d
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, howling 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 sitting up so very
late, he honestly slumbered a fool's allowance.

There may be an excess even of informing light. Niepce, a Frenchman,
discovered "actinism," that power in the sun's rays which produces a
chemical effect,--that granite rocks, and stone structures, and statues
of metal, "are all alike destructively acted upon during the hours of
sunshine, and, but for provisions of Nature no less wonderful, would
soon perish under the delicate touch of the most subtile of the agencies
of the universe." But he observed that "those bodies which underwent
this change during the daylight possessed the power of restoring
themselves to their original conditions during the hours of night, when
this excitement was no longer influencing them." Hence it has been
inferred that "the hours of darkness are as necessary to the inorganic
creation as we know night and sleep are to the organic kingdom." Not
even does the moon shine every night, but gives place to darkness.

I would not have every man nor every part of a man cultivated, any more
than I would have every acre of earth cultivated: part will be tillage,
but the greater part will be meadow and forest, not only serving an
immediate use, but preparing a m