in the course of forty months, and so redeem it by the magic of his
spade. I refer to him only as the type of a class.

The weapons with which we have gained our most important victories,
which should be handed down as heirlooms from father to son, are not the
sword and the lance, but the bush-whack, the turf-cutter, the spade, and
the bog-hoe, rusted with the blood of many a meadow, and begrimed with
the dust of many a hard-fought field. The very winds blew the Indian's
cornfield into the meadow, and pointed out the way which he had not
the skill to follow. He had no better implement with which to intrench
himself in the land than a clamshell. But the farmer is armed with
plough and spade.

In Literature it is only the wild that attracts us. Dulness is but
another name for lameness. It is the uncivilized free and wild thinking
in "Hamlet" and the "Iliad," in all the Scriptures and Mythologies, not
learned in the schools, that delights us. As the wild duck is more swift
and beautiful than the tame, so is the wild--the mallard--thought, which
'mid falling dews wings its way above the fens. A truly good book is
something as natural, and as unexpectedly and unaccountably fair and
perfect, as a wild flower discovered on the prairies of the West or in
the jungles of the East. Genius is a light which makes the darkness
visible, like the lightning's flash, which perchance shatters the temple
of knowledge itself,--and not a taper lighted at the hearth-stone of the
race, which pales before the light of common day.

English literature, from the days of the minstrels to the Lake
Poets,--Chaucer and Spenser and Milton, and even Shakespeare,
included,--breathes no quite fresh and in this sense wild strain. It
is an essentially tame and civilized literature, reflecting Greece and