the forest, uproot the stumps,
and plant it, year after year, in potatoes and maize, you say you
have subdued it. But, if you leave it for a season or two, a kind of
barbarism seems to steal out upon it from the circling woods; coarse
grass and brambles cover it; bushes spring up in a wild tangle; the
raspberry and the blackberry flower and fruit; and the humorous bear
feeds upon them. The last state of that ground is worse than the first.

Perhaps the cleared spot is called Ephesus. There is a splendid city on
the plain; there are temples and theatres on the hills; the commerce
of the world seeks its port; the luxury of the Orient flows through
its marble streets. You are there one day when the sea has receded: the
plain is a pestilent marsh; the temples, the theatres, the lofty gates
have sunken and crumbled, and the wild-brier runs over them; and, as you
grow pensive in the most desolate place in the world, a bandit lounges
out of a tomb, and offers to relieve you of all that which creates
artificial distinctions in society. The higher the civilization has
risen, the more abject is the desolation of barbarism that ensues. The
most melancholy spot in the Adirondacks is not a tamarack-swamp, where
the traveler wades in moss and mire, and the atmosphere is composed of
equal active parts of black-flies, mosquitoes, and midges. It is the
village of the Adirondack Iron-Works, where the streets of gaunt houses
are falling to pieces, tenantless; the factory-wheels have stopped; the
furnaces are in ruins; the iron and wooden machinery is strewn about in
helpless detachment; and heaps of charcoal, ore, and slag proclaim an
arrested industry. Beside this deserted village, even Calamity Pond,
shallow, sedgy, with its ragged shores of stunted firs, and its
melancholy shaft that marks the spot where the proprietor of the
iron-works accidentally shot himself, is cheerful.

The instinct of barbarism that leads people periodically to throw aside
the habits of civilization, and seek the freedom and discomfort of the
woods, is explicable enough; but it is not so easy to understand why
this passion should be strongest in those who are most refined, and
most trained in intellectual and social fastidiousness. Philistinism and
shoddy do not like the woods, unless it becomes fashionable to do so;
and then, as speedily as possible, they introduce their artificial
luxuries, and reduce the life in the wilderness to the vulgarity of a
well-fed