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 that man intends to put a girdling ditch round the whole