enser and Milton, and even Shakespeare,
included--breathes no quite fresh and, in this sense, wild strain. It
is an essentially tame and civilized literature, reflecting Greece and
Rome. Her wilderness is a green wood, her wild man a Robin Hood.
There is plenty of genial love of Nature, but not so much of Nature
herself. Her chronicles inform us when her wild animals, but not when
the wild man in her, became extinct.

The science of Humboldt is one thing, poetry is another thing. The
poet to-day, notwithstanding all the discoveries of science, and the
accumulated learning of mankind, enjoys no advantage over Homer.

Where is the literature which gives expression to Nature? He would be
a poet who could impress the winds and streams into his service, to
speak for him; who nailed words to their primitive senses, as farmers
drive down stakes in the spring, which the frost has heaved; who
derived his words as often as he used them--transplanted them to his
page with earth adhering to their roots; whose words were so true and
fresh and natural that they would appear to expand like the buds at the
approach of spring, though they lay half-smothered between two musty
leaves in a library,--aye, to bloom and bear fruit there, after their
kind, annually, for the faithful reader, in sympathy with surrounding
Nature.

I do not know of any poetry to quote which adequately expresses this
yearning for the Wild. Approached from this side, the best poetry is
tame. I do not know where to find in any literature, ancient or
modern, any account which contents me of that Nature with which even I
am acquainted. You will perceive that I demand something which no
Augustan nor Elizabethan age, which no _culture_, in short, can give.
Mythology comes nearer to it than anything. How much more fertile a
Nature, at least, has Grecian mythology its root in than English
literature! Mythology is the crop which the Old World bore before its
soil was exhausted, before the fancy and imagination were affected with
blight; and which it still bears, wherever its pristine vigor is
unabated. All other literatures endure only as the elms which
overshadow our houses; but this is like the great dragon-tree of the
Western Isles, as old as mankind, and, whether that does or not, will
endure as long; for the decay of other literatures makes the soil in
which it thrives.

The West is preparing to add its fables to those of the East. The
valleys of the G