hill
about two miles northwest of Bangor, whither I went for this
purpose. After this I was ready to return to Massachusetts.

* * * * *

Humboldt has written an interesting chapter on the primitive forest,
but no one has yet described for me the difference between that wild
forest which once occupied our oldest townships, and the tame one
which I find there to-day. It is a difference which would be worth
attending to. The civilized man not only clears the land permanently
to a great extent, and cultivates open fields, but he tames and
cultivates to a certain extent the forest itself. By his mere
presence, almost, he changes the nature of the trees as no other
creature does. The sun and air, and perhaps fire, have been
introduced, and grain raised where it stands. It has lost its wild,
damp, and shaggy look, the countless fallen and decaying trees are
gone, and consequently that thick coat of moss which lived on them is
gone too. The earth is comparatively bare and smooth and dry. The
most primitive places left with us are the swamps, where the spruce
still grows shaggy with usnea. The surface of the ground in the Maine
woods is everywhere spongy and saturated with moisture. I noticed that
the plants which cover the forest floor there are such as are commonly
confined to swamps with us,--the _Clintonia borealis_, orchises,
creeping snowberry, and others; and the prevailing aster there is the
_Aster acuminatus_, which with us grows in damp and shady
woods. The asters _cordifolias_ and _macrophyllus_ also are
common, asters of little or no color, and sometimes without petals. I
saw no soft, spreading, second-growth white-pines, with smooth bark,
acknowledging the presence of the wood-chopper, but even the young
white-pines were all tall and slender rough-barked trees.

Those Maine woods differ essentially from ours. There you are never
reminded that the wilderness which you are threading is, after all,
some villager's familiar wood-lot, some widow's thirds, from which her
ancestors have sledded fuel for generations, minutely described in
some old deed which is recorded, of which the owner has got a plan
too, and old bound-marks may be found every forty rods, if you will
search. 'Tis true, the map may inform you that you stand on land
granted by the State to some academy, or on Bingham's purchase; but
these names do not impose on you, for you see nothing to remind you of
the academy or of Bingham