One's outlook is a part of his virtue. Does it matter nothing to
him what objects accost him whenever he glances from his windows,
or steps out-of-doors? He who is so far weaned from the landscape,
or indifferent to it, as not to derive a sweet and robust habit of
character therefrom, seems out of keeping with nature and himself.
I suspect something amiss in him who has no love, no enthusiasm for
his surroundings, and that his friendships, if such he profess, are
of a cold and isolate quality at best; one even questions, at times,
whether the residents of cities, where art has thrown around them a
world of its own, are compensated by all this luxury of display,--to
say nothing of the social artifices wont to steal into their costly
compliments,--for the simple surroundings of the countryman, which
prompt to manliness and true gentility. A country dwelling without
shrubbery, hills near or in the distance, a forest and water view, if
but a rivulet, seems so far incomplete as if the occupants themselves
were raw and impoverished. Wood and water god both, man loves to
traverse the forests, wade the streams, and confess his kindred
alliance with primeval things. He leaps not from the woods into
civility at a single bound, neither comes from cities and conversations
freed from the wildness of his dispositions. Something of the forester
stirs within him when occasion provokes, as if men were trees
transformed, and delighted to claim their affinities with their sylvan
ancestry.
Man never tires of Nature's scene,
Himself the liveliest evergreen.