The Aegean Sea Is But
Lake Huron Still To The Indian.
Also there is all the refinement
of civilized life in the woods under a sylvan garb.
The wildest
scenes have an air of domesticity and homeliness even to the
citizen, and when the flicker's cackle is heard in the clearing,
he is reminded that civilization has wrought but little change
there. Science is welcome to the deepest recesses of the forest,
for there too nature obeys the same old civil laws. The little
red bug on the stump of a pine, - for it the wind shifts and the
sun breaks through the clouds. In the wildest nature, there is
not only the material of the most cultivated life, and a sort of
anticipation of the last result, but a greater refinement already
than is ever attained by man. There is papyrus by the river-side,
and rushes for light, and the goose only flies overhead, ages
before the studious are born or letters invented, and that
literature which the former suggest, and even from the first have
rudely served, it may be man does not yet use them to express.
Nature is prepared to welcome into her scenery the finest work of
human art, for she is herself an art so cunning that the artist
never appears in his work.
Art is not tame, and Nature is not wild, in the ordinary sense.
A perfect work of man's art would also be wild or natural in a
good sense.
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