hrough a wood, and presently the
overflowing brooks seek it for a channel, the obstructed winds draw
through it, the fox and woodchuck travel by it, the catbird and robin
build near it, the bee and swallow make a high-road of its convenient
thoroughfare. In winter the first snows mark it with a white line; as
you wander through you hear the blue-jay's cry, and see the hurrying
flight of the sparrow; the graceful outlines of the leafless bushes are
revealed, and the clinging bird's-nests, "leaves that do not fall,"
give happy memories of summer homes. Thus Nature meets man half-way.
The paths of the wild forest and of the rural neighborhood are not at
all the same thing; indeed, a "spotted trail," marked only by the
woodman's axe-marks on the trees, is not a footpath. Thoreau, who is
sometimes foolishly accused of having sought to be a mere savage,
understood this distinction well. "A man changes by his presence," he
says in his unpublished diary, "the very nature of the trees. The
poet's is not a logger's path, but a woodman's,--the logger and pioneer
have preceded him, and banished decaying wood and the spongy mosses
which feed on it, and built hearths and humanized nature for him. For a
permanent residence, there can be no comparison between this and the
wilderness. Our woods are sylvan, and their inhabitants woodsmen and
rustics; that is, a selvaggia and its inhabitants salvages." What
Thoreau loved, like all men of healthy minds, was the occasional
experience of untamed wildness. "I love to see occasionally," he adds,
"a man from whom the usnea (lichen) hangs as gracefully as from a
spruce."

Footpaths bring us nearer both to nature and to man. No high-road, not
even a lane, conducts to the deeper recesses of the wood, where you
hear the wood-thrush. There are a thousand concealed fitnesses in
nature, rhymed correspondences of bird and blossom, for which you must
seek through hidden paths; as when you come upon some black brook so
palisaded with cardinal-flowers as to seem "a stream of sunsets"; or
trace its shadowy course till it spreads into some forest-pool, above
which that rare and patrician insect, the Agrion dragon-fly, flits and
hovers perpetually, as if the darkness and the cool had taken wings.
The dark brown pellucid water sleeps between banks of softest moss;
white stars of twin-flowers creep close to the brink, delicate sprays
of dewberry trail over it, and the emerald tips of drooping leaves
forever t