Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 | Page 8

From the forest and
wilderness come the tonics and barks which brace mankind. Our
ancestors were savages. The story of Romulus and Remus 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 was 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-vitae in
our tea. There is a difference between eating and drinking for strength

and from mere gluttony. The Hottentots 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 Cummings 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 like 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 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 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,--
"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 analyzed 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 farther 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 should 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-fulls 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,