body of  which  roads  are  the 
arms and legs - a trivial or quadrivial place, the thoroughfare and ordinary 
of travelers. The word is from the Latin  villa  which  together  with  via, 
a way, or more anciently ved and vella, Varro derives from veho,  to  carry, 
because the villa is the place to and from which things  are  carried.  They 
who got their living by teaming were said vellaturam facere. Hence, too, the 
Latin word vilis and our vile, also villain.  This  suggests  what  kind  of 
degeneracy villagers are liable to. They are wayworn by the travel that goes 
by and over them, without traveling themselves.

    Some do not walk at all; others walk in the highways; a few walk  across 
lots. Roads are made for horses and men of business. I do not travel in them 
much, comparatively, because I am not in a hurry to get  to  any  tavern  or 
grocery or livery-stable or depot to which they lead. I am a good  horse  to 
travel, but not from choice  a  roadster.  The  landscape-painter  uses  the 
figures of men to mark a road. He would not make  that  use  of  my  figure. 
I walk out into a nature such as the old prophets and  poets,  Menu,  Moses, 
Homer, Chaucer, walked in. You may name it America, but it is  not  America; 
neither Americus Vespueius, nor Columbus, nor the rest were the  discoverers 
of it. There is a truer amount of it in mythology than  in  any  history  of 
America, so called, that I have seen.

    However, there are a few old roads that may be trodden with  profit,  as 
if they led somewhere now that they are nearly discontinued.  There  is  the 
Old Marlborough Road, which does not go  to  Marlborough  now,  me - thinks, 
unless that is Marlborough where it carries me. I am the bolder to speak  of 
it here, because I presume that there are one or two  such  roads  in  every 
town.


    THE OLD MARLBOROUGH ROAD

    Where they once dug for money,
    But never found any;
    Where sometimes Martial Miles
    Singly files,
    And Elijah Wood,
    I fear for no good:
    No other man,
    Save Elisha Dugan -
    O man of wild habits,
    Partridges and rabbits
    Who hast no cares
    Only to set snares,
    Who liv'st all alone,
    Close to the bone
    And where life is sweetest
    Constantly eatest.
    When the spring stirs my blood
    With the instinct to travel,
    I can get enough gravel
    On the Old Marlborough Road.
    Nobody repairs it,
    For nobody wears it;
    It is a living way,
    As the Christians say.
    Not many there be
    Who enter therein,
    Only the guests of the
    Irishman Quin.
    What is it, what is it
    But a direction out there,
    And the bare possibility
    Of going somewhere?
    Great guide-boards of stone,
    But travelers none;
    Cenotaphs of the towns
    Named on their crowns.
    It is worth going to see

    Where you MIGHT be.
    What king
    Did the thing,
    I am still wondering;
    Set up how or when,
    By what selectmen,
    Gourgas or Lee,
    Clark or Darby?
    They're a great endeavor
    To be something forever;
    Blank tablets of stone,
    Where a traveler might groan,
    And in one sentence
    Grave all that is known
    Which another might read,
    In his extreme need.
    I know one or two
    Lines that would do,
    Literature that might stand
    All over the land
    Which a man could remember
    Till next December,
    And read again in the spring,
    After the thawing.
    If with fancy unfurled
    You leave your abode,
    You may go round the world
    By the Old Marlborough Road.


    At present, in this vicinity, the best part of the land is  not  private 
property; the landscape is not owned,  and  the  walker  enjoys  comparative 
freedom. But possibly the day will come when it will be partitioned off into 
so-called pleasure-grounds, in which a few will take a narrow and  exclusive 
pleasure only - when fences shall be multiplied,  and  man-traps  and  other 
engines invented to confine men to the PUBLIC road,  and  walking  over  the
surface of God's earth shall  be  construed  to  mean  trespassing  on  some 
gentleman's grounds. To enjoy a thing exclusively  is  commonly  to  exclude 
yourself from the true enjoyment of it. Let us  improve  our  opportunities, 
then, before the evil days come.

    What is it that makes it so hard sometimes to determine whither we  will 
walk? I believe that there is a subtle magnetism in  Nature,  which,  if  we 
unconsciously yield to it, will direct us aright. It is not  indifferent  to 
us which way we walk. There is a right way; but  we  are  very  liable  from 
heedlessness and stupidity to take the wrong one. We would  fain  take  that 
walk, never yet taken by us through this actual world,  which  is  perfectly
symbolical of the path which we love to travel in  the  interior  and  ideal 
world; and  sometimes,  no  doubt,  we  find  it  difficult  to  choose  our 
direction, because it does not yet exist distinctly in our idea.

    When I go out of the house for a walk, uncertain as yet whither  I  will 
bend my steps, and submit myself to my instinct to decide for  me,  I  find, 
strange and whimsical as it may seem, that I finally and  inevitably  settle 
southwest, toward some particular wood or meadow or deserted pasture or hill 
in that direction. My needle is slow to settle, - varies a few degrees,  and 
does not always point due southwest, it is true, and it has  good  authority
for this variation, but it always settles between west and  south-southwest. 
The future lies that way to me, and the earth  seems  more  unexhausted  and 
richer on that side. The outline which would bound my walks  would  be,  not 
a circle, but a parabola, or rather like one of those cometary orbits  which 
have been thought to be non-returning curves, in this case opening westward, 
in which my house occupies the place of the sun.  I  turn  round  and  round 
irresolute sometimes  for  a  quarter  of  an  hour,  until  I  decide,  for 
a thousandth time, that I will walk into the  southwest  or  west.  Eastward 
I go only by force; but westward I go free. Thither no business leads me. It 
is hard for me to believe that I shall find fair  landscapes  or  sufficient 
wildness and freedom behind the eastern horizon. I am  not  excited  by  the
prospect of a walk thither; but I believe that the forest which I see in the 
western horizon stretches uninterruptedly toward the setting sun, and  there 
are no towns nor cities in it of enough consequence to disturb  me.  Let  me 
live where I will, on this side is the city, on  that  the  wilderness,  and 
ever I am  leaving  the  city  more  and  more,  and  withdrawing  into  the 
wilderness. I should not lay so much stress on  this  fact,  if  I  did  not 
believe  that  something  like  this  is  the  prevailing  tendency  of   my 
countrymen. I must walk toward Oregon, and not toward Europe. And  that  way
the nation is moving, and I may say that mankind progress from east to west. 
Within a few years we have  witnessed  the  phenomenon  of  a  southeastward 
migration,  in  the  settlement  of  Australia;  but  this  affects  us   as 
a retrograde movement, and, judging from the moral and physical character of 
the first generation  of  Australians,  has  not  yet  proved  a  successful 
experiment. The eastern Tartars think that  there  is  nothing  west  beyond 
Thibet. "The world ends there," say  they;  "beyond  there  is  nothing  but 
a shoreless sea." It is unmitigated East where they live.

    We go eastward to realize  history  and  study  the  works  of  art  and 
literature, retracing the steps of the race; we  go  westward  as  into  the 
future, with a spirit of enterprise and adventure. The Atlantic is a Lethean 
stream, in our passage over which we have had an opportunity to  forget  the 
Old World and its institutions. If we do not succeed  this  time,  there  is 
perhaps one more chance for the race left before it arrives on the banks  of 
the Styx; and that is in the Lethe of the Pacific, which is three  times  as
wide.

    I know not how significant it is, or  how  far  it  is  an  evidence  of 
singularity, that an individual should thus consent  in  his  pettiest  walk 
with the general movement of the race; but I know that something akin to the 
migratory instinct in birds and quadrupeds - which, in  some  instances,  is 
known to have affected the squirrel tribe, impelling them to a  general  and 
mysterious movement, in  which  they  were  seen,  say  some,  crossing  the 
broadest rivers, each on its particular  chip,  with  its  tail  raised  for 
a sail, and bridging narrower streams with their dead - that something  like 
the furor which affects the domestic cattle in  the  spring,  and  which  is 
referred to a worm in their tails, - affects both nations  and  individuals, 
either perennially or from time to time. Not a flock of wild  geese  cackles 
over our town, but it to some extent unsettles  the  value  of  real  estate 
here, and, if I were a broker, I should probably take that disturbance  into 
account.

    "Than longen folk to gon on pilgrimages,
    And palmeres for to seken strange strondes."

    Every sunset which I witness inspires me with the desire to go to a West 
as distant and as fair as that into which the sun goes down. He  appears  to 
migrate westward daily, and tempt us to follow him. He is the Great  Western 
Pioneer whom the nations follow. We dream all night of those mountain-ridges 
in the horizon, though they may be of vapor only, which were last gilded  by 
his rays. The island of  Atlantis,  and  the  islands  and  gardens  of  the 
Hesperides, a sort of terrestrial paradise, appear to have  been  the  Great 
West of the ancients, enveloped in mystery and poetry. Who has not  seen  in 
imagination,  when  looking  into  the  sunset  sky,  the  gardens  of   the 
Hesperides, and the foundation of all those fables?

    Columbus felt the westward tendency more strongly than  any  before.  He 
obeyed it, and found a New World for Castile and Leon. The herd  of  men  in 
those days scented fresh pastures from afar,

    "And now the sun had stretched out all the hills,
    And now was dropped into the western bay;
    At last HE rose, and twitched his mantle blue;
    Tomorrow to fresh woods and pastures new."
       
    Where on the globe can there be found an area of equal extent with  that 
occupied by the bulk of our States, so fertile and so rich and varied in its 
productions, and at the same time so habitable by the European, as this  is? 
Michaux, who knew but part of them, says that "the species  of  large  trees 
are much more numerous in North America than in Europe; in the United States
there are more than one hundred and forty species that exceed thirty feet in 
height; in France there  are  but  thirty  that  attain  this  size."  Later 
botanists more than confirm his observations. Humboldt came  to  America  to 
realize his youthful dreams of a tropical vegetation, and he  beheld  it  in 
its greatest perfection in the primitive forests of  the  Amazon,  the  most 
gigantic wilderness on the earth, which he has so eloquently described.  The 
geographer Guyot, himself a European, goes farther - farther than I am ready 
to follow him; yet not when he says: "As the plant is made for  the  animal, 
as the vegetable world is made for the animal world, America is made for the 
man of the Old World.... The man of the Old World sets  out  upon  his  way. 
Leaving the highlands of Asia, he descends from station to  station  towards 
Europe. Each of his steps is marked by a new civilization  superior  to  the 
preceding, by a greater power of development. Arrived at  the  Atlantic,  he 
pauses on the shore of this unknown ocean, the bounds of which he knows not, 
and turns upon his footprints for an instant." When  he  has  exhausted  the 
rich soil of  Europe,  and  reinvigorated  himself,  "then  recommences  his
adventurous career westward as in the earliest ages." So far Guyot.
      
    From this western impulse coming in contact  with  the  barrier  of  the 
Atlantic sprang the commerce and enterprise of  modern  times.  The  younger 
Michaux, in his Travels West of the  Alleghanies  in  1802,  says  that  the 
common inquiry in the newly settled West was, "'From what part of the  world 
have you come?' As if these vast and fertile regions would naturally be  the 
place of meeting and common country of all the inhabitants of the globe."

    To use an obsolete Latin word, I might say, Ex Oriente lux; ex Occidente 
FRUX. From the East light; from the West fruit.

    Sir Francis Head, an English traveler and a Governor-General of  Canada, 
tells us that "in both the northern and  southern  hemispheres  of  the  New 
World, Nature has not only outlined her works on a  larger  scale,  but  has 
painted the whole picture with brighter and more costly colors than she used 
in delineating and in beautifying the Old World.... The heavens  of  America 
appear infinitely higher, the sky is bluer, the air is fresher, the cold  is 
intenser, the moon looks larger, the  stars  are  brighter  the  thunder  is 
louder, the lightning is vivider, the wind is stronger, the rain is heavier, 
the mountains are higher, the rivers longer, the forests bigger, the  plains 
broader." This statement will do at least to set against Buffon's account of
this part of the world and its productions.

    Linnaeus said long  ago,  "Nescio  quae  facies  laeta,  glabra  plantis 
Americanis" (I know not what there is of joyous and smooth in the aspect  of 
American plants); and I think that in this country there are no, or at  most 
very few, Africanae bestiae, African beasts, as the Romans called them,  and 
that in this respect also it is peculiarly fitted for the habitation of man. 
We are told that within three miles of the center of the East-Indian city of
Singapore, some of the inhabitants are annually carried off by  tigers;  but 
the traveler can lie down in the woods at night  almost  anywhere  in  North 
America without fear of wild beasts.
        
    These are encouraging testimonies. If the moon looks larger here than in 
Europe, probably the sun looks larger also. If the heavens of America appear 
infinitely higher, and the stars brighter, I  trust  that  these  facts  are 
symbolical of the height to which the philosophy and poetry and religion  of 
her inhabitants may one day  soar.  At  length,  perchance,  the  immaterial 
heaven will appear as much higher to the American mind, and the  intimations 
that star it as much brighter. For I believe that climate does thus react on 
man - as there is something in the mountain air that feeds  the  spirit  and 
inspires. Will not man grow to greater perfection intellectually as well  as
physically under these influences? Or is it unimportant how many foggy  days 
there are in his life? I trust that we shall be more imaginative,  that  our 
thoughts will be clearer, fresher, and more
ethereal, as our sky - our understanding  more  comprehensive  and  broader, 
like our plains - our intellect generally  on  a  grander  seale,  like  our 
thunder and lightning, our rivers and mountains and forests-and  our  hearts 
shall even correspond in breadth and depth and grandeur to our inland  seas. 
Perchance there will appear to the traveler something, he knows not what, of 
laeta and glabra, of joyous and serene, in our very faces. Else to what  end
does the world go on, and why was America discovered?

    To Americans I hardly need to say -

    "Westward the star of empire takes its way."

    As a true patriot, I should be ashamed to think that  Adam  in  paradise 
was more favorably situated on the  whole  than  the  backwoodsman  in  this 
country.

    Our sympathies in Massachusetts are not confined to New England;  though 
we may be estranged from the South, we sympathize with the  West.  There  is 
the home of the younger sons, as among the Scandinavians they  took  to  the 
sea for their inheritance. It is too late to be studying Hebrew; it is  more 
important to understand even the slang of today.

    Some months ago I went to see a panorama  of  the  Rhine.  It  was  like 
a dream of the Middle Ages. I floated down its historic stream in  something 
more than imagination, under bridges built by the Romans,  and  repaired  by 
later heroes, past cities and castles whose very  names  were  music  to  my 
ears,  and  each  of  which  was  the  subject  of  a  legend.  There   were 
Ehrenbreitstein and Rolandseck and Coblentz, which I knew only  in  history. 
They were ruins that interested me chiefly. There seemed to come up from its 
waters and its vine-clad hills and valleys a hushed music  as  of  Crusaders 
departing for the Holy Land. I floated along under the spell of enchantment, 
as if I had been transported to an heroic age, and breathed an atmosphere of 
chivalry.

    Soon after, I went to see a panorama of the Mississippi, and as I worked 
my way up the river in the light of today, and saw  the  steamboats  wooding 
up, counted the rising cities, gazed on the fresh ruins  of  Nauvoo,  beheld 
the Indians moving west across the stream, and, as before I  had  looked  up 
the Moselle, now looked up the Ohio and the Missouri and heard  the  legends 
of Dubuque and of Wenona's Cliff - still thinking more of the future than of 
the past or present - I saw that this was a  Rhine  stream  of  a  different 
kind; that the foundations of castles were yet to be laid,  and  the  famous 
bridges were yet to be thrown over the river; and I felt that THIS  WAS  THE 
HEROIC AGE ITSELF, though we know it not,  for  the  hero  is  commonly  the 
simplest and obscurest of men.

    The West of which I speak is but another name for  the  Wild;  and  what 
I have been preparing to say is, that in Wildness is the preservation of the 
World. Every tree sends its fibers forth in search of the Wild.  The  cities 
import it at any price. Men plow and  sail  for  it.  From  the  forest  and 
wilderness come the tonics and barks which brace mankind. Our ancestors were 
savages. The story of Romulus and Remus being  suckled  by  a  wolf  is  not 
a meaningless fable. The founders of every state which has risen to eminence 
have drawn their nourishment and vigor from a similar wild  source.  It  was 
because the children of the Empire were not suckled by the  wolf  that  they 
were conquered and displaced by the children of  the  northern  forests  who 
were.

    I believe in the forest, and in the meadow, and in the  night  in  which 
the corn grows. We require an infusion of hemlock, spruce or arbor vitae  in 
our tea. There is a difference between eating and drinking for strength  and 
from mere gluttony. The Hottentots eagerly devour the marrow of  the  koodoo 
and other antelopes raw, as a matter of course. Some of our northern Indians 
eat raw the marrow of the Arctic reindeer, as well as various  other  parts,
including the summits of the antlers, as long as they are soft. And  herein, 
perchance, they have stolen a march on the cooks of  Paris.  They  get  what 
usually goes to feed the fire. This is probably better than  stall-fed  beef 
and slaughterhouse pork to make a man of. Give me a wildness whose glance no 
civilization can endure - as if we lived on the marrow of  koodoos  devoured 
raw.

    There are some intervals which border the strain of the wood thrush,  to 
which I would migrate - wild lands where no settler has squatted; to  which, 
methinks, I am already acclimated.

    The African hunter Cumming tells us that the skin of the eland, as  well 
as that of most other  antelopes  just  killed,  emits  the  most  delicious 
perfume of trees and grass. I would have every  man  so  much  like  a  wild 
antelope, so much a part and parcel of nature, that his very  person  should 
thus sweetly advertise our senses of his presence, and remind  us  of  those 
parts of nature which he most haunts. I feel no disposition to be satirical, 
when the trapper's coat emits the odor of musquash even;  it  is  a  sweeter 
scent to me than that which commonly exhales  from  the  merchant's  or  the 
scholar's garments.  When  I  go  into  their  wardrobes  and  handle  their 
vestments, I am reminded of no grassy plains and flowery  meads  which  they 
have frequented, but of dusty merchants' exchanges and libraries rather.
     
    A tanned skin is something more than respectable, and perhaps olive is a 
fitter color than white for a man - a denizen of the woods. "The pale  white 
man!" I do not wonder that the African pitied  him.  Darwin  the  naturalist 
says, "A white man bathing by the side  of  a  Tahitian  was  like  a  plant 
bleached by the gardener's art,  compared  with  a  fine,  dark  green  one, 
growing vigorously in the open fields."

    Ben Jonson exclaims, -

    "How near to good is what is fair!"

    So I would say, -

    "How near to good is what is WILD!"

    Life consists with wildness. The most alive  is  the  wildest.  Not  yet 
subdued to  man,  its  presence  refreshes  him.  One  who  pressed  forward 
incessantly and never rested  from  his  labors,  who  grew  fast  and  made 
infinite demands on life, would always find himself  in  a  new  country  or 
wilderness, and surrounded by the raw material of life. He would be climbing 
over the prostrate stems of primitive forest trees.

    Hope and the future for me are not in lawns and cultivated  fields,  not 
in towns and cities,  but  in  the  impervious  and  quaking  swamps.  When, 
formerly,  I  have  analyzed  my  partiality  for  some  farm  which  I  had 
contemplated purchasing, I have frequently found that I was attracted solely 
by a few square rods of impermeable and unfathomable bog - a natural sink in 
one corner of it. That was the jewel which dazzled me. I derive more  of  my
subsistence from the swamps which surround my  native  town  than  from  the 
cultivated gardens in the village. There are no richer parterres to my  eyes 
than the dense beds of dwarf andromeda (Cassandra  calyculata)  which  cover 
these tender places on the earth's surface. Botany cannot  go  farther  than 
tell me the names of the  shrubs  which  grow  there - the  high  blueberry, 
panicled andromeda, lambkill, azalea,  and  rhodora - all  standing  in  the
quaking sphagnum. I often think that I should like to have my house front on 
this mass of dull red bushes,  omitting  other  flower  plots  and  borders, 
transplanted spruce and trim box, even graveled walks - to have this fertile 
spot under my windows, not a few imported barrowfuls of soil only  to  cover 
the sand which was thrown out in digging the cellar. Why not put  my  house, 
my parlor, behind this plot, instead of behind  that  meager  assemblage  of 
curiosities, that poor apology for a Nature and Art, which I call  my  front 
yard? It is an effort to clear up and make  a  decent  appearance  when  the 
carpenter and mason have departed, though done as much for the passer-by  as 
the dweller  within.  The  most  tasteful  front-yard  fence  was  never  an 
agreeable object of study to me; the most elaborate ornaments,  acorn  tops,
or what not, soon wearied and disgusted me. Bring your sills up to the  very 
edge of the swamp, then (though it may not be  the  best  place  for  a  dry 
cellar), so that there be no access on that side to  citizens.  Front  yards 
are not made to walk in, but, at most, through, and you could go in the back 
way.

    Yes, though you may think me perverse, if it  were  proposed  to  me  to 
dwell in the neighborhood of the most beautiful garden that ever  human  art 
contrived, or else of a Dismal Swamp, I  should  certainly  decide  for  the 
swamp. How vain, then, have been all your labors, citizens, for me!

    My spirits infallibly rise in proportion to the outward dreariness. Give 
me the ocean, the desert, or the wilderness! In the  desert,  pure  air  and 
solitude compensate for want of moisture and fertility. The traveler  Burton 
says of it - "Your MORALE improves; you become frank and cordial, hospitable 
and single-minded.... In the desert, spirituous liquors excite only disgust. 
There is a keen enjoyment in a mere animal existence." They  who  have  been 
traveling long on the steppes of Tartary  say,  "On  re-entering  cultivated 
lands, the agitation, perplexity, and turmoil of civilization oppressed  and 
suffocated us; the air seemed to fail us, and we felt  every  moment  as  if 
about to die of asphyxia." When I would recreate myself, I seek the  darkest 
woods the thickest and most interminable and, to the citizen,  most  dismal, 
swamp. I enter a swamp as a sacred place, - a sanctum  sanctorum.  There  is 
the strength, the marrow, of Nature. The wildwood covers the virgin mould, - 
and the same soil is good for men and for trees. A man's health requires  as 
many acres of meadow to his prospect as his farm does loads of  muck.  There 
are the strong meats on which he feeds. A town is saved,  not  more  by  the 
righteous men in  it  than  by  the  woods  and  swamps  that  surround  it. 
A township where one primitive forest waves above  while  another  primitive 
forest rots below - such a town  is  fitted  to  raise  not  only  corn  and 
potatoes, but poets and philosophers for the coming ages.  In  such  a  soil 
grew Homer and Confucius and the rest, and out of such  a  wilderness  comes 
the Reformer eating locusts and wild honey.

    To preserve wild animals implies generally the creation of a forest  for 
them to dwell in or resort to. So it is with man. A hundred years  ago  they 
sold bark in our streets peeled from our own woods. In the  very  aspect  of 
those primitive and rugged trees there was, methinks,  a  tanning  principle 
which hardened and consolidated the fibers of men's  thoughts.  Ah!  already 
I shudder for these comparatively degenerate days of my native village, when 
you cannot collect a load of bark  of  good  thickness,  and  we  no  longer 
produce tar and turpentine.

    The civilized nations - Greece, Rome, England - have been  sustained  by 
the primitive forests which anciently rotted where they stand. They  survive 
as long as the soil is not exhausted. Alas for human culture! little  is  to 
be expected of a nation, when the vegetable mould is exhausted,  and  it  is 
compelled to make manure of  the  bones  of  its  fathers.  There  the  poet 
sustains himself merely by his own  superfluous  fat,  and  the  philosopher 
comes down on his marrow-bones.

    It is said to be the task of the American "to work the virgin soil," and 
that "agriculture here already assumes proportions unknown everywhere else." 
I think that the farmer displaces the Indian even  because  he  redeems  the 
meadow, and so makes himself stronger and in  some  respects  more  natural. 
I was surveying for a man the other day a single straight line  one  hundred 
and thirty-two rods long, through a swamp at whose entrance might have  been 
written the words which  Dante  read  over  the  entrance  to  the  infernal 
regions, - "Leave all hope, ye that enter" - that is, of  ever  getting  out 
again; where at one time I saw my employer  actually  up  to  his  neck  and 
swimming for his life in his property, though it was still  winter.  He  had 
another similar swamp which I could  not  survey  at  all,  because  it  was 
completely under water, and nevertheless, with  regard  to  a  third  swamp, 
which I did SURVEY  from  a  distance,  he  remarked  to  me,  true  to  his 
instincts, that he would not part with it for any consideration, on  account 
of the mud which it contained. And that man intends to put a girdling  ditch 
round the whole in the course of forty months, and so redeem it by the magic 
of his spade. I refer to him only as the type of a class.

    The weapons with which we have  gained  our  most  important  victories, 
which should be handed down as heirlooms from father to  son,  are  not  the 
sword and the lance, but the bushwhack, the turf-cutter, the spade, and  the 
bog hoe, rusted with the blood of many a meadow, and begrimed with the  dust 
of many a hard-fought field. The very winds blew the Indian's cornfield into 
the meadow, and pointed out the way which he had not the skill to follow. He 
had no better implement with which to intrench  himself  in  the  land  than 
a clam-shell. But the farmer is armed with plow and spade.

    In literature it is only the wild that  attracts  us.  Dullness  is  but 
another name for tameness. It is the uncivilized free and wild  thinking  in 
Hamlet and the Iliad, in all the scriptures and mythologies, not learned  in 
the schools, that delights us. As the wild duck is more swift and  beautiful 
than the tame, so is the wild - the mallard - thought,  which  'mid  falling 
dews wings its way above the  fens.  A  truly  good  book  is  something  as 
natural, and as unexpectedly and unaccountably fair and perfect, as a  wild-
flower discovered on the prairies of the West or in the jungles of the East. 
Genius is a light which makes the darkness  visible,  like  the  lightning's 
flash, which perchance shatters the temple  of  knowledge  itself - and  not 
a taper lighted at the hearthstone of the race, which pales before the light 
of common day.

    English literature, from the days of the minstrels to the  Lake  Poets - 
Chaucer and Spenser and Milton, and even Shakespeare, included - breathes no 
quite fresh and, in this sense, wild strain. It is an essentially  tame  and 
civilized literature, reflecting Greece and Rome. Her wilderness is a  green 
wood, her wild man a Robin Hood. There is plenty of genial love  of  Nature,
but not so much of Nature herself. Her chronicles inform us  when  her  wild 
animals, but not when the wild man in her, became extinct.

    The science of Humboldt is one thing, poetry is another thing. The  poet 
today, notwithstanding all the discoveries of science, and  the  accumulated 
learning of mankind, enjoys no advantage over Homer.

    Where is the literature which gives expression to Nature?  He  would  be 
a poet who could impress the winds and streams into his  service,  to  speak 
for him; who nailed words to their primitive senses, as farmers  drive  down 
stakes in the spring, which the frost has heaved; who derived his  words  as 
often as he used them - transplanted them to his page with earth adhering to 
their roots; whose words were so true and fresh and natural that they  would 
appear to expand like the buds at the approach of spring,  though  they  lay 
half smothered between two musty leaves in a  library - aye,  to  bloom  and 
bear fruit there, after their kind, annually, for the  faithful  reader,  in 
sympathy with surrounding Nature.

    I do not know of any poetry to quote  which  adequately  expresses  this 
yearning for the Wild. Approached from this side, the best poetry is tame. I 
do not know where to find in any literature, ancient or modern, any  account 
which contents me of that Nature with which even I am acquainted.  You  will 
perceive that I demand something which  no  Augustan  nor  Elizabethan  age, 
which no culture, in short, can give. Mythology  comes  nearer  to  it  than
anything. How much more fertile a Nature, at least,  has  Grecian  mythology 
its root in than English literature! Mythology is the  crop  which  the  Old 
World bore before its soil was exhausted, before the fancy  and  imagination 
were affected with blight; and which it still bears, wherever  its  pristine 
vigor is unabated. All other literatures  endure  only  as  the  elms  which 
overshadow our houses; but this is like the great dragon-tree of the Western
Isles, as old as mankind, and, whether that does  or  not,  will  endure  as 
long; for the decay of other literatures makes the soil in which it thrives.

    The West is preparing to add its  fables  to  those  of  the  East.  The 
valleys of the Ganges, the Nile, and the Shine having yielded their crop, it 
remains to be seen what the valleys of the Amazon, the Plate,  the  Orinoco, 
the St. Lawrence, and the Mississippi will produce. Perchance, when, in  the 
course of ages, American liberty has become a fiction of the past - as it is 
to some extent a fiction of the present - the poets of  the  world  will  be 
inspired by American mythology.

    The wildest dreams of wild men, even, are not the less true, though they 
may not recommend themselves  to  the  sense  which  is  most  common  among 
Englishmen and Americans today. It is not every truth that recommends itself 
to the common sense. Nature has a place for the wild Clematis as well as for 
the cabbage. Some  expressions  of  truth  are  reminiscent - others  merely 
SENSIBLE, as the phrase is, - others prophetic. Some forms of disease, even,
may prophesy forms of health. The geologist has discovered that the  figures 
of serpents, griffins, flying dragons, and other fanciful embellishments  of 
heraldry, have their prototypes in the forms of fossil  species  which  were 
extinct before man was created, and hence  "indicate  a  faint  and  shadowy 
knowledge of a previous state of organic existence." The Hindus dreamed that 
the earth rested on an elephant, and the elephant on  a  tortoise,  and  the 
tortoise on a serpent; and though it may be an unimportant  coincidence,  it 
will not be out of place here to state, that a fossil  tortoise  has  lately 
been discovered in Asia large enough to support an elephant. I confess  that 
I am partial to these wild fancies, which transcend the order  of  time  and 
development. They  are  the  sublimest  recreation  of  the  intellect.  The 
partridge loves peas, but not those that go with her into the pot.

    In short, all good things are wild  and  free.  There  is  something  in 
a strain of music, whether produced by an instrument or by the human voice - 
take the sound of a bugle in a summer night,  for  instance - which  by  its 
wildness, to speak without satire, reminds me of the cries emitted  by  wild 
beasts in their native forests. It is so much of their  wildness  as  I  can 
understand. Give me for my friends and neighbors wild men,  not  tame  ones. 
The wildness of the savage is but a faint symbol of the  awful  ferity  with 
which good men and lovers meet.

    I love even to see the domestic animals reassert their  native  rights - 
any evidence that they have not wholly lost their original wild  habits  and 
vigor; as when my neighbor's cow breaks out of  her  pasture  early  in  the 
spring and boldly swims the river, a cold, gray tide, twenty-five or  thirty 
rods wide, swollen by the melted  snow.  It  is  the  buffalo  crossing  the
Mississippi. This exploit confers some dignity on  the  herd  in  my  eyes - 
already dignified. The seeds of instinct are preserved under the thick hides 
of cattle and horses, like seeds in the bowels of the earth,  an  indefinite 
period.

    Any sportiveness in cattle is unexpected.  I  saw  one  day  a  herd  of 
a dozen bullocks and cows running about and frisking in unwieldy sport, like 
huge rats, even like kittens. They shook their heads,  raised  their  tails, 
and rushed up and down a hill, and I perceived by their horns, as well as by 
their activity, their relation to the deer tribe. But, alas! a  sudden  loud 
WHOA! would have damped their ardor at once, reduced them  from  venison  to
beef, and stiffened their sides and sinews like the locomotive. Who but  the 
Evil One has cried "Whoa!" to mankind? Indeed, the life of cattle, like that 
of many men, is but a sort of locomotiveness; they move a side  at  a  time, 
and man, by his machinery, is meeting the horse and the ox halfway. Whatever 
part the whip has touched is thenceforth palsied. Who would  ever  think  of 
a SIDE of any of the supple cat tribe, as we speak of a SIDE of beef?

    I rejoice that horses and steers have to be broken before  they  can  be 
made the slaves of men, and that men themselves have some  wild  oats  still 
left to sow before they become submissive members of  society.  Undoubtedly, 
all men are not equally fit  subjects  for  civilization;  and  because  the 
majority, like dogs and sheep, are tame by inherited disposition, this is no 
reason why the others should have their natures  broken  that  they  may  be 
reduced to the same level. Men are in the main alike,  but  they  were  made 
several in order that they might be various. If a low use is to  be  served, 
one man will do nearly  or  quite  as  well  as  another;  if  a  high  one, 
individual excellence is to be regarded. Any man can stop a hole to keep the 
wind away, but no other man could serve so rare a use as the author of  this 
illustration did. Confucius says, - "The skins of the tiger and the leopard, 
when they are tanned, are as the skins of the dog and the sheep tanned." But 
it is not the part of a true culture to tame tigers, any more than it is  to 
make sheep ferocious; and tanning their skins for shoes is not the best  use 
to which they can be put.


    When looking over a list of men's names in a  foreign  language,  as  of 
military officers, or of authors who have written on a particular subject, I 
am reminded once more that there is nothing in a name. The name Menschikoff, 
for instance, has nothing in it to my ears more human than a whisker, and it 
may belong to a rat. As the names of the Poles and Russians are  to  us,  so 
are ours to  them.  It  is  as  if  they  had  been  named  by  the  child's 
rigmarole, - IERY FIERY ICHERY VAN, TITTLE-TOL-TAN. I see in my mind a  herd 
of wild creatures swarming over the earth, and  to  each  the  herdsman  has 
affixed some barbarous sound in his own dialect. The names of  men  are,  of 
course, as cheap and meaningless as BOSE and TRAY, the names of dogs.

    Methinks it would be some advantage to  philosophy  if  men  were  named 
merely in the gross, as they are known. It would be necessary only  to  know 
the genus and perhaps the race or variety, to know the  individual.  We  are 
not prepared to believe that every private  soldier  in  a  Roman  army  had 
a name of his own - because we have not supposed that he had a character  of 
his own.

    At present our only true names are nicknames. I knew a boy who, from his 
peculiar energy, was called "Buster" by  his  playmates,  and  this  rightly 
supplanted his Christian name. Some travelers tell us that an Indian had  no 
name given him at first, but earned it, and his name was his fame; and among 
some tribes he acquired a new name with every new  exploit.  It  is  pitiful 
when a man bears a name for convenience merely, who has earned neither  name 
nor fame.

    I will not allow mere names to make distinctions for me, but  still  see 
men in herds for all them. A familiar name cannot make a man less strange to 
me. It may be given to a savage who retains in secret  his  own  wild  title 
earned in the woods. We have a wild savage in  us,  and  a  savage  name  is 
perchance somewhere recorded as ours. I see that my neighbor, who bears  the 
familiar epithet William or Edwin, takes it off with his jacket. It does not
adhere to him when asleep  or  in  anger,  or  aroused  by  any  passion  or 
inspiration. I seem to hear pronounced by some of his kin at such a time his 
original wild name in some jaw-breaking or else melodious tongue.


    Here is this vast, savage, hovering mother of ours,  Nature,  lying  all 
around, with such beauty, and  such  affection  for  her  children,  as  the 
leopard; and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society, to  that 
culture which is exclusively an  interaction  of  man  on  man - a  sort  of 
breeding in and in, which  produces  at  most  a  merely  English  nobility, 
a civilization destined to have a speedy limit.

    In society, in the best institutions  of  men,  it  is  easy  to  detect 
a certain precocity. When we  should  still  be  growing  children,  we  are 
already little men. Give me a culture  which  imports  much  muck  from  the 
meadows, and deepens the soil - not that which trusts  to  heating  manures, 
and improved implements and modes of culture only!

    Many a poor sore-eyed student that I have heard of  would  grow  faster, 
both intellectually and physically, if, instead of sitting up so very  late, 
he honestly slumbered a fool's allowance.

    There may be an excess even of informing  light.  Niepce,  a  Frenchman, 
discovered  "actinism,"  that  power  in  the  sun's  rays  which   produces 
a chemical effect; that granite rocks, and stone structures, and statues  of 
metal "are all alike destructively acted upon during the hours of  sunshine, 
and, but for provisions of Nature no less wonderful, would soon perish under 
the delicate touch of the most subtle of the agencies of the universe."  But 
he observed that "those  bodies  which  underwent  this  change  during  the 
daylight possessed the power  of  restoring  themselves  to  their  original 
conditions during the hours of night, when this  excitement  was  no  longer 
influencing them." Hence it has been inferred that "the  hours  of  darkness 
are as necessary to the inorganic creation as we know night and sleep are to 
the organic kingdom." Not even does the moon shine every  night,  but  gives
place to darkness.

    I would not have every man nor every part of a man cultivated, any  more 
than I would have every acre of earth cultivated: part will be tillage,  but 
the greater part will be meadow and forest, not only  serving  an  immediate 
use, but preparing a mould against a distant future, by the annual decay  of 
the vegetation which it supports.

    There are other letters for the child to learn than those  which  Cadmus 
invented. The Spaniards have a good term to  express  this  wild  and  dusky 
knowledge - Gramatica parda - tawny grammar, a kind  of  mother-wit  derived 
from that same leopard to which I have referred.

    We have heard of a Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. It  is 
said that knowledge is power, and the like. Methinks there is equal need  of 
a Society for the Diffusion of Useful Ignorance, what we will call Beautiful 
Knowledge, a knowledge useful in a higher sense: for what  is  most  of  our 
boasted so-called knowledge but a conceit that we know something, which robs 
us of the advantage of our actual ignorance? What we call knowledge is often 
our positive ignorance; ignorance our negative knowledge. By long  years  of 
patient industry and reading of the newspapers - for what are the  libraries 
of science but files of newspapers - a man accumulates a myriad facts,  lays 
them up in his memory, and then when in some spring of his life he  saunters
abroad into the Great Fields of thought, he, as it were, goes to grass  like 
a horse and leaves all his harness behind in the stable. I would say to  the 
Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, sometimes, - Go to grass. You 
have eaten hay long enough. The spring has come with  its  green  crop.  The 
very cows are driven to their country pastures before the end of May; though 
I have heard of one unnatural farmer who kept his cow in the  barn  and  fed 
her on hay all the year round. So, frequently, the Society for the Diffusion 
of Useful Knowledge treats its cattle.

    A man's ignorance sometimes is not only  useful,  but  beautiful - while 
his knowledge, so called, is oftentimes worse than  useless,  besides  being 
ugly. Which is the best man  to  deal  with - he  who  knows  nothing  about 
a subject, and, what is extremely rare, knows that he knows nothing,  or  he 
who really knows something about it, but thinks that he knows all?

    My desire for knowledge is intermittent, but my desire to bathe my  head 
in atmospheres unknown to my feet is perennial  and  constant.  The  highest 
that we can attain to is not Knowledge, but Sympathy with Intelligence. I do 
not know that this higher knowledge amounts to anything more definite than a 
novel and grand surprise on a sudden revelation of the insufficiency of  all
that we called Knowledge before - a discovery that there are more things  in 
heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy. It is  the  lighting 
up of the mist by the sun. Man cannot KNOW in any higher  sense  than  this, 
any more than he can look serenely and with impunity in the face of the sun: 
"You will not perceive that, as perceiving  a  particular  thing,"  say  the 
Chaldean Oracles.

    There is something servile in the habit of seeking after a law which  we 
may obey. We may study the laws of matter at and for  our  convenience,  but 
a successful life knows no law. It is an  unfortunate  discovery  certainly, 
that of a law which binds us where we did  not  know  before  that  we  were 
bound. Live free, child of the mist - and with respect to knowledge  we  are 
all children of the mist. The man who takes the liberty to live is  superior 
to all the laws, by virtue of his relation to the lawmaker. "That is  active 
duty," says the Vishnu Purana, "which  is  not  for  our  bondage;  that  is 
knowledge which is for our liberation: all other  duty  is  good  only  unto 
weariness; all other knowledge is only the cleverness of an artist."


    It is remarkable how few events or crises there are  in  our  histories, 
how little exercised we have been in our minds, how few experiences we  have 
had. I would fain be assured that I am growing apace and rankly,  though  my 
very growth disturb  this  dull  equanimity - though  it  be  with  struggle 
through long, dark, muggy nights or seasons of gloom. It would  be  well  if 
all our lives were a divine tragedy even, instead of this trivial comedy  or
farce. Dante, Bunyan, and others appear to  have  been  exercised  in  their 
minds more than we: they were subjected to a kind of  culture  such  as  our 
district schools and colleges do not contemplate. Even Mahomet, though  many 
may scream at his name, had a good deal more to live for, aye,  and  to  die 
for, than they have commonly.

    When, at rare intervals, some thought visits one,  as  perchance  he  is 
walking on a railroad, then, indeed, the cars  go  by  without  his  hearing 
them. But soon, by some inexorable law,  our  life  goes  by  and  the  cars 
return.

         "Gentle breeze, that wanderest unseen,
         And bendest the thistles round Loira of storms,
         Traveler of the windy glens,
         Why hast thou left my ear so soon?"

    While almost all men feel an attraction drawing them to society, few are 
attracted strongly to Nature. In their reaction to Nature men appear  to  me 
for the most part, notwithstanding their arts, lower than the animals. It is 
not often a beautiful relation, as in the case of the  animals.  How  little 
appreciation of the beauty of the land- scape there is among us! We have  to 
be told that the Greeks called the world Beauty, or Order, but we do not see
clearly why  they  did  so,  and  we  esteem  it  at  best  only  a  curious 
philological fact.

    For my part, I feel that with regard to Nature I live a sort  of  border 
life, on the confines of a world into which I make occasional and  transient 
forays only, and my patriotism  and  allegiance  to  the  state  into  whose 
territories I seem to retreat are those of a moss-trooper. Unto a life which 
I call natural I would gladly follow even a  will-o'-the-wisp  through  bogs 
and sloughs unimaginable, but no moon nor firefly has shown me the  causeway 
to it. Nature is a personality so vast and universal that we have never seen 
one of her features. The walker in the familiar fields which stretch  around 
my native town sometimes finds himself in another land than is described  in 
their owners' deeds, as it were in some faraway field on the confines of the
actual Concord, where her jurisdiction ceases, and the idea which  the  word 
Concord suggests ceases to be suggested. These farms  which  I  have  myself 
surveyed, these bounds which I have set up, appear dimly  still  as  through 
a mist; but they have no chemistry to fix them; they fade from  the  surface 
of the glass, and the picture which the painter  painted  stands  out  dimly 
from beneath. The world with which we  are  commonly  acquainted  leaves  no 
trace, and it will have no anniversary.

    I took a walk on Spaulding's Farm the other afternoon. I saw the setting 
sun lighting up the opposite side of a stately pine wood.  Its  golden  rays 
straggled into the aisles of the  wood  as  into  some  noble  hall.  I  was 
impressed as if some ancient and altogether admirable and shining family had 
settled there in that part of the land called Concord,  unknown  to  me - to 
whom the sun was servant - who had not gone into society  in  the  village - 
who had not been called on. I saw their park, their pleasure-ground,  beyond 
through the wood, in Spaulding's cranberry-meadow. The pines furnished  them 
with gables as they grew. Their house was not obvious to vision;  the  trees 
grew through it. I do not know whether I heard the sounds  of  a  suppressed 
hilarity or not. They seemed to recline on the sunbeams. They have sons  and 
daughters. They are quite well. The farmer's cart-path, which leads directly
through their hall, does not in the least put them out, as the muddy  bottom 
of a pool is sometimes seen through the reflected skies. They never heard of 
Spaulding, and do not  know  that  he  is  their  neighbor - notwithstanding 
I heard him whistle as he drove his team  through  the  house.  Nothing  can 
equal the serenity of their lives. Their coat-of-arms is  simply  a  lichen. 
I saw it painted on the pines and oaks. Their attics were in the tops of the 
trees. They are of no politics. There was no  noise  of  labor.  I  did  not 
perceive that they were weaving or spinning. Yet I did detect, when the wind 
lulled and hearing was done away, the finest imaginable sweet musical hum, - 
as of a distant hive  in  May,  which  perchance  was  the  sound  of  their 
thinking. They had no idle thoughts, and no  one  without  could  see  their 
work, for their industry was not as in knots and excrescences embayed.

    But I find it difficult to remember them. They fade irrevocably  out  of 
my mind even now while I speak, and endeavor to recall  them  and  recollect 
myself. It is only after a long and serious  effort  to  recollect  my  best 
thoughts that I become again aware of their cohabitancy. If it were not  for 
such families as this, I think I should move out of Concord.


    We are accustomed to say in New England that few and fewer pigeons visit 
us every year. Our forests furnish no mast for them. So, it would seem,  few 
and fewer thoughts visit each growing man from year to year, for  the  grove 
in our minds is laid waste - sold to feed unnecessary fires of ambition,  or 
sent to mill - and there is scarcely a twig left for them to perch on.  They 
no longer build nor breed with us. In some more  genial  season,  perchance, 
a faint shadow flits across the landscape of the mind, cast by the WINGS  of 
some thought in its vernal or autumnal migration, but, looking  up,  we  are 
unable to detect the substance of the thought itself.  Our  winged  thoughts 
are turned to poultry.  They  no  longer  soar,  and  they  attain  only  to 
a Shanghai  and  Cochin-China  grandeur.  Those  GRA-A-ATE  THOUGHTS,  those 
GRA-A-ATE men you hear of!

    We hug the earth - how  rarely  we  mount!  Methinks  we  might  elevate 
ourselves a little more. We might climb a tree, at least. I found my account 
in climbing a tree once. It was a tall white pine, on the top of a hill; and 
though I got well pitched, I was well paid for  it,  for  I  discovered  new 
mountains in the horizon which I had never seen before - so much more of the 
earth and the heavens. I might have walked about the foot of  the  tree  for 
threescore years and ten, and yet I certainly should never have  seen  them. 
But, above all, I discovered around me - it was near the  end  of  June - on 
the ends of the topmost  branches  only,  a  few  minute  and  delicate  red 
conelike blossoms, the fertile flower of the white pine looking  heavenward. 
I carried straightway to the village the topmost spire,  and  showed  it  to 
stranger jurymen who walked the streets - for it  was  court  week - and  to 
farmers and lumber-dealers and woodchoppers and hunters,  and  not  one  had 
ever seen the like before, but they wondered as at a star dropped down. Tell 
of ancient architects finishing their  works  on  the  tops  of  columns  as 
perfectly as on the lower and more visible parts! Nature has from the  first 
expanded the minute blossoms of the forest only toward  the  heavens,  above 
men's heads and unobserved by them. We see only the flowers that  are  under 
our feet in the meadows. The pines have developed their delicate blossoms on 
the highest twigs of the wood every summer for ages, as well over the  heads 
of Nature's red children as of her white ones;  yet  scarcely  a  farmer  or 
hunter in the land has ever seen them.


    Above all, we cannot afford not to live in the present.  He  is  blessed 
over all mortals who loses no moment of the passing life in remembering  the 
past. Unless our philosophy hears the cock crow in every barnyard within our 
horizon, it is belated. That sound commonly reminds us that we  are  growing 
rusty and antique in our employments and habits of thoughts. His  philosophy 
comes down to a more recent time than ours. There is something suggested  by 
it that is a newer testament, - the gospel according to this moment. He  has 
not fallen astern; he has got up early and kept up early, and to be where he 
is is to be in season, in the foremost rank of time. It is an expression  of 
the health and soundness of Nature, a brag for all the  world, - healthiness 
as of a spring burst forth, a new fountain of the Muses, to  celebrate  this 
last instant of time. Where he lives no fugitive slave laws are passed.  Who 
has not betrayed his master many times since last he heard that note?

    The  merit  of  this  bird's  strain  is  in  its   freedom   from   all 
plaintiveness. The singer can easily move us to tears or  to  laughter,  but 
where is he who can excite in us a pure morning joy? When, in doleful dumps, 
breaking the awful stillness  of  our  wooden  sidewalk  on  a  Sunday,  or, 
perchance, a watcher in the house of mourning, I hear a cockerel crow far or 
near, I think to myself, "There is one of us well, at any rate," - and  with 
a sudden gush return to my senses.


    We had a remarkable sunset one day  last  November.  I  was  walking  in 
a meadow, the source of a small brook, when the sun  at  last,  just  before 
setting, after a cold, gray day, reached a clear stratum in the horizon, and 
the softest, brightest morning sunlight fell on the dry  grass  and  on  the 
stems of the trees in the opposite horizon and on the leaves  of  the  shrub 
oaks on the hillside, while our shadows stretched long over the meadow east-
ward, as if we were the only motes in its beams. It was such a light  as  we 
could not have imagined a moment before, and the air also was  so  warm  and 
serene that nothing was wanting to make a paradise of that meadow.  When  we 
reflected that this was not a solitary phenomenon, never  to  happen  again,  
but that it would happen forever and ever, an infinite number  of  evenings, 
and cheer and reassure the latest child  that  walked  there,  it  was  more 
glorious still.

    The sun sets on some retired meadow, where no house is visible, with all 
the glory and splendor that it lavishes on cities, and perchance as  it  has 
never set before - where there is but a solitary  marsh  hawk  to  have  his 
wings gilded by it, or only a musquash looks out from his cabin,  and  there 
is some little black-veined brook in the midst of the marsh, just  beginning 
to meander, winding slowly round a decaying stump. We walked in so pure  and 
bright a light, gilding  the  withered  grass  and  leaves,  so  softly  and 
serenely bright, I thought I had  never  bathed  in  such  a  golden  flood, 
without a ripple or a murmur to it. The west side of every wood  and  rising 
ground gleamed like the boundary of Elysium, and the sun on our backs seemed 
like a gentle herdsman driving us home at evening.

    So we saunter toward the Holy Land, till one day  the  sun  shall  shine 
more brightly than ever he has done, shall perchance shine  into  our  minds 
and hearts, and light up our whole lives with a great  awakening  light,  as 
warm and serene and golden as on a bankside in autumn.




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