of the highway, as a lake of a river. It is the body of which roads
are the arms and legs--a trivial or quadrivial place, the thoroughfare
and ordinary of travellers. The word is from the Latin _villa_, which,
together with _via_, a way, or more anciently _ved_ and _vella_, Varro
derives from _veho_, to carry, because the villa is the place to and
from which things are carried. They who get their living by teaming
were said _vellaturam facere_. Hence, too, apparently, the Latin word
_vilis_ and our vile; also _villain_. This suggests what kind of
degeneracy villagers are liable to. They are wayworn by the travel that
goes by and over them, without travelling themselves.
Some do not walk at all; others walk in the highways; a few walk
across lots. Roads are made for horses and men of business. I do not
travel in them much, comparatively, because I am not in a hurry to
get to any tavern or grocery or livery-stable or depÙt to which they
lead. I am a good horse to travel, but not from choice a roadster. The
landscape-painter uses the figures of men to mark a road. He would not
make that use of my figure. I walk out into a Nature such as the old
prophets and poets, Menu, Moses, Homer, Chaucer, walked in. You may
name it America, but it is not America: neither Americus Vespucius, nor
Columbus, nor the rest were the discoverers of it. There is a truer
account of it in mythology than in any history of America, so called,
that I have seen.
At present, in this vicinity, the best part of the land is not private
property; the landscape is not owned, and the walker enjoys comparative
freedom. But possibly the day will come when it will be partitioned off
into so-called pleasure-grounds, in which a few will take a narrow and
exclusive pleasure only,--when fences shall be multiplied, and mantraps
and other engines invented to confine men to the _public road_, and
walking over the surface of God's earth shall be construed to mean
trespassing on some gentleman's grounds. To enjoy a thing exclusively
is commonly to exclude yourself from the true enjoyment of it. Let us
improve our opportunities, then, before the evil days come.
What is it that makes it so hard sometimes to determine whither we will
walk? I believe that there is a subtle magnetism in Nature which, if we
unconsciously yield to it, will direct us aright. It is not indifferent
to us which way we walk. There is a right way; but we are very liable
from heedlessness and stupidity to take the wrong one. We would fain
take that walk, never yet taken by us through this actual world, which
is perfectly symbolical of the path which we love to travel in the
interior and ideal world; and sometimes, no doubt, we find it difficult
to choose our direction, because it does not yet exist distinctly in
our idea.
When I go out of the house for a walk, uncertain as yet whither I
will bend my steps, and submit myself to my instinct to decide for
me, I find, strange and whimsical as it may seem, that I finally
and inevitably settle south-west, toward some particular wood or
meadow or deserted pasture or hill in that direction. My needle is
slow to settle,--varies a few degrees, and does not always point due
south-west, it is true, and it has good authority for this variation,
but it always settles between west and south-south-west. The future
lies that way to me, and the earth seems more unexhausted and richer
on that side. The outline which would bound my walks would be, not a
circle, but a parabola, or rather like one of those cometary orbits
which have been thought to be non-returning curves, in this case
opening westward, in which my house occupies the place of the sun.
I turn round and round irresolute, sometimes for a quarter of an
hour, until I decide, for a thousandth time, that I will walk into
the south-west or west. Eastward I go only by force; but westward I
go free. Thither no business leads me. It is hard for me to believe
that I shall find fair landscapes or sufficient wildness and freedom
behind the eastern horizon. I am not excited by the prospect of a walk
thither; but I believe that the forest which I see in the western
horizon stretches uninterruptedly toward the setting sun, and there are
no towns nor cities in it of enough consequence to disturb me. Let me
live where I will, on this side is the city, on that the wilderness,
and ever I am leaving the city more and more, and withdrawing into the
wilderness. I should not lay so much stress on this fact, if I did
not believe that something like this is the prevailing tendency of my
countrymen. I must walk toward Oregon, and not toward Europe. And that
way the nation is moving, and I may say that mankind progress from
east to west. Within a few years we have witnessed the phenomenon of
a south-eastward migration in the settlement of Australia; but this
affects us as a retrograde movement, and, judging from the moral and
physical character of the first generation of Australians, has not yet
proved a successful experiment. The eastern Tartars think that there is
nothing west beyond Thibet. "The world ends there," say they; "beyond
there is nothing but a shoreless sea." It is unmitigated East where
they live.
We go eastward to realise history and study the works of art and
literature, retracing the steps of the race; we go westward as into the
future, with a spirit of enterprise and adventure. The Atlantic is a
Lethean stream, in our passage over which we have had an opportunity
to forget the Old World and its institutions. If we do not succeed
this time, there is perhaps one more chance for the race left before
it arrives on the banks of the Styx; and that is in the Lethe of the
Pacific, which is three times as wide.
I know not how significant it is, or how far it is an evidence of
singularity, that an individual should thus consent in his pettiest
walk with the general movement of the race; but I know that something
akin to the migratory instinct in birds and quadrupeds,--which, in
some instances, is known to have affected the squirrel tribe, impelling
them to a general and mysterious movement, in which they were seen, say
some, crossing the broadest rivers, each on its particular chip, with
its tail raised for a sail, and bridging narrower streams with their
dead,--that something like a _furor_ which affects the domestic cattle
in the spring, and which is referred to a worm in their tails,--affects
both nations and individuals, either perennially or from time to time.
Not a flock of wild geese cackles over our town, but it to some extent
unsettles the value of real estate here, and, if I were a broker, I
should probably take that disturbance into account.
"Than longen folk to gon on pilgrimages,
And palmeres for to seken strange strondes."
Every sunset which I witness inspires me with the desire to go to a
West as distant and as fair as that into which the sun goes down. He
appears to migrate westward daily, and tempts us to follow him. He is
the Great Western Pioneer whom the nations follow. We dream all night
of those mountain-ridges in the horizon, though they may be of vapour
only, which were last gilded by his rays. The islands of Atlantis,
and the islands and gardens of the Hesperides, a sort of terrestrial
paradise, appear to have been the Great West of the ancients,
enveloped in mystery and poetry. Who has not seen in imagination, when
looking into the sunset sky, the gardens of the Hesperides, and the
foundation of all those fables?
Columbus felt the westward tendency more strongly than any before. He
obeyed it, and found a New World for Castile and Leon. The head of men
in those days scented fresh pastures from afar.
"And now the sun had stretched out all the hills,
And now was dropped into the western bay;
At last _he_ rose, and twitched his mantle blue;
To-morrow to fresh woods and pastures new."
Where on the globe can there be found an area of equal extent with
that occupied by the bulk of our States, so fertile and so rich and
varied in its proportions, and at the same time so habitable by the
European, as this is? Michaux, who knew but part of them, says that
"the species of large trees are much more numerous in North America
than in Europe; in the United States there are more than one hundred
and forty species that exceed thirty feet in height; in France there
are but thirty that attain this size." Later botanists more than
confirm his observations. Humboldt came to America to realise his
youthful dreams of a tropical vegetation, and he beheld it in its
greatest perfection in the primitive forests of the Amazon, the most
gigantic wilderness on the earth, which he has so eloquently described.
The geographer Guyot, himself a European, goes farther--farther than
I am ready to follow him; yet not when he says: "As the plant is made
for the animal, as the vegetable world is made for the animal world,
America is made for the man of the Old World.... The man of the Old
World sets out upon his way. Leaving the highlands of Asia, he descends
from station to station towards Europe. Each of his steps is marked by
a new civilisation superior to the preceding, by a greater power of
development. Arrived at the Atlantic, he pauses on the shore of this
unknown ocean, the bounds of which he knows not, and turns upon his
footprints for an instant." When he has exhausted the rich soil of
Europe, and reinvigorated himself, "then recommences his adventurous
career westward as in the earliest ages." So far Guyot.
From this western impulse coming in contact with the barrier of the
Atlantic sprang the commerce and enterprise of modern times. The
younger Michaux, in his _Travels West of the Alleghanies in 1802_, says
that the common inquiry in the newly settled West was, "'From what part
of the world have you come?' As if these vast and fertile regions
would naturally be the place of meeting and common country of all the
inhabitants of the globe."
To use an obsolete Latin word, I might say, _Ex Oriente lux; ex
Occidente_ FRUX. From the East light; from the West fruit.
Sir Francis Head, an English traveller and a Governor-General of
Canada, tells us that "in both the northern and southern hemispheres
of the New World, Nature has not only outlined her words on a larger
scale, but has painted the whole picture with brighter and more costly
colours than she used in delineating and in beautifying the Old
World.... The heavens of America appear infinitely higher, the sky
is bluer, the air is fresher, the cold is intenser, the moon looks
larger, the stars are brighter, the thunder is louder, the lightning
is vivider, the wind is stronger, the rain is heavier, the mountains
are higher, the rivers longer, the forests bigger, the plains broader."
This statement will do at least to set against Buffon's account of this
part of the world and its productions.
LinnÊus said long ago, "_Nescio quÊ facies_ lÊta, glabra _plantis
Americanis_: I know not what there is of joyous and smooth in the
aspect of American plants"; and I think that in this country there are
no, or at most very few, _AfricanÊ bestiÊ_, African beasts, as the
Romans called them, and that in this respect also it is peculiarly
fitted for the habitation of man. We are told that within three miles
of the centre of the East Indian city of Singapore, some of the
inhabitants are annually carried off by tigers; but the traveller can
lie down in the woods at night almost anywhere in North America without
fear of wild beasts.
These are encouraging testimonies. If the moon looks larger here than
in Europe, probably the sun looks larger also. If the heavens of
America appear infinitely higher, and the stars brighter, I trust that
these facts are symbolical of the height to which the philosophy and
poetry and religion of her inhabitants may one day soar. At length,
perchance, the immaterial heaven will appear as much higher to the
American mind, and the intimations that star it as much brighter. For I
believe that climate does thus react on man--as there is something in
the mountain air that feeds the spirit and inspires. Will not man grow
to greater perfection intellectually as well as physically under these
influences? Or is it unimportant how many foggy days there are in his
life? I trust that we shall be more imaginative, that our thoughts will
be clearer, fresher, and more ethereal, as our sky--our understanding
more comprehensive and broader, like our plains--our intellect
generally on a grander scale, like our thunder and lightning, our
rivers and mountains and forests--and our hearts shall even correspond
in breadth and depth and grandeur to our inland seas. Perchance there
will appear to the traveller something, he knows not what, of _lÊta_
and _glabra_, of joyous and serene, in our very faces. Else to what end
does the world go on, and why was America discovered?
To Americans I hardly need to say:
"Westward the star of empire takes its way."
As a true patriot, I should be ashamed to think that Adam in paradise
was more favourably 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 sympathise 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 vigour 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-vitÊ
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 civilisation
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 odour
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 colour 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."
Ben Jonson exclaims:
"How near to good is what is fair!"
So I would say:
How near to good is what is _wild_!
Life consists with wildness. The most alive is the wildest. Not yet
subdued to man, its presence refreshes him. One who pressed forward
incessantly and never rested from his labours, who grew fast and made
infinite demands on life, would always find himself in a new country
or wilderness, and surrounded by the raw material of life. He would be
climbing over the prostrate stems of primitive forest trees.
Hope and the future for me are not in lawns and cultivated fields, not
in towns and cities, but in the impervious and quaking swamps. When,
formerly, I have analysed my partiality for some farm which I had
contemplated purchasing, I have frequently found that I was attracted
solely by a few square rods of impermeable and unfathomable bog--a
natural sink in one corner of it. That was the jewel which dazzled
me. I derive more of my subsistence from the swamps which surround my
native town than from the cultivated gardens in the village. There are
no richer parterres to my eyes than the dense beds of dwarf andromeda
(_Cassandra calyculata_) which cover these tender places on the earth's
surface. Botany cannot go further than tell me the names of the shrubs
which grow there--the high-blueberry, panicled andromeda, lambkill,
azalea, and rhodora--all standing in the quaking sphagnum. I often
think that I should like to have my house front on this mass of dull
red bushes, omitting other flower plots and borders, transplanted
spruce and trim box, even gravelled walks--to have this fertile spot
under my windows, not a few imported barrowfuls of soil only to cover
the sand which was thrown out in digging the cellar. Why not put my
house, my parlour, behind this plot, instead of behind that meagre
assemblage of curiosities, that poor apology for a Nature and Art which
I call my front yard? It is an effort to clear up and make a decent
appearance when the carpenter and mason have departed, though done
as much for the passer-by as the dweller within. The most tasteful
front-yard fence was never an agreeable object of study to me; the
most elaborate ornaments, acorn-tops, or what not, soon wearied and
disgusted me. Bring your sills up to the very edge of the swamp, then
(though it may not be the best place for a dry cellar), so that there
be no access on that side to citizens. Front yards are not made to walk
in, but, at most, through, and you could go in the back way.
Yes, though you may think me perverse, if it were proposed to me to
dwell in the neighbourhood of the most beautiful garden that ever human
art contrived, or else of a dismal swamp, I should certainly decide for
the swamp. How vain, then, have been all your labours, citizens, for me!
My spirits infallibly rise in proportion to the outward dreariness.
Give me the ocean, the desert or the wilderness! In the desert, pure
air and solitude compensate for want of moisture and fertility. The
traveller Burton says of it--"Your _morale_ improves; you become frank
and cordial, hospitable and single-minded.... In the desert, spirituous
liquors excite only disgust. There is a keen enjoyment in a mere
animal existence." They who have been travelling long on the steppes
of Tartary say--"On re-entering cultivated lands, the agitation,
perplexity, and turmoil of civilisation oppressed and suffocated us;
the air seemed to fail us, and we felt every moment as if about to die
of asphyxia." When I would recreate myself, I seek the darkest wood,
the thickest and most interminable, and, to the citizen, most dismal
swamp. I enter a swamp as a sacred place,--_a sanctum sanctorum_. There
is the strength, the marrow of Nature. The wild-wood covers the virgin
mould,--and the same soil is good for men and for trees. A man's health
requires as many acres of meadow to his prospect as his farm does loads
of muck. There are the strong meats on which he feeds. A town is saved,
not more by the righteous men in it than by the woods and swamps that
surround it. A township where one primitive forest waves above while
another primitive forest rots below,--such a town is fitted to raise
not only corn and potatoes, but poets and philosophers for the coming
ages. In such a soil grew Homer and Confucius and the rest, and out of
such a wilderness comes the Reformer eating locusts and wild honey.
To preserve wild animals implies generally the creation of a forest
for them to dwell in or resort to. So it is with man. A hundred years
ago they sold bark in our streets peeled from our own woods. In the
very aspect of those primitive and rugged trees there was, methinks, a
tanning principle which hardened and consolidated the fibres of men's
thoughts. Ah! already I shudder for these comparatively degenerate days
of my native village, when you cannot collect a load of bark of good
thickness; and we no longer produce tar and turpentine.
The civilised nations--Greece, Rome, England--have been sustained by
the primitive forests which anciently rotted where they stand. They
survive as long as the soil is not exhausted. Alas for human culture!
little is to be expected of a nation when the vegetable mould is
exhausted, and it is compelled to make manure of the bones of its
fathers. There the poet sustains himself merely by his own superfluous
fat, and the philosopher comes down on his marrow-bones.
It is said to be the task of the American "to work the virgin soil,"
and that "agriculture here already assumes proportions unknown
everywhere else." I think that the farmer displaces the Indian even
because he redeems the meadow, and so makes himself stronger and in
some respects 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.