Walking
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