A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers - Pennsylvania State ...

are English, and love to hear the sound of such sweet and
classical names as the Pentland and Malvern Hills, the Cliffs
of Dover and the Trosachs, Richmond, Derwent, and
Winandermere, which are to him now instead of the Acropolis
and Parthenon, of Baiae, and Athens with its sea-walls,
and Arcadia and Tempe.
Greece, who am I that should remember thee,
Thy Marathon and thy Thermopylae?
Is my life vulgar, my fate mean,
Which on these golden memories can lean?
We are apt enough to be pleased with such books as Evelyn’s
Sylva, Acetarium, and Kalendarium Hortense, but they imply
a relaxed nerve in the reader. Gardening is civil and social,
but it wants the vigor and freedom of the forest and the
outlaw. There may be an excess of cultivation as well as of
anything else, until civilization becomes pathetic. A highly
cultivated man,—all whose bones can be bent! whose heavenborn
virtues are but good manners! The young pines springing
up in the cornfields from year to year are to me a refresh-
A <strong>Week</strong> on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
42
ing fact. We talk of civilizing the Indian, but that is not the
name for his improvement. By the wary independence and
aloofness of his dim forest life he preserves his intercourse
with his native gods, and is admitted from time to time to a
rare and peculiar society with Nature. He has glances of starry
recognition to which our saloons are strangers. The steady
illumination of his genius, dim only because distant, is like
the faint but satisfying light of the stars compared with the
dazzling but ineffectual and short-lived blaze of candles. The
Society-Islanders had their day-born gods, but they were not
supposed to be “of equal antiquity with the atua fauau po, or
night-born gods.” It is true, there are the innocent pleasures
of country life, and it is sometimes pleasant to make the
earth yield her increase, and gather the fruits in their season,
but the heroic spirit will not fail to dream of remoter retirements
and more rugged paths. It will have its garden-plots
and its parterres elsewhere than on the earth, and gather nuts
and berries by the way for its subsistence, or orchard fruits
with such heedlessness as berries. We would not always be
soothing and taming nature, breaking the horse and the ox,
but sometimes ride the horse wild and chase the buffalo.