des 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 traveller
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 travellers. 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, apparently, 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 travelling 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
account of it in mythology than in any hi