"Westward the star of empire takes its way."
As a true patriot, I should be ashamed to think that Adam in paradise
was more favorably situated on the whole than the backwoodsman in this
country.
Our sympathies in Massachusetts are not confined to New England; though
we may be estranged from the South, we sympathize with the West. There
is the home of the younger sons, as among the Scandinavians they took to
the sea for their inheritance. It is too late to be studying Hebrew; it
is more important to understand even the slang of to-day.
Some months ago I went to see a panorama of the Rhine. It was like a
dream of the Middle Ages. I floated down its historic stream in
something more than imagination, under bridges built by the Romans, and
repaired by later heroes, past cities and castles whose very names were
music to my ears, and each of which was the subject of a legend. There
were Ehrenbreitstein and Rolandseck and Coblentz, which I knew only in
history. They were ruins that interested me chiefly. There seemed to
come up from its waters and its vine-clad hills and valleys a hushed
music as of Crusaders departing for the Holy Land. I floated along under
the spell of enchantment, as if I had been transported to an heroic age,
and breathed an atmosphere of chivalry.
Soon after, I went to see a panorama of the Mississippi, and as I worked
my way up the river in the light of to-day, and saw the steamboats
wooding up, counted the rising cities, gazed on the fresh ruins of
Nauvoo, beheld the Indians moving west across the stream, and, as before
I had looked up the Moselle now looked up the Ohio and the Missouri, and
heard the legends of Dubuque and of Wenona's Cliff,--still thinking more
of the future than of the past or present,--I saw that this was a Rhine
stream of a different kind; that the foundations of castles were yet to
be laid, and the famous bridges were yet to be thrown over the river;
and I felt that _this was the heroic age itself_, though we know it not,
for the hero is commonly the simplest and obscurest of men.
* * * * *
The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild; and what I
have been preparing to say is, that in Wildness is the preservation of
the World. Every tree sends its fibers forth in search of the Wild. The
cities import it at any price. Men plow and sail for it. From the forest
and wilderness come the tonics and barks which brace mankind. Our
ancestors were savages. The story of Romulus and Remus being suckled by
a wolf is not a meaningless fable. The founders of every State which has
risen to eminence have drawn their nourishment and vigor from a similar
wild source. It was because the children of the Empire were not suckled
by the wolf that they were conquered and displaced by the children of
the Northern forests who were.
I believe in the forest, and in the meadow, and in the night in which
the corn grows. We require an infusion of hemlock-spruce or arbor-vitæ
in our tea. There is a difference between eating and drinking for
strength and from mere gluttony. The Hottentots eagerly devour the
marrow of the koodoo and other antelopes raw, as a matter of course.
Some of our Northern Indians eat raw the marrow of the Arctic reindeer,
as well as various other parts, including the summits of the antlers, as
long as they are soft. And herein, perchance, they have stolen a match
on the cooks of Paris. They get what usually goes to feed the fire. This
is probably better than stall-fed beef and slaughter-house pork to make
a man of. Give me a wildness whose glance no civilization can
endure,--as if we lived on the marrow of koodoos devoured raw.
There are some intervals which border the strain of the wood-thrush, to
which I would migrate,--wild lands where no settler has squatted; to
which, methinks, I am already acclimated.
The African hunter Cummings tells us that the skin of the eland, as well
as that of most other antelopes just killed, emits the most delicious
perfume of trees and grass. I would have every man so much like a wild
antelope, so much a part and parcel of Nature, that his very person
should thus sweetly advertise our senses of his presence, and remind us
of those parts of Nature which he most haunts. I feel no disposition to
be satirical, when the trapper's coat emits the odor of musquash even;
it is a sweeter scent to me than that which commonly exhales from the
merchant's or the scholar's garments. When I go into their wardrobes and
handle their vestments, I am reminded of no grassy plains and flowery
meads which they have frequented, but of dusty merchants' exchanges and
libraries rather.
A tanned skin is something more than respectable, and perhaps olive is a
fitter color than white for a man,--a denizen of the woods. "The pale
white man!" I do not wonder that the African pitied him. Darwin the
naturalist says, "A white man bathing by the side of a Tahitian was like
a plant bleached by the gardener's art, compared with a fine, dark green
one, growing vigorously in the open fields."