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 bush-whack, 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 corn-field 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 plough and spade.

In Literature it is only the wild that attracts us. Dulness 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 Sp