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.
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