does not stand from one year's end to another, and there,
consequently, politics are not, for they are but as the
cigar-smoke of a man.

The village is the place to which the roads tend, a sort of
expansion of the highway, as a lake of a river. It is the body of
which roads are the arms and legs--a trivial or quadrivial place,
the thoroughfare and ordinary of travelers. The word is from the
Latin villa which together with via, a way, or more anciently ved
and vella, Varro derives from veho, to carry, because the villa
is the place to and from which things are carried. They who got
their living by teaming were said vellaturam facere. Hence, too,
the Latin word vilis and our vile, also villain. This suggests
what kind of degeneracy villagers are liable to. They are wayworn
by the travel that goes by and over them, without traveling
themselves.

Some do not walk at all; others walk in the highways; a few walk
across lots. Roads are made for horses and men of business. I do
not travel in them much, comparatively, because I am not in a
hurry to get to any tavern or grocery or livery-stable or depot
to which they lead. I am a good horse to travel, but not from
choice a roadster. The landscape-painter uses the figures of men
to mark a road. He would not make that use of my figure. I walk
out into a nature such as the old prophets and poets, Menu,
Moses, Homer, Chaucer, walked in. You may name it America, but it
is not America; neither Americus Vespueius, nor Columbus, nor the
rest were the discoverers of it. There is a truer amount of it in
mythology than in any history of America, so called, that I have
seen.