Democracy most of all affiliates with the open air, is sunny and hardy
and sane only with Nature--just as much as Art is. Something is required
to temper both--to check them, restrain them from excess, morbidity. I
have wanted, before departure, to bear special testimony to a very old
lesson and requisite. American Democracy, in its myriad personalities,
in factories, work-shops, stores, offices--through the dense streets and
houses of cities, and all their manifold sophisticated life--must either
be fibred, vitalized, by regular contact with out-door light and air and
growths, farm-scenes, animals, fields, trees, birds, sun-warmth and free
skies, or it will certainly dwindle and pale. We cannot have grand races
of mechanics, work people, and commonalty, (the only specific purpose
of America,) on any less terms. I conceive of no flourishing and heroic
elements of Democracy in the United States, or of Democracy maintaining
itself at all, without the Nature-element forming a main part--to be
its health-element and beauty-element--to really underlie the whole
politics, sanity, religion and art of the New World.
Finally, the morality: "Virtue," said Marcus Aurelius, "what is it,
only a living and enthusiastic sympathy with Nature?" Perhaps indeed the
efforts of the true poets, founders, religions, literatures, all ages,
have been, and ever will be, our time and times to come, essentially the
same--to bring people back from their persistent strayings and sickly
abstractions, to the costless average, divine, original concrete.