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

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, 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 and the rest, and out of such
a wilderness comes the Reformer eating locusts and wild honey.
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--have been 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 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 long, through a
swamp, at whose entrance might have been written the words which
Dante 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