Every One Finds By His Own Experience, As
Well As In History, That The Era In Which Men Cultivate The
Apple, And The Amenities Of The Garden, Is Essentially Different
From That Of The Hunter And Forest Life, And Neither Can Displace
The Other Without Loss.
We have all had our day-dreams, as well
as more prophetic nocturnal vision; but as for farming, I am
convinced that my genius dates from an older era than the
agricultural.
I would at least strike my spade into the earth
with such careless freedom but accuracy as the woodpecker his
bill into a tree. There is in my nature, methinks, a singular
yearning toward all wildness. I know of no redeeming qualities
in myself but a sincere love for some things, and when I am
reproved I fall back on to this ground. What have I to do with
ploughs? I cut another furrow than you see. Where the off ox
treads, there is it not, it is farther off; where the nigh ox
walks, it will not be, it is nigher still. If corn fails, my
crop fails not, and what are drought and rain to me? The rude
Saxon pioneer will sometimes pine for that refinement and
artificial beauty which are English, and love to hear the sound
of such sweet and classical names as the Pentland and Malvern
Hills, the Cliffs of Dover and the Trosachs, Richmond, Derwent,
and Winandermere, which are to him now instead of the Acropolis
and Parthenon, of Baiae, and Athens with its sea-walls, and
Arcadia and Tempe.
Greece, who am I that should remember thee,
Thy Marathon and thy Thermopylae?
Is my life vulgar, my fate mean,
Which on these golden memories can lean?
We are apt enough to be pleased with such books as Evelyn's
Sylva, Acetarium, and Kalendarium Hortense, but they imply a
relaxed nerve in the reader. Gardening is civil and social, but
it wants the vigor and freedom of the forest and the outlaw.
There may be an excess of cultivation as well as of anything
else, until civilization becomes pathetic. A highly cultivated
man, - all whose bones can be bent! whose heaven-born virtues are
but good manners! The young pines springing up in the cornfields
from year to year are to me a refreshing fact. We talk of
civilizing the Indian, but that is not the name for his
improvement. By the wary independence and aloofness of his dim
forest life he preserves his intercourse with his native gods,
and is admitted from time to time to a rare and peculiar society
with Nature. He has glances of starry recognition to which our
saloons are strangers. The steady illumination of his genius,
dim only because distant, is like the faint but satisfying light
of the stars compared with the dazzling but ineffectual and
short-lived blaze of candles. The Society-Islanders had their
day-born gods, but they were not supposed to be "of equal
antiquity with the _atua fauau po_, or night-born gods." It is
true, there are the innocent pleasures of country life, and it is
sometimes pleasant to make the earth yield her increase, and
gather the fruits in their season, but the heroic spirit will not
fail to dream of remoter retirements and more rugged paths.
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