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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 1022 ***
+
+WALKING
+
+by Henry David Thoreau
+
+
+
+
+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 à 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 dumb-bells 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 wood-side. 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
+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,
+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.
+
+       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
+further—further 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.
+
+Linnæus said long ago, “Nescio quæ facies læta, 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, Africanæ bestiæ, 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 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 læta 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 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 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
+vitæ 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, lamb-kill,
+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 barrow-fuls 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 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 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 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 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.
+
+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 half way. 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-wiery 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
+travellers 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: ?? t? ????, ?? ?e????
+???se??,—“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
+law-maker. “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 relation 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 landscape there
+is among us! We have to be told that the Greeks called the world Κόσμος
+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 wood-choppers 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 barn-yard
+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 grey 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 eastward, 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 bank-side in Autumn.
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 1022 ***
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+<div>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 1022 ***</div>
+
+<h1>Walking</h1>
+
+<h2 class="no-break">by Henry David Thoreau</h2>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>
+I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute Freedom and Wildness, as
+contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil,&mdash;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&mdash;who had a genius, so to
+speak, for <i>sauntering</i>, which word is beautifully derived &ldquo;from
+idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity,
+under pretense of going <i>à la Sainte Terre</i>,&rdquo; to the Holy Land, till
+the children exclaimed, &ldquo;There goes a <i>Sainte-Terrer</i>,&rdquo; 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 <i>sans terre</i> 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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,&mdash;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,&mdash;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&mdash;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&mdash;not the Knight, but Walker
+Errant. He is a sort of fourth estate, outside of Church and State and People.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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. <i>Ambulator nascitur, non fit.</i> 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+&ldquo;When he came to grene wode,<br />
+    In a mery mornynge,<br />
+There he herde the notes small<br />
+    Of byrdes mery syngynge.<br />
+<br />
+&ldquo;It is ferre gone, sayd Robyn,<br />
+    That I was last here;<br />
+Me lyste a lytell for to shote<br />
+    At the donne dere.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend four hours
+a day at least&mdash;and it is commonly more than that&mdash;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&mdash;as if the legs were made to sit upon, and
+not to stand or walk upon&mdash;I think that they deserve some credit for not
+having all committed suicide long ago.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&rsquo;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,&mdash;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&mdash;sitting there now at three o&rsquo;clock in the afternoon, as
+if it were three o&rsquo;clock in the morning. Bonaparte may talk of the
+three-o&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&mdash;and so the
+evil cure itself.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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 <i>stand</i> 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&mdash;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&rsquo;s swinging dumb-bells for his health, when those springs are bubbling
+up in far-off pastures unsought by him!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Moreover, you must walk like a camel, which is said to be the only beast which
+ruminates when walking. When a traveler asked Wordsworth&rsquo;s servant to
+show him her master&rsquo;s study, she answered, &ldquo;Here is his library,
+but his study is out of doors.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Living much out of doors, in the sun and wind, will no doubt produce a certain
+roughness of character&mdash;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&mdash;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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. &ldquo;They planted groves and walks of Platanes,&rdquo; where
+they took <i>subdiales ambulationes</i> 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&mdash;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&mdash;for this may sometimes happen.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&rsquo; 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&rsquo; 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Nowadays almost all man&rsquo;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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 wood-side. 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,&mdash;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,&mdash;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&rsquo;s surface where a man does not stand from one
+year&rsquo;s end to another, and there, consequently, politics are not, for
+they are but as the cigar smoke of a man.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&mdash;a trivial or quadrivial place, the thoroughfare and ordinary of
+travelers. The word is from the Latin <i>villa</i> which together with
+<i>via</i>, a way, or more anciently <i>ved</i> and <i>vella</i>, Varro derives
+from <i>veho</i>, to carry, because the villa is the place to and from which
+things are carried. They who got their living by teaming were said
+<i>vellaturam facere</i>. Hence, too, the Latin word <i>vilis</i> and our
+<i>vile</i>; also <i>villain</i>. 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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 amount of
+it in mythology than in any history of America, so called, that I have seen.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+THE OLD MARLBOROUGH ROAD.<br />
+<br />
+Where they once dug for money,<br />
+But never found any;<br />
+Where sometimes Martial Miles<br />
+Singly files,<br />
+And Elijah Wood,<br />
+I fear for no good:<br />
+No other man,<br />
+Save Elisha Dugan&mdash;<br />
+O man of wild habits,<br />
+Partridges and rabbits,<br />
+Who hast no cares<br />
+Only to set snares,<br />
+Who liv&rsquo;st all alone,<br />
+Close to the bone;<br />
+And where life is sweetest<br />
+Constantly eatest.<br />
+When the spring stirs my blood<br />
+With the instinct to travel,<br />
+I can get enough gravel<br />
+On the Old Marlborough Road.<br />
+Nobody repairs it,<br />
+For nobody wears it;<br />
+It is a living way,<br />
+As the Christians say.<br />
+Not many there be<br />
+Who enter therein,<br />
+Only the guests of the<br />
+Irishman Quin.<br />
+What is it, what is it<br />
+But a direction out there,<br />
+And the bare possibility<br />
+Of going somewhere?<br />
+Great guide boards of stone,<br />
+But travelers none;<br />
+Cenotaphs of the towns<br />
+Named on their crowns.<br />
+It is worth going to see<br />
+Where you <i>might</i> be.<br />
+What king<br />
+Did the thing,<br />
+I am still wondering;<br />
+Set up how or when,<br />
+By what selectmen,<br />
+Gourgas or Lee,<br />
+Clark or Darby?<br />
+They&rsquo;re a great endeavor<br />
+To be something forever;<br />
+Blank tablets of stone,<br />
+Where a traveler might groan,<br />
+And in one sentence<br />
+Grave all that is known<br />
+Which another might read,<br />
+In his extreme need.<br />
+I know one or two<br />
+Lines that would do,<br />
+Literature that might stand<br />
+All over the land,<br />
+Which a man could remember<br />
+Till next December,<br />
+And read again in the spring,<br />
+After the thawing.<br />
+If with fancy unfurled<br />
+You leave your abode,<br />
+You may go round the world<br />
+By the Old Marlborough Road.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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,&mdash;when fences shall be multiplied, and man traps and other
+engines invented to confine men to the <i>public</i> road, and walking over the
+surface of God&rsquo;s earth shall be construed to mean trespassing on some
+gentleman&rsquo;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&mdash;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. &ldquo;The world ends
+there,&rdquo; say they; &ldquo;beyond there is nothing but a shoreless
+sea.&rdquo; It is unmitigated East where they live.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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,&mdash;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,&mdash;that something like the <i>furor</i> which
+affects the domestic cattle in the spring, and which is referred to a worm in
+their tails,&mdash;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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+&ldquo;Than longen folk to gon on pilgrimages,<br />
+And palmeres for to seken strange strondes.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+&ldquo;And now the sun had stretched out all the hills,<br />
+And now was dropped into the western bay;<br />
+At last <i>he</i> rose, and twitched his mantle blue;<br />
+To-morrow to fresh woods and pastures new.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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 &ldquo;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.&rdquo; 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 further&mdash;further than I am ready to follow
+him; yet not when he says: &ldquo;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.&rdquo; When he has exhausted the rich soil of
+Europe, and reinvigorated himself, &ldquo;then recommences his adventurous
+career westward as in the earliest ages.&rdquo; So far Guyot.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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, &ldquo;&lsquo;From what part of the world have you
+come?&rsquo; As if these vast and fertile regions would naturally be the place
+of meeting and common country of all the inhabitants of the globe.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To use an obsolete Latin word, I might say, <i>Ex oriente lux; ex occidente</i>
+FRUX. From the East light; from the West fruit.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Sir Francis Head, an English traveler and a Governor-General of Canada, tells
+us that &ldquo;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.&rdquo; This
+statement will do at least to set against Buffon&rsquo;s account of this part
+of the world and its productions.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Linnæus said long ago, &ldquo;Nescio quæ facies <i>læta, glabra</i> plantis
+Americanis&rdquo; (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, <i>Africanæ bestiæ</i>, 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&mdash;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&mdash;our understanding more
+comprehensive and broader, like our plains&mdash;our intellect generally on a
+grander scale, like our thunder and lightning, our rivers and mountains and
+forests,&mdash;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 <i>læta</i> and <i>glabra</i>, of joyous and
+serene, in our very faces. Else to what end does the world go on, and why was
+America discovered?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To Americans I hardly need to say&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+&ldquo;Westward the star of empire takes its way.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&rsquo;s Cliff&mdash;still thinking more of the future than of the past
+or present&mdash;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 <i>this was the heroic age
+itself</i>, though we know it not, for the hero is commonly the simplest and
+obscurest of men.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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 vitæ 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,&mdash;as if we lived on the marrow of koodoos devoured raw.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There are some intervals which border the strain of the wood-thrush, to which I
+would migrate&mdash;wild lands where no settler has squatted; to which,
+methinks, I am already acclimated.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&rsquo;s coat
+emits the odor of musquash even; it is a sweeter scent to me than that which
+commonly exhales from the merchant&rsquo;s or the scholar&rsquo;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&rsquo; exchanges and libraries rather.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A tanned skin is something more than respectable, and perhaps olive is a fitter
+color than white for a man&mdash;a denizen of the woods. &ldquo;The pale white
+man!&rdquo; I do not wonder that the African pitied him. Darwin the naturalist
+says, &ldquo;A white man bathing by the side of a Tahitian was like a plant
+bleached by the gardener&rsquo;s art, compared with a fine, dark green one,
+growing vigorously in the open fields.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Ben Jonson exclaims,&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+&ldquo;How near to good is what is fair!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+So I would say,&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+&ldquo;How near to good is what is <i>wild!</i>&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&mdash;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
+(<i>Cassandra calyculata</i>) which cover these tender places on the
+earth&rsquo;s surface. Botany cannot go farther than tell me the names of the
+shrubs which grow there&mdash;the high-blueberry, panicled andromeda,
+lamb-kill, azalea, and rhodora&mdash;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&mdash;to have this fertile spot under my windows, not
+a few imported barrow-fuls 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&mdash;&ldquo;Your <i>morale</i> 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.&rdquo; They who
+have been traveling long on the steppes of Tartary say, &ldquo;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.&rdquo; 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,&mdash;a <i>sanctum
+sanctorum</i>. There is the strength, the marrow, of Nature. The wild wood
+covers the virgin mould,&mdash;and the same soil is good for men and for trees.
+A man&rsquo;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&mdash;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&rsquo;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The civilized nations&mdash;Greece, Rome, England&mdash;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is said to be the task of the American &ldquo;to work the virgin
+soil,&rdquo; and that &ldquo;agriculture here already assumes proportions
+unknown everywhere else.&rdquo; 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,&mdash;&ldquo;Leave all hope, ye that
+enter&rdquo;&mdash;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 <i>survey</i> 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&rsquo;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&mdash;the mallard&mdash;thought, which &rsquo;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&rsquo;s flash, which perchance
+shatters the temple of knowledge itself&mdash;and not a taper lighted at the
+hearthstone of the race, which pales before the light of common day.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+English literature, from the days of the minstrels to the Lake
+Poets&mdash;Chaucer and Spenser and Milton, and even Shakespeare
+included&mdash;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&mdash;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,&mdash;aye, to bloom and bear fruit there, after
+their kind, annually, for the faithful reader, in sympathy with surrounding
+Nature.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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
+<i>culture</i>, 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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,&mdash;as it is to some
+extent a fiction of the present,&mdash;the poets of the world will be inspired
+by American mythology.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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,&mdash;others merely <i>sensible</i>,
+as the phrase is,&mdash;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 &ldquo;indicate a faint and shadowy
+knowledge of a previous state of organic existence.&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&mdash;take the
+sound of a bugle in a summer night, for instance,&mdash;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I love even to see the domestic animals reassert their native rights&mdash;any
+evidence that they have not wholly lost their original wild habits and vigor;
+as when my neighbor&rsquo;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&mdash;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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 <i>Whoa!</i> 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 &ldquo;Whoa!&rdquo; 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 half way. Whatever part the
+whip has touched is thenceforth palsied. Who would ever think of a <i>side</i>
+of any of the supple cat tribe, as we speak of a <i>side</i> of beef?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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,&mdash;&ldquo;The
+skins of the tiger and the leopard, when they are tanned, are as the skins of
+the dog and the sheep tanned.&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When looking over a list of men&rsquo;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&rsquo;s
+rigmarole&mdash;<i>Iery-wiery ichery van, tittle-tol-tan</i>. 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 <i>Bose</i> and <i>Tray</i>, the names of
+dogs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&mdash;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 &ldquo;Buster&rdquo; by his playmates, and this rightly
+supplanted his Christian name. Some travellers 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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,&mdash;a sort of breeding in and in,
+which produces at most a merely English nobility, a civilization destined to
+have a speedy limit.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&mdash;not that which trusts to heating manures, and improved implements
+and modes of culture only!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&rsquo;s allowance.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There may be an excess even of informing light. Niepce, a Frenchman, discovered
+&ldquo;actinism,&rdquo; that power in the sun&rsquo;s rays which produces a
+chemical effect; that granite rocks, and stone structures, and statues of metal
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+But he observed that &ldquo;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.&rdquo; Hence it has been inferred that &ldquo;the hours of
+darkness are as necessary to the inorganic creation as we know night and sleep
+are to the organic kingdom.&rdquo; Not even does the moon shine every night,
+but gives place to darkness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&mdash;<i>Gramatica parda</i>&mdash;tawny grammar, a kind of
+mother-wit derived from that same leopard to which I have referred.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&mdash;for what are the libraries of
+science but files of newspapers&mdash;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,&mdash;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A man&rsquo;s ignorance sometimes is not only useful, but beautiful&mdash;while
+his knowledge, so called, is oftentimes worse than useless, besides being ugly.
+Which is the best man to deal with&mdash;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?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&mdash;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 <i>know</i> in any higher sense than this, any more
+than he can look serenely and with impunity in the face of the sun:
+&#8009;&#962; &#964;&#8054; &#957;&#959;&#8182;&#957;, &#959;&#8016;
+&#954;&#949;&#8150;&#957;&#959;&#957;
+&#957;&#959;&#8053;&#963;&#949;&#953;&#962;,&mdash;&ldquo;You will not perceive
+that, as perceiving a particular thing,&rdquo; say the Chaldean Oracles.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&mdash;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 law-maker. &ldquo;That is active duty,&rdquo;
+says the Vishnu Purana, &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&mdash;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+&ldquo;Gentle breeze, that wanderest unseen,<br />
+And bendest the thistles round Loira of storms,<br />
+Traveler of the windy glens,<br />
+Why hast thou left my ear so soon?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+While almost all men feel an attraction drawing them to society, few are
+attracted strongly to Nature. In their relation 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 landscape there is among us! We have to be
+told that the Greeks called the world &#922;&#8057;&#963;&#956;&#959;&#962;
+Beauty, or Order, but we do not see clearly why they did so, and we esteem it
+at best only a curious philological fact.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&rsquo;-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&rsquo; 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I took a walk on Spaulding&rsquo;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&mdash;to whom the
+sun was servant&mdash;who had not gone into society in the village&mdash;who
+had not been called on. I saw their park, their pleasure-ground, beyond through
+the wood, in Spaulding&rsquo;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&rsquo;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,&mdash;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,&mdash;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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,&mdash;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 <i>wings</i> 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 <i>gra-a-ate thoughts</i>, those <i>gra-a-ate men</i> you
+hear of!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We hug the earth&mdash;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,&mdash;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,&mdash;it was near the end of June,&mdash;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,&mdash;for it was court week&mdash;and to farmers and lumber-dealers
+and wood-choppers 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&rsquo;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&rsquo;s red children as of her white
+ones; yet scarcely a farmer or hunter in the land has ever seen them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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 barn-yard 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,&mdash;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,&mdash;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?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The merit of this bird&rsquo;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,
+&ldquo;There is one of us well, at any rate,&rdquo;&mdash;and with a sudden
+gush return to my senses.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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 grey 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 eastward, 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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,&mdash;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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 bank-side in Autumn.
+</p>
+
+<div>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 1022 ***</div>
+</body>
+
+</html>
+
+
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #1022 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1022)
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+The Project Gutenberg eBook of Walking, by Henry David Thoreau
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
+most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
+whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
+of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
+www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you
+will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before
+using this eBook.
+
+Title: Walking
+
+Author: Henry David Thoreau
+
+Release Date: August, 1997 [eBook #1022]
+[Most recently updated: January 15, 2021]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+Produced by: Q Myers, and David Widger
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WALKING ***
+
+
+
+
+WALKING
+
+by Henry David Thoreau
+
+
+
+
+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 à 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 dumb-bells 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 wood-side. 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
+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,
+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.
+
+       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
+further—further 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.
+
+Linnæus said long ago, “Nescio quæ facies læta, 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, Africanæ bestiæ, 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 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 læta 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 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 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
+vitæ 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, lamb-kill,
+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 barrow-fuls 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 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 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 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 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.
+
+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 half way. 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-wiery 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
+travellers 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: ?? t? ????, ?? ?e????
+???se??,—“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
+law-maker. “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 relation 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 landscape there
+is among us! We have to be told that the Greeks called the world Κόσμος
+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 wood-choppers 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 barn-yard
+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 grey 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 eastward, 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 bank-side in Autumn.
+
+
+
+
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+<div style='text-align:center; font-size:1.2em; font-weight:bold;'>The Project Gutenberg eBook of Walking, by Henry David Thoreau</div>
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+</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:1em; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Title: Walking</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:1em; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Author: Henry David Thoreau</div>
+<div style='display:block;margin:1em 0'>Release Date: August, 1997 [eBook #1022]<br />
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+<div style='margin-top:2em;margin-bottom:4em'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WALKING ***</div>
+
+<h1>Walking</h1>
+
+<h2 class="no-break">by Henry David Thoreau</h2>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>
+I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute Freedom and Wildness, as
+contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil,&mdash;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&mdash;who had a genius, so to
+speak, for <i>sauntering</i>, which word is beautifully derived &ldquo;from
+idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity,
+under pretense of going <i>à la Sainte Terre</i>,&rdquo; to the Holy Land, till
+the children exclaimed, &ldquo;There goes a <i>Sainte-Terrer</i>,&rdquo; 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 <i>sans terre</i> 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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,&mdash;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,&mdash;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&mdash;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&mdash;not the Knight, but Walker
+Errant. He is a sort of fourth estate, outside of Church and State and People.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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. <i>Ambulator nascitur, non fit.</i> 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+&ldquo;When he came to grene wode,<br />
+    In a mery mornynge,<br />
+There he herde the notes small<br />
+    Of byrdes mery syngynge.<br />
+<br />
+&ldquo;It is ferre gone, sayd Robyn,<br />
+    That I was last here;<br />
+Me lyste a lytell for to shote<br />
+    At the donne dere.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend four hours
+a day at least&mdash;and it is commonly more than that&mdash;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&mdash;as if the legs were made to sit upon, and
+not to stand or walk upon&mdash;I think that they deserve some credit for not
+having all committed suicide long ago.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&rsquo;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,&mdash;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&mdash;sitting there now at three o&rsquo;clock in the afternoon, as
+if it were three o&rsquo;clock in the morning. Bonaparte may talk of the
+three-o&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&mdash;and so the
+evil cure itself.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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 <i>stand</i> 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&mdash;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&rsquo;s swinging dumb-bells for his health, when those springs are bubbling
+up in far-off pastures unsought by him!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Moreover, you must walk like a camel, which is said to be the only beast which
+ruminates when walking. When a traveler asked Wordsworth&rsquo;s servant to
+show him her master&rsquo;s study, she answered, &ldquo;Here is his library,
+but his study is out of doors.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Living much out of doors, in the sun and wind, will no doubt produce a certain
+roughness of character&mdash;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&mdash;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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. &ldquo;They planted groves and walks of Platanes,&rdquo; where
+they took <i>subdiales ambulationes</i> 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&mdash;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&mdash;for this may sometimes happen.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&rsquo; 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&rsquo; 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Nowadays almost all man&rsquo;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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 wood-side. 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,&mdash;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,&mdash;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&rsquo;s surface where a man does not stand from one
+year&rsquo;s end to another, and there, consequently, politics are not, for
+they are but as the cigar smoke of a man.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&mdash;a trivial or quadrivial place, the thoroughfare and ordinary of
+travelers. The word is from the Latin <i>villa</i> which together with
+<i>via</i>, a way, or more anciently <i>ved</i> and <i>vella</i>, Varro derives
+from <i>veho</i>, to carry, because the villa is the place to and from which
+things are carried. They who got their living by teaming were said
+<i>vellaturam facere</i>. Hence, too, the Latin word <i>vilis</i> and our
+<i>vile</i>; also <i>villain</i>. 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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 amount of
+it in mythology than in any history of America, so called, that I have seen.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+THE OLD MARLBOROUGH ROAD.<br />
+<br />
+Where they once dug for money,<br />
+But never found any;<br />
+Where sometimes Martial Miles<br />
+Singly files,<br />
+And Elijah Wood,<br />
+I fear for no good:<br />
+No other man,<br />
+Save Elisha Dugan&mdash;<br />
+O man of wild habits,<br />
+Partridges and rabbits,<br />
+Who hast no cares<br />
+Only to set snares,<br />
+Who liv&rsquo;st all alone,<br />
+Close to the bone;<br />
+And where life is sweetest<br />
+Constantly eatest.<br />
+When the spring stirs my blood<br />
+With the instinct to travel,<br />
+I can get enough gravel<br />
+On the Old Marlborough Road.<br />
+Nobody repairs it,<br />
+For nobody wears it;<br />
+It is a living way,<br />
+As the Christians say.<br />
+Not many there be<br />
+Who enter therein,<br />
+Only the guests of the<br />
+Irishman Quin.<br />
+What is it, what is it<br />
+But a direction out there,<br />
+And the bare possibility<br />
+Of going somewhere?<br />
+Great guide boards of stone,<br />
+But travelers none;<br />
+Cenotaphs of the towns<br />
+Named on their crowns.<br />
+It is worth going to see<br />
+Where you <i>might</i> be.<br />
+What king<br />
+Did the thing,<br />
+I am still wondering;<br />
+Set up how or when,<br />
+By what selectmen,<br />
+Gourgas or Lee,<br />
+Clark or Darby?<br />
+They&rsquo;re a great endeavor<br />
+To be something forever;<br />
+Blank tablets of stone,<br />
+Where a traveler might groan,<br />
+And in one sentence<br />
+Grave all that is known<br />
+Which another might read,<br />
+In his extreme need.<br />
+I know one or two<br />
+Lines that would do,<br />
+Literature that might stand<br />
+All over the land,<br />
+Which a man could remember<br />
+Till next December,<br />
+And read again in the spring,<br />
+After the thawing.<br />
+If with fancy unfurled<br />
+You leave your abode,<br />
+You may go round the world<br />
+By the Old Marlborough Road.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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,&mdash;when fences shall be multiplied, and man traps and other
+engines invented to confine men to the <i>public</i> road, and walking over the
+surface of God&rsquo;s earth shall be construed to mean trespassing on some
+gentleman&rsquo;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&mdash;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. &ldquo;The world ends
+there,&rdquo; say they; &ldquo;beyond there is nothing but a shoreless
+sea.&rdquo; It is unmitigated East where they live.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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,&mdash;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,&mdash;that something like the <i>furor</i> which
+affects the domestic cattle in the spring, and which is referred to a worm in
+their tails,&mdash;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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+&ldquo;Than longen folk to gon on pilgrimages,<br />
+And palmeres for to seken strange strondes.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+&ldquo;And now the sun had stretched out all the hills,<br />
+And now was dropped into the western bay;<br />
+At last <i>he</i> rose, and twitched his mantle blue;<br />
+To-morrow to fresh woods and pastures new.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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 &ldquo;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.&rdquo; 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 further&mdash;further than I am ready to follow
+him; yet not when he says: &ldquo;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.&rdquo; When he has exhausted the rich soil of
+Europe, and reinvigorated himself, &ldquo;then recommences his adventurous
+career westward as in the earliest ages.&rdquo; So far Guyot.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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, &ldquo;&lsquo;From what part of the world have you
+come?&rsquo; As if these vast and fertile regions would naturally be the place
+of meeting and common country of all the inhabitants of the globe.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To use an obsolete Latin word, I might say, <i>Ex oriente lux; ex occidente</i>
+FRUX. From the East light; from the West fruit.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Sir Francis Head, an English traveler and a Governor-General of Canada, tells
+us that &ldquo;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.&rdquo; This
+statement will do at least to set against Buffon&rsquo;s account of this part
+of the world and its productions.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Linnæus said long ago, &ldquo;Nescio quæ facies <i>læta, glabra</i> plantis
+Americanis&rdquo; (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, <i>Africanæ bestiæ</i>, 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&mdash;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&mdash;our understanding more
+comprehensive and broader, like our plains&mdash;our intellect generally on a
+grander scale, like our thunder and lightning, our rivers and mountains and
+forests,&mdash;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 <i>læta</i> and <i>glabra</i>, of joyous and
+serene, in our very faces. Else to what end does the world go on, and why was
+America discovered?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To Americans I hardly need to say&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+&ldquo;Westward the star of empire takes its way.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&rsquo;s Cliff&mdash;still thinking more of the future than of the past
+or present&mdash;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 <i>this was the heroic age
+itself</i>, though we know it not, for the hero is commonly the simplest and
+obscurest of men.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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 vitæ 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,&mdash;as if we lived on the marrow of koodoos devoured raw.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There are some intervals which border the strain of the wood-thrush, to which I
+would migrate&mdash;wild lands where no settler has squatted; to which,
+methinks, I am already acclimated.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&rsquo;s coat
+emits the odor of musquash even; it is a sweeter scent to me than that which
+commonly exhales from the merchant&rsquo;s or the scholar&rsquo;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&rsquo; exchanges and libraries rather.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A tanned skin is something more than respectable, and perhaps olive is a fitter
+color than white for a man&mdash;a denizen of the woods. &ldquo;The pale white
+man!&rdquo; I do not wonder that the African pitied him. Darwin the naturalist
+says, &ldquo;A white man bathing by the side of a Tahitian was like a plant
+bleached by the gardener&rsquo;s art, compared with a fine, dark green one,
+growing vigorously in the open fields.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Ben Jonson exclaims,&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+&ldquo;How near to good is what is fair!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+So I would say,&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+&ldquo;How near to good is what is <i>wild!</i>&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&mdash;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
+(<i>Cassandra calyculata</i>) which cover these tender places on the
+earth&rsquo;s surface. Botany cannot go farther than tell me the names of the
+shrubs which grow there&mdash;the high-blueberry, panicled andromeda,
+lamb-kill, azalea, and rhodora&mdash;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&mdash;to have this fertile spot under my windows, not
+a few imported barrow-fuls 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&mdash;&ldquo;Your <i>morale</i> 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.&rdquo; They who
+have been traveling long on the steppes of Tartary say, &ldquo;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.&rdquo; 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,&mdash;a <i>sanctum
+sanctorum</i>. There is the strength, the marrow, of Nature. The wild wood
+covers the virgin mould,&mdash;and the same soil is good for men and for trees.
+A man&rsquo;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&mdash;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&rsquo;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The civilized nations&mdash;Greece, Rome, England&mdash;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is said to be the task of the American &ldquo;to work the virgin
+soil,&rdquo; and that &ldquo;agriculture here already assumes proportions
+unknown everywhere else.&rdquo; 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,&mdash;&ldquo;Leave all hope, ye that
+enter&rdquo;&mdash;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 <i>survey</i> 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&rsquo;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&mdash;the mallard&mdash;thought, which &rsquo;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&rsquo;s flash, which perchance
+shatters the temple of knowledge itself&mdash;and not a taper lighted at the
+hearthstone of the race, which pales before the light of common day.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+English literature, from the days of the minstrels to the Lake
+Poets&mdash;Chaucer and Spenser and Milton, and even Shakespeare
+included&mdash;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&mdash;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,&mdash;aye, to bloom and bear fruit there, after
+their kind, annually, for the faithful reader, in sympathy with surrounding
+Nature.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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
+<i>culture</i>, 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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,&mdash;as it is to some
+extent a fiction of the present,&mdash;the poets of the world will be inspired
+by American mythology.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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,&mdash;others merely <i>sensible</i>,
+as the phrase is,&mdash;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 &ldquo;indicate a faint and shadowy
+knowledge of a previous state of organic existence.&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&mdash;take the
+sound of a bugle in a summer night, for instance,&mdash;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I love even to see the domestic animals reassert their native rights&mdash;any
+evidence that they have not wholly lost their original wild habits and vigor;
+as when my neighbor&rsquo;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&mdash;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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 <i>Whoa!</i> 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 &ldquo;Whoa!&rdquo; 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 half way. Whatever part the
+whip has touched is thenceforth palsied. Who would ever think of a <i>side</i>
+of any of the supple cat tribe, as we speak of a <i>side</i> of beef?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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,&mdash;&ldquo;The
+skins of the tiger and the leopard, when they are tanned, are as the skins of
+the dog and the sheep tanned.&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When looking over a list of men&rsquo;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&rsquo;s
+rigmarole&mdash;<i>Iery-wiery ichery van, tittle-tol-tan</i>. 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 <i>Bose</i> and <i>Tray</i>, the names of
+dogs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&mdash;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 &ldquo;Buster&rdquo; by his playmates, and this rightly
+supplanted his Christian name. Some travellers 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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,&mdash;a sort of breeding in and in,
+which produces at most a merely English nobility, a civilization destined to
+have a speedy limit.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&mdash;not that which trusts to heating manures, and improved implements
+and modes of culture only!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&rsquo;s allowance.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There may be an excess even of informing light. Niepce, a Frenchman, discovered
+&ldquo;actinism,&rdquo; that power in the sun&rsquo;s rays which produces a
+chemical effect; that granite rocks, and stone structures, and statues of metal
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+But he observed that &ldquo;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.&rdquo; Hence it has been inferred that &ldquo;the hours of
+darkness are as necessary to the inorganic creation as we know night and sleep
+are to the organic kingdom.&rdquo; Not even does the moon shine every night,
+but gives place to darkness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&mdash;<i>Gramatica parda</i>&mdash;tawny grammar, a kind of
+mother-wit derived from that same leopard to which I have referred.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&mdash;for what are the libraries of
+science but files of newspapers&mdash;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,&mdash;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A man&rsquo;s ignorance sometimes is not only useful, but beautiful&mdash;while
+his knowledge, so called, is oftentimes worse than useless, besides being ugly.
+Which is the best man to deal with&mdash;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?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&mdash;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 <i>know</i> in any higher sense than this, any more
+than he can look serenely and with impunity in the face of the sun:
+&#8009;&#962; &#964;&#8054; &#957;&#959;&#8182;&#957;, &#959;&#8016;
+&#954;&#949;&#8150;&#957;&#959;&#957;
+&#957;&#959;&#8053;&#963;&#949;&#953;&#962;,&mdash;&ldquo;You will not perceive
+that, as perceiving a particular thing,&rdquo; say the Chaldean Oracles.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&mdash;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 law-maker. &ldquo;That is active duty,&rdquo;
+says the Vishnu Purana, &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&mdash;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+&ldquo;Gentle breeze, that wanderest unseen,<br />
+And bendest the thistles round Loira of storms,<br />
+Traveler of the windy glens,<br />
+Why hast thou left my ear so soon?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+While almost all men feel an attraction drawing them to society, few are
+attracted strongly to Nature. In their relation 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 landscape there is among us! We have to be
+told that the Greeks called the world &#922;&#8057;&#963;&#956;&#959;&#962;
+Beauty, or Order, but we do not see clearly why they did so, and we esteem it
+at best only a curious philological fact.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&rsquo;-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&rsquo; 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I took a walk on Spaulding&rsquo;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&mdash;to whom the
+sun was servant&mdash;who had not gone into society in the village&mdash;who
+had not been called on. I saw their park, their pleasure-ground, beyond through
+the wood, in Spaulding&rsquo;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&rsquo;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,&mdash;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,&mdash;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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,&mdash;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 <i>wings</i> 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 <i>gra-a-ate thoughts</i>, those <i>gra-a-ate men</i> you
+hear of!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We hug the earth&mdash;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,&mdash;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,&mdash;it was near the end of June,&mdash;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,&mdash;for it was court week&mdash;and to farmers and lumber-dealers
+and wood-choppers 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&rsquo;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&rsquo;s red children as of her white
+ones; yet scarcely a farmer or hunter in the land has ever seen them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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 barn-yard 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,&mdash;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,&mdash;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?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The merit of this bird&rsquo;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,
+&ldquo;There is one of us well, at any rate,&rdquo;&mdash;and with a sudden
+gush return to my senses.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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 grey 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 eastward, 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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,&mdash;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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 bank-side in Autumn.
+</p>
+
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+*The Project Gutenberg Etext of Walking, by Henry David Thoreau*
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+
+
+
+Walking by Henry David Thoreau
+This etext was prepared by Q Myers, Bend, Oregon.
+
+
+
+
+
+Walking
+by Henry David Thoreau
+
+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.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of The Project Gutenberg Etext of Walking by Henry David Thoreau
+
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