of the damp
fir-wood, high on the mossy bank, about nine o'clock of this bright
moonlight night, I kindled a fire, when they were gone, and, sitting on
the fir-twigs, within sound of the falls, examined by its light the
botanical specimens which I had collected that afternoon, and wrote down
some of the reflections which I have here expanded; or I walked along the
shore and gazed up the stream, where the whole space above the falls was
filled with mellow light. As I sat before the fire on my fir-twig seat,
without walls above or around me, I remembered how far on every hand that
wilderness stretched, before you came to cleared or cultivated fields, and
wondered if any bear or moose was watching the light of my fire; for
Nature looked sternly upon me on account of the murder of the moose.

Strange that so few ever come to the woods to see how the pine lives and
grows and spires, lifting its evergreen arms to the light,--to see its
perfect success; but most are content to behold it in the shape of many
broad boards brought to market, and deem that its true success! But the
pine is no more lumber than man is, and to be made into boards and houses
is no more its true and highest use than the truest use of a man is to be
cut down and made into manure. There is a higher law affecting our
relation to pines as well as to men. A pine cut down, a dead pine, is no
more a pine than a dead human carcass is a man. Can he who has discovered
only some of the values of whalebone and whale oil be said to have
discovered the true use of the whale? Can he who slays the elephant for
his ivory be said to have "seen the elephant"? These are petty and
accidental uses; just as if a stronger race were to kill us in order to
make buttons and flageolets of our bones; for everything may serve a lower
as well as a higher use. Every creature is better alive than dead, men and
moose and pine-trees, and he who understands it aright will rather
preserve its life than destroy it.

Is it the lumberman, then, who is the friend and lover of the pine, stands
nearest to it, and understands its nature best? Is it the tanner who has
barked it, or he who has boxed it for turpentine, whom posterity will
fable to have been changed into a pine at last? No! no! it is the poet; he
it is who makes the truest use of the pine,--who does not fondle it with
an axe, nor tickle it with a saw, nor stroke it with a plane,--who knows
whether its heart is false without cutting