No More Learning

There is the home of the younger sons, as among the
Scandinavians they took to the sea for their inheritance. It is too
late to be studying Hebrew; it is more important to understand even
the slang of to-day.

Some months ago I went to see a panorama of the Rhine. It was like a
dream of the Middle Ages. I floated down its historic stream in
something more than imagination, under bridges built by the Romans,
and repaired by later heroes, past cities and castles whose very names
were music to my ears, and each of which was the subject of a legend.
There were Ehrenbreitstein and Rolandseck and Coblentz, which I knew
only in history. They were ruins that interested me chiefly. There
seemed to come up from its waters and its vine-clad hills and valleys
a hushed music as of Crusaders departing for the Holy Land. I floated
along under the spell of enchantment, as if I had been transported to
an heroic age, and breathed an atmosphere of chivalry.

Soon after, I went to see a panorama of the Mississippi, and as I
worked my way up the river in the light of to-day, and saw the
steamboats wooding up, counted the rising cities, gazed on the fresh
ruins of Nauvoo, beheld the Indians moving west across the stream,
and, as before I had looked up the Moselle, now looked up the Ohio and
the Missouri and heard the legends of Dubuque and of Wenona's
Cliff,--still thinking more of the future than of the past or
present,--I saw that this was a Rhine stream of a different kind; that
the foundations of castles were yet to be laid, and the famous bridges
were yet to be thrown over the river; and I felt that _this was the
heroic age itself_, though we know it not, for the hero is commonly
the simplest and obscurest of men.

* * * * *

The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild; and what I
have been preparing to say is, that in Wildness is the preservation of
the World. Every tree sends its fibres forth in search of the Wild.
The cities import it at any price. Men plow and sail for it. From the
forest and wilderness come the tonics and barks which brace mankind.
Our ancestors were savages. The story of Romulus and Remus being
suckled by a wolf is not a meaningless fable. The founders of every
state which has risen to eminence have drawn their nourishment and
vigor from a similar wild source. It was because the children of the
Empire were not suckled by the wolf that they were conquered and
displaced by the children of the northern forests who were.

I believe in the forest, and in the meadow, and in the night in which
the corn grows. We require an infusion of hemlock spruce or arbor-vitae
in our tea. There is a difference between eating and drinking for
strength and from mere gluttony. The Hottentots eagerly devour the
marrow of the koodoo and other antelopes raw, as a matter of course.
Some of our northern Indians eat raw the marrow of the Arctic
reindeer, as well as various other parts, including the summits of the
antlers, as long as they are soft. And herein, perchance, they have
stolen a march on the cooks of Paris. They get what usually goes to
feed the fire. This is probably better than stall-fed beef and
slaughter-house pork to make a man of. Give me a wildness whose glance
no civilization can endure,--as if we lived on the marrow of koodoos
devoured raw.

There are some intervals which border the strain of the wood thrush,
to which I would migrate,--wild lands where no settler has squatted;
to which, methinks, I am already acclimated.

The African hunter Cumming tells us that the skin of the eland, as
well as that of most other antelopes just killed, emits the most
delicious perfume of trees and grass. I would have every man so much
like a wild antelope, so much a part and parcel of nature, that his
very person should thus sweetly advertise our senses of his presence,
and remind us of those parts of nature which he most haunts.