What business have I in the woods, if I am thinking
of something out of the woods? I suspect myself, and cannot help a
shudder, when I find myself so implicated even in what are called good
works,--for this may sometimes happen.
My vicinity affords many good walks; and though for so many years I have
walked almost every day, and sometimes for several days together, I have
not yet exhausted them. An absolutely new prospect is a great happiness,
and I can still get this any afternoon. Two or three hours' walking will
carry me to as strange a country as I expect ever to see. A single
farmhouse which I had not seen before is sometimes as good as the
dominions of the King of Dahomey. There is in fact a sort of harmony
discoverable between the capabilities of the landscape within a circle of
ten miles' radius, or the limits of an afternoon walk, and the threescore
years and ten of human life. It will never become quite familiar to you.
Nowadays almost all man's improvements, so called, as the building of
houses, and the cutting down of the forest and of all large trees, simply
deform the landscape, and make it more and more tame and cheap. A people
who would begin by burning the fences and let the forest stand! I saw the
fences half consumed, their ends lost in the middle of the prairie, and
some worldly miser with a surveyor looking after his bounds, while heaven
had taken place around him, and he did not see the angels going to and
fro, but was looking for an old post-hole in the midst of paradise. I
looked again, and saw him standing in the middle of a boggy, stygian fen,
surrounded by devils, and he had found his bounds without a doubt, three
little stones, where a stake had been driven, and looking nearer, I saw
that the Prince of Darkness was his surveyor.
I can easily walk ten, fifteen, twenty, any number of miles, commencing at
my own door, without going by any house, without crossing a road except
where the fox and the mink do: first along by the river, and then the
brook, and then the meadow and the wood-side. There are square miles in my
vicinity which have no inhabitant. From many a hill I can see civilization
and the abodes of man afar. The farmers and their works are scarcely more
obvious than woodchucks and their burrows. Man and his affairs, church and
state and school, trade and commerce, and manufactures and agriculture,
even politics, the most alarming of them all,--I am pleased to see how
little space they occupy in the landscape. Politics is but a narrow field,
and that still narrower highway yonder leads to it. I sometimes direct the
traveller thither. If you would go to the political world, follow the
great road,--follow that market-man, keep his dust in your eyes, and it
will lead you straight to it; for it, too, has its place merely, and does
not occupy all space. I pass from it as from a bean-field into the forest,
and it is forgotten. In one half-hour I can walk off to some portion of
the earth's surface where a man does not stand from one year's end to
another, and there, consequently, politics are not, for they are but as
the cigar-smoke of a man.
The village is the place to which the roads tend, a sort of expansion of
the highway, as a lake of a river. It is the body of which roads are the
arms and legs,--a trivial or quadrivial place, the thoroughfare and
ordinary of travellers.
