Walking - Part 2 of 3
"It was a pleasure and a privilege to walk with him. He knew the
country like a fox or a bird, and passed through it as freely by paths
of his own." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
What is it that makes it so hard sometimes to determine
whither we will walk? I believe that there is a subtile magnetism in Nature,
which, if we unconsciously yield to it, will direct us aright. It is not
indifferent to us which way we walk. There is a right way; but we are very
liable from heedlessness and stupidity to take the wrong one. We would
fain take that walk, never yet taken by us through this actual world, which
is perfectly symbolical of the path which we love to travel in the interior
and ideal world; and sometimes, no doubt, we find it difficult to choose
our direction, because it does not yet exist distinctly in our idea.
When I go out of the house for a walk, uncertain
as yet whither I will bend my steps, and submit myself to my instinct to
decide for me, I find, strange and whimsical as it may seem, that I finally
and inevitably settle south-west, toward some particular wood or meadow
or deserted pasture or hill in that direction. My needle is slow to settle-varies
a few degrees, and does not always point due south-west, it is true, and
it has good authority for this variation, but it always settles between
west and south-south-west. The future lies that way to me, and the earth
seems more unexhausted and richer on that side. The outline which would
bound my walks, would be, not a circle, but a parabola, or rather
like one of those cometary orbits, which have been thought to be non-returning
curves, in this case opening westward, in which my house occupies the place
of the sun. I turn round and round irresolute sometimes for a quarter of
an hour, until I decide for the thousandth time, that I will walk into
the south-west or west. Eastward I go only by force; but westward I go
free. Thither no business leads me. It is hard for me to believe that I
shall find fair landscapes, or sufficient Wildness and Freedon behind the
eastern horizon. I am not excited by the prospect of a walk thither; but
I believe that the forest which I see in the western horizon stretches
uninterruptedly towards the setting sun, and that there are no towns nor
cities in it of enough consequence to disturb me. Let me live where I will,
on this side is the city, on that the wilderness, and ever I am leaving
the city more and more, and withdrawing into the wilderness. I should not
lay so much stress on this fact, if I did not believe that something like
this is the prevailing tendency of my countrymen. I must walk toward Oregon,
and not toward Europe. And that way the nation is moving, and I may say
that mankind progress from east to west. Within a
few years we have witnessed the phenomenon of a south-eastward migration,
in the settlement of Australia; but this affects us as a retrograde movement,
and, judging from the moral and physical character of the first generation
of Australians,(1) has not yet
proved a successful experiment. The eastern Tartars (2)
think that there is nothing west beyond Thibet.(3)
"The World ends there", say they, "beyond there is nothing but a shoreless
sea." It is unmitigated East where they live.
We go eastward to realize history, and study the
works of art and literature, retracing the steps of the race,-we go westward
as into the future, with a spirit of enterprise and adventure. The Atlantic
is a Lethean stream, in our passage over which we have had an opportunity
to forget the old world and its institutions. If we
do not succeed this time, there is perhaps one more chance for the race
left before it arrives on the banks of the Styx;(4)
and that is in the Lethe (5)
of the Pacific, which is three times as wide.
I know not how significant it is, or how far it is
an evidence of singularity, that an individual should thus consent in his
pettiest walk, with the general movement of the race; but I know that something
akin to the migratory instinct in birds and quadrupeds,-which, in some
instances, is known to have affected the squirrel tribe, impelling them
to a general and mysterious movement, in which they were seen, say some,
crossing the broadest rivers, each on its particular chip, with its tail
raised for a sail, and bridging narrower streams with their dead,-that
something like the furor which affects the domestic cattle in the
spring, and which is referred to a worm in their tails,-affects both nations
and individuals, either perennially or from time to time. Not
a flock of wild geese cackles over our town but it to some extent unsettles
the value of real estate here, and if I were a broker I should probably
take that disturbance into account.-
"Than longen folk to gon on pilgrimages,
And palmeres for to seken strange strondes."(6)
Every sunset which I witness inspires me with the
desire to go to a west as distant and as fair as that into which the Sun
goes down. He appears to migrate westward daily and tempt us to follow
him. He is the Great Western Pioneer whom the nations follow. We
dream all night of those mountain ridges in the horizon, though they may
be of vapor only, which were last gilded by his rays. The island of Atlantis,(7)
and the islands and gardens of the Hesperides,(8)
a sort of terrestrial paradise, appear to have been the Great West of the
ancients, enveloped in mystery and poetry. Who has not seen in imagination,
when looking into the sunset sky, the gardens of the Hesperides, and the
foundation of all those fables?
Columbus felt the westward tendency
more strongly than any before. He obeyed it, and found a New World for
Castile (9) and Leon.(10)
The herd of men in those days scented fresh pastures from afar.-
"And now the sun had stretched out all the hills,
And now was dropt into the western bay;
At last he rose, and twitch'd his mantle blue;
To-morrow to fresh woods and pastures new."
Where on the Globe can there be
found an area of equal extent with that occupied by the bulk of our states,
so fertile and so rich and varied in its productions, and at the same time
so habitable by the European, as this is? Michaux (11)
who knew but part of them, says that "the species of large trees are much
more numerous in North America than in Europe: in the United States there
are more than 140 species that exceed thirty feet in height; in France
there are but thirty that attain this size." Later
botanists more than confirm his observations. Humboldt (12)
came to America to realize his youthful dreams of a tropical vegetation,
and he beheld it in its greatest perfection in the primitive forests of
the Amazon, the most gigantic wilderness on the earth, which he has so
eloquently described. The geographer Guyot,(13)
himself a European, goes farther-farther than I am ready to follow him,
yet not when he says, "As the plant is made for the animal, as the vegetable
world is made for the animal world, America is made for the man of the
Old World."
"The man of the Old World sets out upon his way.
Leaving the highlands of Asia, he descends from station to station, towards
Europe. Each of his steps is marked by a new civilization superior to the
preceding, by a greater power of development. Arrived at the Atlantic,
he pauses on the shore of this unknown Ocean, the bounds of which he knows
not, and turns upon his foot prints for an instant." When he has exhausted
the rich soil of Europe and reinvigorated himself-"Then recommences his
adventurous career westward as in the earliest ages." -So far Guyot.
From this western impulse coming in contact with
the barrier of the Atlantic sprang the commerce and enterprise of modern
times. The younger Michaux, in his "Travels West of the Alleghanies in
1802," says that the common inquiry in the newly settled West was-"'From
what part of the world have you come?' As if these vast and fertile regions
would naturally be the place of meeting and common country of all the inhabitants
of the globe."
To use an obsolete Latin word, I might say Ex
oriente lux; ex occidente FRUX. From the East
light; from the West fruit.
Sir Francis Head, an English traveller, and a Governor-General
of Canada, tells us that "in both the northern and southern hemispheres
of the new world, Nature has not only outlined her works on a larger scale,
but has painted the whole picture with brighter and more costly colors
than she used in delineating and in beautifying the old world." "The heavens
of America appear infinitely higher-the sky is bluer-the air is fresher-the
cold is intenser-the moon looks larger-the stars are brighter-the thunder
is louder-the lightning is vivider-the wind is stronger-the rain is heavier-the
mountains are higher-the rivers larger-the forests bigger-the plains broader." This
statement will do at least to set against Buffon's (14)
account of this part of the world and its productions.
Linnæus (15)
said long ago Nescio quæ facies læta, glabra plantis
Americanis. I know not what there is of joyous and smooth in the aspect
of Amercian plants; and I think that in this country there are no, or at
most, very few, Africanæ bestiæ, African beasts, as
the Romans called them, and that in this respect also it is peculiarly
fitted for the habitation of man. We are told that within three miles of
the center of the East Indian city of Singapore some of the inhabitants
are annually carried off by tigers;-but the traveller can lie down in the
woods at night almost anywhere in North America without fear of wild beasts.
These are encouraging testimonies. If the moon looks
larger here than in Europe, probably the sun looks larger also. If the
heavens of America appear infinitely higher, the stars brighter, I trust
that these facts are symbolical of the height to which the philosophy and
poetry and religion of her inhabitants may one day soar. At length perchance
the immaterial heaven will appear as much higher to the American mind,
and the intimations that star it as much brighter. For I believe that climate
does thus react on man-as there is something in the mountain air that feeds
the spirit and inspires. Will not man grow to greater perfection intellectually
as well as physically under these influences? Or is it unimportant how
many foggy days there are in his life? I trust that we shall be more imaginative;
that our thoughts will be clearer, fresher and more ethereal, as our sky-our
understanding more comprehensive and broader, like our plains-our intellect
generally on a grander scale, like our thunder and lightning, our rivers
and mountains and forests,-and our hearts shall even correspond in breadth
and depth and grandeur to our inland seas. Perchance there will appear
to the traveller something, he knows not what, of læta and
glabra-of joyous and serene, in our very faces. Else, to what end does
the world go on, and why was America discovered?
To Americans I hardly need to say-
"Westward the star of empire takes its way."
As a true patriot I should be ashamed to think that Adam in paradise
was more favorably situated on the whole than the backwoodsman in this
country.
Our sympathies in Massachusetts are not confined
to New England, though we may be estranged from the south, we sympathize
with the west. 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
(16) 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,(17)
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 a 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 stream in the light of
to-day,-and saw the steam-boats 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 (18)
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 stream; 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 (19)
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 is 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 vitæ in our tea. There is a difference
between eating and drinking for strength and from mere gluttony. The Hottentots
(20) 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 Gordon-Cumming
(21) 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 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. I feel no disposition to be
satirical when the trapper's coat emits the odor of musquash
(22) even; it is a sweeter scent to me than
that which commonly exhales from the merchant's or the scholar's garments.
When I go into their wardrobes and handle their vestments, I am reminded
of no grassy plains and flowery meads which they have frequented, but of
dusty merchants' exchanges and libraries rather.
A tanned skin is something more than respectable,
and perhaps olive is a fitter color than white for a man-a denizen of the
woods. "The pale white man!" I do not wonder that
the African pitied him. Darwin (23)
the naturalist says "A white man bathing by the side of a Tahitian was
like a plant bleached by the gardener's art compared with a fine, dark
green one growing vigorously in the open fields."
Ben Jonson exclaims,(24)-
"How near to good is what is fair!"
So I would say-
How near to good is what is wild!
Life consists with Wildness. The most alive is the wildest. Not yet
subdued to man, its presence refreshes him. One who pressed forward incessantly
and never rested from his labors, who grew fast and made infinite demands
on life, would always find himself in a new country or wilderness, and
surrounded by the raw material of life. He would be climbing over the prostrate
stems of primitive forest trees.
Hope and the future for me are not in lawns and cultivated
fields, not in towns and cities, but in the impervious and quaking swamps.
When, formerly, I have analysed my partiality for some farm which I had
contemplated purchasing, I have frequently found that I was attracted solely
by a few square rods of impermeable and unfathomable bog-a natural sink
in one corner of it. That was the jewel which dazzled me. I derive more
of my subsistence from the swamps which surround my native town than from
the cultivated gardens in the village. There are no richer parterres to
my eyes than the dense beds of dwarf andromeda (Cassandra calyculata)
which cover these tender places on the earth's surface. Botany cannot go
further than tell me the names of the shrubs which grow there-the high-blueberry,
panicled andromeda,-lamb-kill, azalea-and rhodora-all standing in the quaking
sphagnum. I often think that I would like to have my house front on this
mass of dull red bushes, omitting other flower plots and borders, transplanted
spruce and trim box, even gravelled walks-to have this fertile spot under
my windows, not a few imported barrow-fuls of soil only, to cover the sand
which was thrown out in digging the cellar. Why not put my house-my parlor-behind
this plot instead of behind that meagre assemblage of curiosities-that
poor apology for a Nature and art, which I call my front yard? It is an
effort to clear up and make a decent appearance when the carpenter and
mason have departed, though done as much for the passer by as the dweller
within. The most tasteful front-yard fence was never an agreeable object
of study to me; the most elaborate ornaments, acorn tops, or what
not, soon wearied and disgusted me. Bring your sills up to the very edge
of the swamp then, (though it may not be the best place for a dry cellar,)
so that there be no access on that side to citizens. Front-yards are not
made to walk in, but, at most, through, and you could go in the back way.
Yes; though you may think me perverse, if it were
proposed to me to dwell in the neighborhood of the most beautiful garden
that ever human art contrived, or else of a dismal swamp, I should certainly
decide for the swamp. How vain then have been all your labors, citizens,
for me!
My spirits infallibly rise in proportion to the outward
dreariness. Give me the Ocean, the desert, or the wilderness. In the desert
a pure air and solitude compensate for want of moisture and fertility.
The traveller Burton says of it "Your morale improves: you become
frank and cordial, hospitable and single-minded. . . . In the desert spirituous
liquors excite only disgust. There is a keen enjoyment in a mere animal
existence." They who have been travelling long on the steppes of Tartary,
say "On reëntering cultivated lands, the agitation, perplexity and
turmoil of civilization oppressed and suffocated us; the air seemed to
fail us, and we felt every moment as if about to die of asphyxia." When
I would recreate myself, I seek the darkest wood, the thickest and most
interminable, and, to the citizen, most dismal swamp. I enter a swamp as
a sacred place-a
sanctum sanctorum. There is the strength-the marrow
of Nature. The wild wood covers the virgin mould,-and the same soil is
good for men and for trees. A man's health requires as many acres of meadow
to his prospect as his farm does loads of muck. There are the strong meats
on which he feeds. 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 (25) and the rest,
and out of such a wilderness comes the reformer eating locusts and wild
honey.(26)
To preserve wild animals, implies generally the creation
of a forest for them to dwell in or resort to. So is it 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, are
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 to 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
(27) long through a swamp, at whose entrance
might have been written the words which Dante (28)
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 bush-whack-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 clam-shell. 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 Shakspeare included,
breathes no quite fresh and in this sense wild strain. It is an essentially
tame and civilized literature reflecting Greece and Rome. Her wilderness
is a green-wood-her wild man a Robinhood. There is plenty of genial love
of nature, but not so much of Nature herself. Her chronicles inform us
when her wild animals, but not when the wild man in her, became extinct.
The science of Humboldt is one thing, poetry is another
thing. The poet to-day, notwithstanding all the discoveries of science,
and the accumulated learning of mankind, enjoys no advantage over Homer.
Where is the literature which gives expression to
Nature? He would be a poet who could impress the winds and streams into
his service, to speak for him; who nailed words to their primitive senses,
as farmers drive down stakes in the spring which the frost has heaved;
who derived his words as often as he used them-transplanted them to his
page with earth adhering to their roots;-whose words were so true, and
fresh, and natural that they would appear to expand like the buds at the
approach of spring, though they lay half smothered between two musty leaves
in a library,-aye, to bloom and bear fruit there after their kind annually
for the faithful reader, in sympathy with surrounding Nature.
I do not know of any poetry to quote which adequately
expresses this yearning for the Wild. Approached from this side the best
poetry is tame. I do not know where to find in any literature, ancient
or modern, any account which contents me, of that Nature with which even
I am acquainted. You will perceive that I demand something which no Augustan
nor Elizabethan age-which no culture, in short, can give. Mythology
comes nearer to it than anything. How much more fertile a nature at least
has Grecian mythology its root in than English Literature! Mythology is
the crop which the old world bore before its soil was exhausted, before
the fancy and imagination were affected with blight;-and which it still
bears wherever its pristine vigor is unabated. All other literatures endure
only as the elms which overshadow our houses, but this is like the great
Dragon tree of the Western isles, as old as mankind, and whether that does
or not, will endure as long; for the decay of other literatures makes the
soil in which it thrives.
The West is preparing to add its fables to those
of the east. The valleys of the Ganges, the Nile, and the Rhine, having
yielded their crop, it remains to be seen what the valleys of the Amazon,
the Plate, the Orinoco-the St. Lawrence and the Mississippi will produce.
Perchance, when in the course of ages, American Liberty has become a fiction
of the past,-as it is to some extent a fiction of the present,-the poets
of the world will be inspired by American Mythology.
The wildest dreams of wild men, even, are not the
less true, though they may not recommend themselves to the sense which
is most common among Englishmen and Americans to-day. It is not every truth
that recommends itself to the common sense. Nature has a place for the
wild clematis as well as for the cabbage. Some expressions of truth are
reminiscent,-others merely sensible, as the phrase is-others prophetic.
Some forms of disease even may prophesy forms of health. The geologist
has discovered that the figures of serpents, griffins, flying dragons,
and other fanciful embellishments of heraldry, have their prototypes in
the forms of fossil species which were extinct before man was created,
and hence "indicate a faint and shadowy knowledge of a previous state of
organic existence." The Hindoos dreamed that the earth rested on an elephant,
and the elephant on a tortoise, and the tortoise on a serpent; and though
it may be an unimportant coincidence, it will not be out of place here
to state, that a fossil tortoise has lately been discovered in Asia large
enough to support an elephant. I confess that I am partial to these wild
fancies, which transcend the order of time and development. They are the
sublimest recreation of the intellect. The partridge loves peas, but not
those that go with her into the pot.
In short, all good things are wild and free. There
is something in a strain of music, whether produced by an instrument or
by the human voice-take the sound of a bugle in a summer night, for instance,-which
by its wildness, to speak without satire, reminds me of the cries emitted
by wild beasts in their native forests. It is so much of their wildness
as I can understand. Give me for my friends and neighbors wild men, not
tame ones. The wildness of the savage is but a faint symbol of the awful
ferity with which good men and lovers meet.
I love even to see the domestic
animals reassert their native rights-any evidence that they have not wholly
lost their original wild habits and vigor; as when my neighbor's cow breaks
out of her pasture early in the Spring and boldly swims the river, a cold
grey tide, twenty-five or thirty rods wide,(29)
swollen by the melted snow. It is the Buffalo crossing the Mississippi.
This exploit confers some dignity on the herd in my eyes-already dignified.
The seeds of instinct are preserved under the thick hides of cattle and
horses, like seeds in the bowels of the earth, an indefinite period.
Any sportiveness in cattle is unexpected. I saw one
day a herd of a dozen bullocks and cows running about and frisking in unwieldly
sport, like huge rats, even like kittens. They shook their heads, raised
their tails, and rushed up and down a hill, and I perceived by their horns,
as well as by their activity, their relation to the deer tribe. But, alas!
a sudden loud whoa! would have damped their ardor at once, reduced them
from venison to beef, and stiffened their sides and sinews like the locomotive.
Who but the Evil One has cried "Whoa!" to mankind? Indeed, the life of
cattle, like that of many men, is but a sort of locomotiveness, they move
a side at a time, and Man by his machinery is meeting the horse and ox
half way. Whatever part the whip has touched is thenceforth palsied. Who
would ever think of a side of any of the supple cat tribe, as we
speak of a side of beef?
I rejoice that horses and steers have to be broken
before they can be made the slaves of men, and that men themselves have
some wild oats still left to sow before they become submissive members
of society. Undoubtedly, all men are not equally fit subjects for civilization,
and because the majority, like dogs and sheep are tame by inherited dispositon,
is no reason why the others should have their natures broken that they
may be reduced to the same level. Men are in the main alike, but they were
made several in order that they might be various. If a low use is to be
served, one man will do nearly or quite as well as another; if a high one,
individual excellence is to be regarded. Any man can stop a hole to keep
the wind away, but no other man could serve so rare a use as the author
of this illustration did. Confucius says "The skins of the tiger and the
leopard when they are tanned, are as the skins of the dog and the sheep
tanned." But it is not the part of a true culture to tame tigers, any more
than it is to make sheep ferocious, and tanning their skins for shoes is
not the best use to which they can be put.
Notes
1. early Australian colonialists
included English & Irish felons deported as punishment - back
2. descendents of those led by
Ghengis Khan in the Middle Ages, now in parts of eastern Europe and western
Asia, to the west of Tibet - back
3. variation of Tibet - back
4. in Greek mythology, chief river
of the lower world - back
5. river in Hades whose water caused
amnesia in those who drank it - back
6. from Chaucer's "The Prologue
to Canterbury Tales." - back
7. mythical island city in the
Atlantic Ocean, west of Gibraltar - back
8. in classical mythology, nymphs
who protected a garden with golden apples - back
9. from 1312 to 1492 Castile included
most of modern Spain - back
10. Juan Ponce de Leon (1460?-1521)
Spanish explorer who discovered Florida - back
11. Andre Michaux (1747-1802) French
botanist, explored eastern U.S. - back
12. Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859)
German naturalist, explorer - back
13. Arnold Henry Guyot (1807-1884)
Swiss geographer - back
14. Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte
de Buffon (1707-1788) French naturalist - back
15. Carolus
Linnaeus (1707-1778) devised system for naming & classifying organisms
- back
16. pictorial representation shown
in progressive segments - back
17. attractions along the Rhine
River - back
18. city on the Mississippi River
in eastern Iowa - back
19. in Roman legend, sons of Mars
suckled by a wolf; Romulus founded Rome - back
20. a people of southern Africa,
in Thoreau's time the term implied savage & wild - back
21. Roualeyn Gordon-Cumming (1820-1866)
English author on African hunting - back
22. muskrat - back
23. Charles Darwin (1809-1882)
English naturalist, developed theory of evolution - back
24. Ben Jonson (1573?-1637) English
dramatist - back
25. Conficius (1551-1479 B.C.)
Chinese philosopher - back
26. St. John the Baptist, as described
in Matthew 3:3-4 - back
27. a rod is 16.5 feet, 132 rods
is 2178 feet or 4.1 miles - back
28. Dante Alighieri (1265-1321)
Italian poet, author of The Divine Comedy - back
29. 25-30 rods is 412.5-495 feet
- back
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