Walking
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,