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 it is 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 fibers 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