No More Learning

We therefore
need not suppose an oak standing here and there _in_ the wood in order
to seed it, but if a few stand within twenty or thirty rods of it, it
is sufficient.

I think that I may venture to say that every white pine cone that
falls to the earth naturally in this town, before opening and losing
its seeds, and almost every pitch pine one that falls at all, is cut
off by a squirrel, and they begin to pluck them long before they are
ripe, so that when the crop of white pine cones is a small one, as it
commonly is, they cut off thus almost every one of these before it
fairly ripens. I think, moreover, that their design, if I may so
speak, in cutting them off green, is, partly, to prevent their opening
and losing their seeds, for these are the ones for which they dig
through the snow, and the only white pine cones which contain anything
then. I have counted in one heap, within a diameter of four feet, the
cores of 239 pitch pine cones which had been cut off and stripped by
the red squirrel the previous winter.

The nuts thus left on the surface, or buried just beneath it, are
placed in the most favorable circumstances for germinating. I have
sometimes wondered how those which merely fell on the surface of the
earth got planted; but, by the end of December, I find the chestnut of
the same year partially mixed with the mould, as it were, under the
decaying and mouldy leaves, where there is all the moisture and manure
they want, for the nuts fall fast. In a plentiful year, a large
proportion of the nuts are thus covered loosely an inch deep, and are,
of course, somewhat concealed from squirrels. One winter, when the
crop had been abundant, I got, with the aid of a rake, many quarts of
these nuts as late as the tenth of January, and though some bought at
the store the same day were more than half of them mouldy, I did not
find a single mouldy one among these which I picked from under the wet
and mouldy leaves, where they had been snowed on once or twice. Nature
knows how to pack them best. They were still plump and tender.
Apparently, they do not heat there, though wet. In the spring they
were all sprouting.

Loudon says that "when the nut [of the common walnut of Europe] is to
be preserved through the winter for the purpose of planting in the
following spring, it should be laid in a rot-heap, as soon as
gathered, with the husk on, and the heap should be turned over
frequently in the course of the winter. "

Here, again, he is stealing Nature's "thunder. " How can a poor mortal
do otherwise? for it is she that finds fingers to steal with, and the
treasure to be stolen. In the planting of the seeds of most trees, the
best gardeners do no more than follow Nature, though they may not know
it. Generally, both large and small ones are most sure to germinate,
and succeed best, when only beaten into the earth with the back of a
spade, and then covered with leaves or straw. These results to which
planters have arrived remind us of the experience of Kane and his
companions at the north, who, when learning to live in that climate,
were surprised to find themselves steadily adopting the customs of the
natives, simply becoming Esquimaux. So, when we experiment in planting
forests, we find ourselves at last doing as Nature does. Would it not
be well to consult with Nature in the outset? for she is the most
extensive and experienced planter of us all, not excepting the Dukes
of Athol.

In short, they who have not attended particularly to this subject are
but little aware to what an extent quadrupeds and birds are employed,
especially in the fall, in collecting, and so disseminating and
planting, the seeds of trees. It is the almost constant employment of
the squirrels at that season, and you rarely meet with one that has
not a nut in its mouth, or is not just going to get one. One
squirrel-hunter of this town told me that he knew of a walnut tree
which bore particularly good nuts, but that on going to gather them
one fall, he found that he had been anticipated by a family of a dozen
red squirrels. He took out of the tree, which was hollow, one bushel
and three pecks by measurement, without the husks, and they supplied
him and his family for the winter. It would be easy to multiply
instances of this kind. How commonly in the fall you see the
cheek-pouches of the striped squirrel distended by a quantity of nuts!
This species gets its scientific name, _Tamias_, or the steward, from
its habit of storing up nuts and other seeds. Look under a nut tree a
month after the nuts have fallen, and see what proportion of sound
nuts to the abortive ones and shells you will find ordinarily. They
have been already eaten, or dispersed far and wide. The ground looks
like a platform before a grocery, where the gossips of the village sit
to crack nuts and less savory jokes. You have come, you would say,
after the feast was over, and are presented with the shells only.

Occasionally, when threading the woods in the fall, you will hear a
sound as if some one had broken a twig, and, looking up, see a jay
pecking at an acorn, or you will see a flock of them at once about it,
in the top of an oak, and hear them break them off. They then fly to a
suitable limb, and placing the acorn under one foot, hammer away at it
busily, making a sound like a woodpecker's tapping, looking round from
time to time to see if any foe is approaching, and soon reach the
meat, and nibble at it, holding up their heads to swallow, while they
hold the remainder very firmly with their claws. Nevertheless it often
drops to the ground before the bird has done with it. I can confirm
what William Bartram wrote to Wilson, the ornithologist, that "the jay
is one of the most useful agents in the economy of nature, for
disseminating forest trees and other nuciferous and hard-seeded
vegetables on which they feed. Their chief employment during the
autumnal season is foraging to supply their winter stores. In
performing this necessary duty they drop abundance of seed in their
flight over fields, hedges, and by fences, where they alight to
deposit them in the post-holes, etc. It is remarkable what numbers of
young trees rise up in fields and pastures after a wet winter and
spring. These birds alone are capable, in a few years' time, to
replant all the cleared lands. "

I have noticed that squirrels also frequently drop their nuts in open
land, which will still further account for the oaks and walnuts which
spring up in pastures, for, depend on it, every new tree comes from a
seed. When I examine the little oaks, one or two years old, in such
places, I invariably find the empty acorn from which they sprung.

So far from the seed having lain dormant in the soil since oaks grew
there before, as many believe, it is well known that it is difficult
to preserve the vitality of acorns long enough to transport them to
Europe; and it is recommended in Loudon's "Arboretum," as the safest
course, to sprout them in pots on the voyage. The same authority
states that "very few acorns of any species will germinate after
having been kept a year," that beech mast "only retains its vital
properties one year," and the black walnut "seldom more than six
months after it has ripened. " I have frequently found that in November
almost every acorn left on the ground had sprouted or decayed. What
with frost, drouth, moisture, and worms, the greater part are soon
destroyed. Yet it is stated by one botanical writer that "acorns that
have lain for centuries, on being ploughed up, have soon vegetated. "

Mr. George B. Emerson, in his valuable Report on the Trees and Shrubs
of this State, says of the pines: "The tenacity of life of the seeds
is remarkable. They will remain for many years unchanged in the
ground, protected by the coolness and deep shade of the forest above
them. But when the forest is removed, and the warmth of the sun
admitted, they immediately vegetate. " Since he does not tell us on
what observation his remark is founded, I must doubt its truth.
Besides, the experience of nursery-men makes it the more questionable.

The stories of wheat raised from seed buried with an ancient Egyptian,
and of raspberries raised from seed found in the stomach of a man in
England, who is supposed to have died sixteen or seventeen hundred
years ago, are generally discredited, simply because the evidence is
not conclusive.

Several men of science, Dr. Carpenter among them, have used the
statement that beach plums sprang up in sand which was dug up forty
miles inland in Maine, to prove that the seed had lain there a very
long time, and some have inferred that the coast has receded so far.
But it seems to me necessary to their argument to show, first, that
beach plums grow only on a beach. They are not uncommon here, which is
about half that distance from the shore; and I remember a dense patch
a few miles north of us, twenty-five miles inland, from which the
fruit was annually carried to market. How much further inland they
grow, I know not. Dr. Charles T. Jackson speaks of finding "beach
plums" (perhaps they were this kind) more than one hundred miles
inland in Maine.

It chances that similar objections lie against all the more notorious
instances of the kind on record.

Yet I am prepared to believe that some seeds, especially small ones,
may retain their vitality for centuries under favorable circumstances.
In the spring of 1859, the old Hunt house, so called, in this town,
whose chimney bore the date 1703, was taken down. This stood on land
which belonged to John Winthrop, the first governor of Massachusetts,
and a part of the house was evidently much older than the above date,
and belonged to the Winthrop family. For many years I have ransacked
this neighborhood for plants, and I consider myself familiar with its
productions. Thinking of the seeds which are said to be sometimes dug
up at an unusual depth in the earth, and thus to reproduce long
extinct plants, it occurred to me last fall that some new or rare
plants might have sprung up in the cellar of this house, which had
been covered from the light so long. Searching there on the 22d of
September, I found, among other rank weeds, a species of nettle
(_Urtica urens_) which I had not found before; dill, which I had not
seen growing spontaneously; the Jerusalem oak (_Chenopodium Botrys_),
which I had seen wild in but one place; black nightshade (_Solanum
nigrum_), which is quite rare hereabouts, and common tobacco, which,
though it was often cultivated here in the last century, has for fifty
years been an unknown plant in this town, and a few months before this
not even I had heard that one man, in the north part of the town, was
cultivating a few plants for his own use. I have no doubt that some or
all of these plants sprang from seeds which had long been buried under
or about that house, and that that tobacco is an additional evidence
that the plant was formerly cultivated here. The cellar has been
filled up this year, and four of those plants, including the tobacco,
are now again extinct in that locality.

It is true, I have shown that the animals consume a great part of the
seeds of trees, and so, at least, effectually prevent their becoming
trees; but in all these cases, as I have said, the consumer is
compelled to be at the same time the disperser and planter, and this
is the tax which he pays to Nature. I think it is Linnaeus who says
that while the swine is rooting for acorns he is planting acorns.

Though I do not believe that a plant will spring up where no seed has
been, I have great faith in a seed,--a, to me, equally mysterious
origin for it. Convince me that you have a seed there, and I am
prepared to expect wonders. I shall even believe that the millennium
is at hand, and that the reign of justice is about to commence, when
the Patent Office, or Government, begins to distribute, and the people
to plant, the seeds of these things.

In the spring of 1857 I planted six seeds sent to me from the Patent
Office, and labeled, I think, _Poitrine jaune grosse_, large yellow
squash. Two came up, and one bore a squash which weighed 1231/2 pounds,
the other bore four, weighing together 1861/4 pounds. Who would have
believed that there was 310 pounds of _poitrine jaune grosse_ in that
corner of my garden? These seeds were the bait I used to catch it, my
ferrets which I sent into its burrow, my brace of terriers which
unearthed it. A little mysterious hoeing and manuring was all the
_abracadabra presto-change_ that I used, and lo! true to the label,
they found for me 310 pounds of _poitrine jaune grosse_ there, where
it never was known to be, nor was before. These talismans had
perchance sprung from America at first, and returned to it with
unabated force. The big squash took a premium at your fair that fall,
and I understood that the man who bought it, intended to sell the
seeds for ten cents apiece. (Were they not cheap at that? ) But I have
more hounds of the same breed. I learn that one which I despatched to
a distant town, true to its instincts, points to the large yellow
squash there, too, where no hound ever found it before, as its
ancestors did here and in France.

Other seeds I have which will find other things in that corner of my
garden, in like fashion, almost any fruit you wish, every year for
ages, until the crop more than fills the whole garden. You have but
little more to do than throw up your cap for entertainment these
American days. Perfect alchemists I keep who can transmute substances
without end, and thus the corner of my garden is an inexhaustible
treasure-chest. Here you can dig, not gold, but the value which gold
merely represents; and there is no Signor Blitz about it. Yet farmers'
sons will stare by the hour to see a juggler draw ribbons from his
throat, though he tells them it is all deception. Surely, men love
darkness rather than light.

FOOTNOTE:

[6] An Address read to the Middlesex Agricultural Society in Concord,
September, 1860.




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 dumbbells 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 Vespucius,
nor Columbus, nor the rest were the discoverers of it. There is a
truer account 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,
methinks, 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.


[Illustration: _The Old Marlborough Road_]

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;
To-morrow 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 centre 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 scale, 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 to-day.

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 to-day, 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 fibres 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
slaughter-house 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
meagre 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 reentering 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 wood, 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 fibres 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 corn-field 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 clamshell. 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 hearth-stone 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 greenwood, 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.