No More Learning

A town is saved, not more by the righteous men in it than by
the woods and swamps that surround it. A township where one primitive
forest waves above while another primitive forest rots below,--such a
town is fitted to raise not only corn and potatoes, but poets and
philosophers for the coming ages. In such a soil grew Homer and
Confucius and the rest, and out of such a wilderness comes the
Reformer eating locusts and wild honey.

To preserve wild animals implies generally the creation of a forest
for them to dwell in or resort to. So it is with man. A hundred years
ago they sold bark in our streets peeled from our own woods. In the
very aspect of those primitive and rugged trees there was, methinks, a
tanning principle which hardened and consolidated the fibres of men's
thoughts. Ah! already I shudder for these comparatively degenerate
days of my native village, when you cannot collect a load of bark of
good thickness, and we no longer produce tar and turpentine.

The civilized nations--Greece, Rome, England--have been sustained by
the primitive forests which anciently rotted where they stand. They
survive as long as the soil is not exhausted. Alas for human culture!
little is to be expected of a nation, when the vegetable mould is
exhausted, and it is compelled to make manure of the bones of its
fathers. There the poet sustains himself merely by his own superfluous
fat, and the philosopher comes down on his marrow-bones.

It is said to be the task of the American "to work the virgin soil,"
and that "agriculture here already assumes proportions unknown
everywhere else.
" I think that the farmer displaces the Indian even
because he redeems the meadow, and so makes himself stronger and in
some respects more natural. I was surveying for a man the other day a
single straight line one hundred and thirty-two rods long, through a
swamp at whose entrance might have been written the words which Dante
read over the entrance to the infernal regions, "Leave all hope, ye
that enter,"--that is, of ever getting out again; where at one time I
saw my employer actually up to his neck and swimming for his life in
his property, though it was still winter. He had another similar swamp
which I could not survey at all, because it was completely under
water, and nevertheless, with regard to a third swamp, which I did
_survey_ from a distance, he remarked to me, true to his instincts,
that he would not part with it for any consideration, on account of
the mud which it contained. And that man intends to put a girdling
ditch round the whole in the course of forty months, and so redeem it
by the magic of his spade. I refer to him only as the type of a class.

The weapons with which we have gained our most important victories,
which should be handed down as heirlooms from father to son, are not
the sword and the lance, but the bushwhack, the turf-cutter, the
spade, and the bog hoe, rusted with the blood of many a meadow, and
begrimed with the dust of many a hard-fought field. The very winds
blew the Indian's corn-field into the meadow, and pointed out the way
which he had not the skill to follow. He had no better implement with
which to intrench himself in the land than a clamshell. But the farmer
is armed with plow and spade.

In literature it is only the wild that attracts us. Dullness is but
another name for tameness. It is the uncivilized free and wild
thinking in Hamlet and the Iliad, in all the scriptures and
mythologies, not learned in the schools, that delights us. As the wild
duck is more swift and beautiful than the tame, so is the wild--the
mallard--thought, which 'mid falling dews wings its way above the
fens. A truly good book is something as natural, and as unexpectedly
and unaccountably fair and perfect, as a wild-flower discovered on the
prairies of the West or in the jungles of the East. Genius is a light
which makes the darkness visible, like the lightning's flash, which
perchance shatters the temple of knowledge itself,--and not a taper
lighted at the hearth-stone of the race, which pales before the light
of common day.

English literature, from the days of the minstrels to the Lake
Poets,--Chaucer and Spenser and Milton, and even Shakespeare,
included,--breathes no quite fresh and, in this sense, wild strain.