But He Does Not Hunt This
Cover With All His Hounds, For The Game Is Thin And Small:
And if
you were but alert and wary, if you lodged ever in the deepest
thickets, you too might live on into later generations and astonish
men by your stalwart age and the trophies of an immemorial success.
For the forest takes away from you all excuse to die. There is
nothing here to cabin or thwart your free desires. Here all the
impudencies of the brawling world reach you no more. You may count
your hours, like Endymion, by the strokes of the lone woodcutter,
or by the progression of the lights and shadows and the sun
wheeling his wide circuit through the naked heavens. Here shall
you see no enemies but winter and rough weather. And if a pang
comes to you at all, it will be a pang of healthful hunger. All
the puling sorrows, all the carking repentance, all this talk of
duty that is no duty, in the great peace, in the pure daylight of
these woods, fall away from you like a garment. And if perchance
you come forth upon an eminence, where the wind blows upon you
large and fresh, and the pines knock their long stems together,
like an ungainly sort of puppets, and see far away over the plain a
factory chimney defined against the pale horizon - it is for you, as
for the staid and simple peasant when, with his plough, he upturns
old arms and harness from the furrow of the glebe.
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