Some months ago I went to see a panorama of the Rhine. It was like
a dream of the Middle Ages. I floated down its historic stream in
something more than imagination, under bridges built by the Romans, and
repaired by later heroes, past cities and castles whose very names were
music to my ears, and each of which was the subject of a legend. There
were Ehrenbreitstein and Rolandseck and Coblentz, which I knew only in
history. They were ruins that interested me chiefly. There seemed to
come up from its waters and its vine-clad hills and valleys a hushed
music as of Crusaders departing for the Holy Land. I floated along under
the spell of enchantment, as if I had been transported to an heroic age,
and breathed an atmosphere of chivalry.

Soon after, I went to see a panorama of the Mississippi, and as I worked
my way up the river in the light of to-day, and saw the steamboats
wooding up, counted the rising cities, gazed on the fresh ruins of
Nauvoo, beheld the Indians moving west across the stream, and, as before
I had looked up the Moselle, now looked up the Ohio and the Missouri,
and heard the legends of Dubuque and of Wenona's Cliff,--still thinking
more of the future than of the past or present,--I saw that this was a
Rhine stream of a different kind; that the foundations of castles were
yet to be laid, and the famous bridges were yet to be thrown over the
river; and I felt that _this was the heroic age itself_, though we know
it not, for the hero is commonly the simplest and obscurest of men.

The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild; and what I
have been preparing to say is, that in Wildness is the preservation of
the world. Every tree sends its fibres forth in search of the Wild. The
cities import it at any price. Men plough and sail for it. From the
forest and wilderness come the tonics and barks which brace mankind. Our
ancestors were savages. The story of Romulus and Remus being suckled by