Footpath Way: An Anthology for Walkers — Walking, and the Wild, Part 2

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 traveller 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 words on a larger scale, but has painted the whole picture with brighter and more costly colours 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.

LinnÊus said long ago, "_Nescio quÊ facies_ lÊta, 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, _AfricanÊ bestiÊ_, 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 traveller 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 traveller something, he knows not what, of _lÊta_ 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 favourably 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 sympathise 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 plough 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 vigour 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-vitÊ 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 civilisation 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 Cummings 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 odour 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 colour 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 labours, 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 analysed 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 further 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 gravelled 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 parlour, 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 neighbourhood 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 labours, 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 traveller 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 travelling long on the steppes of Tartary say--"On re-entering cultivated lands, the agitation, perplexity, and turmoil of civilisation 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 wild-wood 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 civilised 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 bush-whack, 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 plough and spade.

In Literature it is only the wild that attracts us.

Dullness is but another name for tameness.

It is the uncivilised 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 civilised 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 to-day, 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,--ay, 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, whenever its pristine vigour 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 Rhine, 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 to-day.

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 Hindoos 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.