still see men in herds for all them. A familiar name cannot make
a man less strange to me. It may be given to a savage who retains
in secret his own wild title earned in the woods. We have a wild
savage in us, and a savage name is perchance somewhere recorded
as ours. I see that my neighbor, who bears the familiar epithet
William or Edwin, takes it off with his jacket. It does not
adhere to him when asleep or in anger, or aroused by any passion
or inspiration. I seem to hear pronounced by some of his kin at
such a time his original wild name in some jaw-breaking or else
melodious tongue.



Here is this vast, savage, hovering mother of ours, Nature, lying
all around, with such beauty, and such affection for her
children, as the leopard; and yet we are so early weaned from her
breast to society, to that culture which is exclusively an
interaction of man on man--a sort of breeding in and in, which
produces at most a merely English nobility, a civilization
destined to have a speedy limit.

In society, in the best institutions of men, it is easy to detect
a certain precocity. When we should still be growing children, we
are already little men. Give me a culture which imports much muck
from the meadows, and deepens the soil--not that which trusts to
heating manures, and improved implements and modes of culture
only!

Many a poor sore-eyed student that I have heard of would grow
faster, both intellectually and physically, if, instead of