n travelling 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 fibres 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 civilised 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