ALONG the forest’s virgin aisles I walk in rapture, miles on miles; at
every turn delights unfold, and wondrous vistas I behold. What noble
scenes on every hand! I feel my ardent soul expand; I turn my face
toward the sky, and to the firmament I cry:
“_The derned mosquitoes—how they bite! The woods would be a pure
delight, would lure all men back to the soil, if these blamed brutes
were boiled in oil! They come forth buzzing from their dens, and they’re
as big as Leghorn hens, and when they bite they raise a lump that makes
the victim yell and jump._”
What wondrous voices have the trees when they are rocked by morning
breeze! The voices of a thousand lyres, the music of a thousand choirs,
the chorus of a thousand spheres are in the noble song one hears! The
same sad music Adam heard when through the Eden groves he stirred; and
ever since the primal birth, through all the ages of the earth, the
trees have whispered, chanted, sung, in their soft, untranslated tongue.
And, moved to tears, I cry aloud, far from the sordid madding crowd:
“_Doggone these measly, red-backed ants! They will keep climbing up my
pants! The woods will soon be shy of guests unless the ants and kindred
pests abolished are by force of law; they’ve chewed me up till I am
raw._”
Here in these sylvan solitudes, unfettered Nature sweetly broods; she’d
clasp her offspring to her breast, and give her weary children rest, and
say to them, “No longer weep, but on your mother’s bosom sleep.” Here
mighty thoughts disturb my brain—I try to set them down in vain; with
noble songs my soul’s afire—I cannot fit them to my lyre, Elysian views
awhile I’ve seen—I cannot tell you what they mean; adown the forest
aisles I stray, and face the glowing East, and say:
“_It must have been a bee, by heck! that stung me that time on the neck!
It’s time I trotted back to town, and got those swellings doctored down!
With bees and ants and wasps and snakes these bosky groves and tangled
brakes are most too fierce for urban bard—I rather long for my back
yard!_”
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