No More Learning

Though I do not believe that a plant will spring up where no seed has
been, I have great faith in a seed,--a, to me, equally mysterious
origin for it. Convince me that you have a seed there, and I am
prepared to expect wonders. I shall even believe that the millennium
is at hand, and that the reign of justice is about to commence, when
the Patent Office, or Government, begins to distribute, and the people
to plant, the seeds of these things.

In the spring of 1857 I planted six seeds sent to me from the Patent
Office, and labeled, I think, _Poitrine jaune grosse_, large yellow
squash. Two came up, and one bore a squash which weighed 1231/2 pounds,
the other bore four, weighing together 1861/4 pounds. Who would have
believed that there was 310 pounds of _poitrine jaune grosse_ in that
corner of my garden? These seeds were the bait I used to catch it, my
ferrets which I sent into its burrow, my brace of terriers which
unearthed it. A little mysterious hoeing and manuring was all the
_abracadabra presto-change_ that I used, and lo! true to the label,
they found for me 310 pounds of _poitrine jaune grosse_ there, where
it never was known to be, nor was before. These talismans had
perchance sprung from America at first, and returned to it with
unabated force. The big squash took a premium at your fair that fall,
and I understood that the man who bought it, intended to sell the
seeds for ten cents apiece. (Were they not cheap at that? ) But I have
more hounds of the same breed. I learn that one which I despatched to
a distant town, true to its instincts, points to the large yellow
squash there, too, where no hound ever found it before, as its
ancestors did here and in France.

Other seeds I have which will find other things in that corner of my
garden, in like fashion, almost any fruit you wish, every year for
ages, until the crop more than fills the whole garden.
You have but
little more to do than throw up your cap for entertainment these
American days. Perfect alchemists I keep who can transmute substances
without end, and thus the corner of my garden is an inexhaustible
treasure-chest. Here you can dig, not gold, but the value which gold
merely represents; and there is no Signor Blitz about it. Yet farmers'
sons will stare by the hour to see a juggler draw ribbons from his
throat, though he tells them it is all deception. Surely, men love
darkness rather than light.

FOOTNOTE:

[6] An Address read to the Middlesex Agricultural Society in Concord,
September, 1860.




WALKING


I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness,
as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil,--to regard man
as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member
of society. I wish to make an extreme statement, if so I may make an
emphatic one, for there are enough champions of civilization: the
minister and the school committee and every one of you will take care
of that.

* * * * *

I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who
understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks,--who had a
genius, so to speak, for _sauntering_, which word is beautifully
derived "from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle
Ages, and asked charity, under pretense of going _a la Sainte Terre_,"
to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, "There goes a
_Sainte-Terrer_," a Saunterer, a Holy-Lander. They who never go to the
Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and
vagabonds; but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense,
such as I mean. Some, however, would derive the word from _sans
terre_, without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense,
will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere.
For this is the secret of successful sauntering. He who sits still in
a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of all; but the
saunterer, in the good sense, is no more vagrant than the meandering
river, which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course
to the sea. But I prefer the first, which, indeed, is the most
probable derivation. For every walk is a sort of crusade, preached by
some Peter the Hermit in us, to go forth and reconquer this Holy Land
from the hands of the Infidels.

It is true, we are but faint-hearted crusaders, even the walkers,
nowadays, who undertake no persevering, never-ending enterprises.