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Our village life would stagnate if it were not for the
unexplored forrests and meadows which surround it. We need the tonic of wildness--to wade sometimes
in marshes where the bittern and the meadow-hen
lurk, and hear the booming of the snipe; to smell
the whispering sedge where only some wilder and
more solitary fowl builds her nest, and the mink
crawls with his belly close to the ground. At the same
time we are earnest to explore and learn all things,
we require that all things be mysterious and |
unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because
unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.
We must be refreshed by the sight of inexaustible
vigour, vast and Titanic features, the seacoast
with its wrecks, the wilderness with its living
and decaying trees, the thundercloud, and the rain
which lasts three weeks and produces freshets. We
need to witness our own limits trangressed, and
some life pasturing freely where we never wander.
- Henry David Thoreau |
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