“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 fibres forth in search of the Wild. The
cities import it at any price. Men plough 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-vitae
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
march 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.”