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 traveler 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 traveling long on the steppes of Tartary say,
"On re-entering 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 woods
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
wildwood covers the virgin mould,--and the same soil is good for
men and for trees. A man's health requires as many acres of