for farming, I am convinced that my genius dates from an older era than the agricultural.  I would at least strike my spade into the earth with such careless freedom but accuracy as the woodpecker his bill into a tree.  There is in my nature, methinks, a singular yearning toward all wildness.  I know of no redeeming qualities in myself but a sincere love for some things, and when I am reproved I fall back on to this ground.  What have I to do with ploughs?  I cut another furrow than you see.  Where the off ox treads, there is it not, it is farther off; where the nigh ox walks, it will not be, it is nigher still.  If corn fails, my crop fails not, and what are drought and rain to me?  The rude Saxon pioneer will sometimes pine for that refinement and artificial beauty which are English, and love to hear the sound of such sweet and classical names as the Pentland and Malvern Hills, the Cliffs of Dover and the Trosachs, Richmond, Derwent, and Winandermere, which are to him now instead of the Acropolis and Parthenon, of Baiae, and Athens with its sea-walls, and Arcadia and Tempe.

     Greece, who am I that should remember thee,
     Thy Marathon and thy Thermopylae? 
     Is my life vulgar, my fate mean,
     Which on these golden memories can lean?

We are apt enough to be pleased with such books as Evelyn’s Sylva, Acetarium, and Kalendarium Hortense, but they imply a relaxed nerve in the reader.  Gardening is civil and social, but it wants the vigor and freedom of the forest and the outlaw.  There may be an excess of cultivation as well as of anything else, until civilization becomes pathetic.  A highly cultivated man,—­all whose bones can be bent! whose heaven-born virtues are but good manners!  The young pines springing up in the cornfields from year to year are to me a refreshing fact.  We talk of civilizing the Indian, but that is not the name for his improvement.  By the wary independence and aloofness of his dim forest life he preserves his intercourse with his native gods, and is admitted from time to time to a rare and peculiar society with Nature.  He has glances of starry recognition to which our saloons are strangers.  The steady illumination of his genius, dim only because distant, is like the faint but satisfying light of the stars compared with the dazzling but ineffectual and short-lived blaze of candles.  The Society-Islanders had their day-born gods, but they were not supposed to be “of equal antiquity with the atua fauau po, or night-born gods.”  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