It is apparent enough to me that only one or two of my townsmen or acquaintances—not more than one in many thousand men, indeed—feel or at least obey any strong attraction drawing them toward the forest or to Nature, but all, almost without exception, gravitate exclusively toward men, or society.[132] The young men of Concord and in other towns do not walk in the woods, but congregate in shops and offices. They suck one another. Their strongest attraction is toward the mill-dam. A thousand assemble about the fountain in the public square,—the town pump,—be it full or dry, clear or turbid, every morning, but not one in a thousand is in the meanwhile drinking at that fountain’s head. It is hard for the young, aye, and the old, man in the outskirts to keep away from the mill-dam a whole day; but he will find some excuse, as an ounce of cloves that might be wanted, or a New England Farmer still in the office, to tackle up the horse, or even go afoot, but he will go at some rate. This is not bad comparatively; this is because he cannot do better. In spite of his hoeing and chopping, he is unexpressed and undeveloped.
I do not know where to find in any literature, whether ancient or modern, any adequate account of that Nature with which I am acquainted. Mythology comes nearest to it of any.[133]
The actual life of men is not without a dramatic interest at least to the thinker. It is not always and everywhere prosaic. Seventy thousand pilgrims proceed annually to Mecca from the various nations of Islam. But this is not so significant as the far simpler and more unpretending pilgrimage to the shrines of some obscure individual, which yet makes no bustle in the world.
I believe that Adam in paradise was not so favorably situated on the whole as is the backwoodsman in America.[134] You all know how miserably the former turned out,—or was turned out,—but there is some consolation at least in the fact that it yet remains to be seen how the western Adam in the wilderness will turn out.
In Adam’s fall
We sinned all.
In the new Adam’s rise
We shall all reach the skies.
An infusion of hemlock in our tea, if we must drink tea,—not the poison hemlock, but the hemlock spruce, I mean,[135]—or perchance the Arbor-Vitæ, the tree of life,—is what we want.
Feb. 12. Wednesday. A beautiful day, with but little snow or ice on the ground. Though the air is sharp, as the earth is half bare the hens have strayed to some distance from the barns. The hens, standing around their lord and pluming themselves and still fretting a little, strive to fetch the year about.