Where is the literature which gives expression to Nature? He
would be a poet who could impress the winds and streams into his
service, to speak for him; who nailed words to their primitive
senses, as farmers drive down stakes in the spring, which the
frost has heaved; who derived his words as often as he used
them--transplanted them to his page with earth adhering to their
roots; whose words were so true and fresh and natural that they
would appear to expand like the buds at the approach of spring,
though they lay half smothered between two musty leaves in a
library--aye, to bloom and bear fruit there, after their kind,
annually, for the faithful reader, in sympathy with surrounding
Nature.

I do not know of any poetry to quote which adequately expresses
this yearning for the Wild. Approached from this side, the best
poetry is tame. I do not know where to find in any literature,
ancient or modern, any account which contents me of that Nature
with which even I am acquainted. You will perceive that I demand
something which no Augustan nor Elizabethan age, which no
culture, in short, can give. Mythology comes nearer to it than
anything. How much more fertile a Nature, at least, has Grecian
mythology its root in than English literature! Mythology is the
crop which the Old World bore before its soil was exhausted,
before the fancy and imagination were affected with blight; and
which it still bears, wherever its pristine vigor is unabated.
All other literatures endure only as the elms which overshadow
our houses; but this is like the great dragon-tree of the Western
Isles, as old as mankind, and, whether that does or not, will
endure as long; for the decay of other literatures makes the soil
in which it thrives.