ich chiefly has
inspired, and will continue to inspire, the strains of poets, such as
compose the mass of any literature. Our woods are sylvan, and their
inhabitants woodmen and rustics,--that is, _selvaggia_, and the
inhabitants are _salvages_. A civilized man, using the word in
the ordinary sense, with his ideas and associations, must at length
pine there, like a cultivated plant, which clasps its fibres about a
crude and undissolved mass of peat. At the extreme North, the voyagers
are obliged to dance and act plays for employment. Perhaps our own
woods and fields,--in the best wooded towns, where we need not quarrel
about the huckleberries,--with the primitive swamps scattered here and
there in their midst, but not prevailing over them, are the perfection
of parks and groves, gardens, arbors, paths, vistas, and landscapes.
They are the natural consequence of what art and refinement we as a
people have,--the common which each village possesses, its true
paradise, in comparison with which all elaborately and wilfully
wealth-constructed parks and gardens are paltry imitations. Or, I
would rather say, such _were_ our groves twenty years ago. The
poet's, commonly, is not a logger's path, but a woodman's. The logger
and pioneer have preceded him, like John the Baptist; eaten the wild
honey, it may be, but the locusts also; banished decaying wood and the
spongy mosses which feed on it, and built hearths and humanized Nature
for him.

But there are spirits of a yet more liberal culture, to whom no
simplicity is barren. There are not only stately pines, but fragile
flowers, like the orchises, commonly described as too delicate for
cultivation, which derive their nutriment from the crudest mass of
peat. These remind us, that, not only for strength, but for beauty,
the poet must, from time to time, travel the logger's path and the
Indian's trail, to drink at some new and more bracing fountain of the
Muses, far in the recesses of the wilderness.

The kings of England formerly had their forests "to hold the king's
game," for sport or food, sometimes destroying villages to create or
extend them; and I think that they were impelled by a true
instinct. Why should not we, who have renounced the king's authority,
have our national preserves, where no villages need be destroyed, in
which the bear and panther, and some even of the hunter race, may
still exist, and not be "civilized off the face of the earth,"--our
forests, not to hol