thus the corner of my garden is an inexhaustible treasure-chest. Here you
can dig, not gold, but the value which gold merely represents; and there
is no Signor Blitz about it. Yet farmers' sons will stare by the hour to
see a juggler draw ribbons from his throat, though he tells them it is all
deception. Surely, men love darkness rather than light.



WALKING.

[1862.]


I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as
contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil,--to regard man as an
inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of
society. I wish to make an extreme statement, if so I may make an emphatic
one, for there are enough champions of civilization: the minister and the
school-committee, and every one of you will take care of that.

* * * * *

I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who
understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks,--who had a
genius, so to speak, for _sauntering_: which word is beautifully derived
"from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and
asked charity, under pretence of going _a la Sainte Terre_" to the Holy
Land, till the children exclaimed, "There goes a _Sainte-Terrer_," a
Saunterer,--a Holy-Lander. They who never go to the Holy Land in their
walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they who