Walking by arm1

Author:arm1 [arm1]
Language: deu
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Walking
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

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Walking - H. D. Thoreau

He would be a poet who could impress the winds and streams the Old World bore before its soil was exhausted, before the into his service, to speak for him; who nailed words to their fancy and imagination were affected with blight; and which primitive senses, as farmers drive down stakes in the spring, it still bears, wherever its pristine vigor is unabated. All other which the frost has heaved; who derived his words as often literatures endure only as the elms which overshadow our as he used them—transplanted them to his page with earth houses; but this is like the great dragon-tree of the Western adhering to their roots; whose words were so true and fresh Isles, as old as mankind, and, whether that does or not, will and natural that they would appear to expand like the buds endure as long; for the decay of other literatures makes the at the approach of spring, though they lay half smothered soil in which it thrives.

between two musty leaves in a library—aye, to bloom and The West is preparing to add its fables to those of the bear fruit there, after their kind, annually, for the faithful East. The valleys of the Ganges, the Nile, and the Shine reader, in sympathy with surrounding Nature.

having yielded their crop, it remains to be seen what the I do not know of any poetry to quote which adequately valleys of the Amazon, the Plate, the Orinoco, the St.

expresses this yearning for the Wild. Approached from this Lawrence, and the Mississippi will produce. Perchance, when, side, the best poetry is tame. I do not know where to find in in the course of ages, American liberty has become a fiction any literature, ancient or modern, any account which con-of the past—as it is to some extent a fiction of the present—

tents me of that Nature with which even I am acquainted.

the poets of the world will be inspired by American mythol-You will perceive that I demand something which no Au-ogy.

gustan nor Elizabethan age, which no culture, in short, can The wildest dreams of wild men, even, are not the less give. Mythology comes nearer to it than anything. How much true, though they may not recommend themselves to the more fertile a Nature, at least, has Grecian mythology its sense which is most common among Englishmen and Ameri-root in than English literature! Mythology is the crop which cans today. It is not every truth that recommends itself to 22

Walking - H. D. Thoreau

the common sense. Nature has a place for the wild Clematis ment or by the human voice—take the sound of a bugle in a as well as for the cabbage. Some expressions of truth are summer night, for instance—which by its wildness, to speak reminiscent—others merely sensible, as the phrase is,—oth-without satire, reminds me of the cries emitted by wild beasts ers prophetic. Some forms of disease, even, may prophesy in their native forests. It is so much of their wildness as I can forms of health.

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