Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 | Page 3

of our nature, as on the face and hands,
or as severe manual labor robs the hands of some of their delicacy of
touch. So staying in the house, on the other hand, may produce a
softness and smoothness, not to say thinness of skin, accompanied by
an increased sensibility to certain impressions. Perhaps we should be
more susceptible to some influences important to our intellectual and

moral growth, if the sun had shone and the wind blown on us a little
less; and no doubt it is a nice matter to proportion rightly the thick and
thin skin. But methinks that is a scurf that will fall off fast
enough,--that the natural remedy is to be found in the proportion which
the night bears to the day, the winter to the summer, thought to
experience. There will be so much the more air and sunshine in our
thoughts. The callous palms of the laborer are conversant with finer
tissues of self-respect and heroism, whose touch thrills the heart, than
the languid fingers of idleness. That is mere sentimentality that lies
abed by day and thinks itself white, far from the tan and callus of
experience.
When we walk, we naturally go to the fields and woods: what would
become of us, if we walked only in a garden or a mall? Even some
sects of philosophers have felt the necessity of importing the woods to
themselves, since they did not go to the woods. "They planted groves
and walks of Platanes," where they took subdiales ambulationes in
porticos open to the air. Of course it is of no use to direct our steps to
the woods, if they do not carry us thither. I am alarmed when it happens
that I have walked a mile into the woods bodily, without getting there
in spirit. In my afternoon walk I would fain forget all my morning
occupations and my obligations to society. But it sometimes happens
that I cannot easily shake off the village. The thought of some work
will run in my head, and I am not where my body is,--I am out of my
senses. In my walks I would fain return to my senses. 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 farm-house 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