Digital heart book

" It is
true, there are the innocent pleasures of country life, and it is
sometimes pleasant to make the earth yield her increase, and
gather the fruits in their season, but the heroic spirit will not
fail to dream of remoter retirements and more rugged paths. It
will have its garden-plots and its _parterres_ elsewhere than on
the earth, and gather nuts and berries by the way for its
subsistence, or orchard fruits with such heedlessness as berries.
We would not always be soothing and taming nature, breaking the
horse and the ox, but sometimes ride the horse wild and chase the
buffalo. The Indian's intercourse with Nature is at least such
as admits of the greatest independence of each. If he is
somewhat of a stranger in her midst, the gardener is too much of
a familiar. There is something vulgar and foul in the latter's
closeness to his mistress, something noble and cleanly in the
former's distance. In civilization, as in a southern latitude,
man degenerates at length, and yields to the incursion of more
northern tribes,
"Some nation yet shut in
With hills of ice.


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