FOOTPATHS 207 
hearths and humanized nature for him. Fora 
permanent residence there can be no comparison 
between this and the wilderness. Our woods 
are sylvan, and their inhabitants woodsmen and 
rustics ; that is, a selvaggia and its inhabitants 
salvages.” What Thoreau loved, like all men 
of healthy minds, was the occasional experi- 
ence of untamed wildness. “TI love to see oc- 
casionally,” he adds, “a man from whom the 
usnea (lichen) hangs as gracefully as from a 
spruce.” 
Footpaths bring us nearer both to nature and 
to man. No high-road, not even a lane, con- 
ducts to the deeper recesses of the wood, where 
you hear the wood thrush. There are a thou- 
sand concealed fitnesses in nature, rhymed cor- 
respondences of bird and blossom, for which 
you must seek through hidden paths ; as when 
you come upon some black brook so palisaded 
with cardinal flowers as to seem “a stream of 
sunsets ;”’ or trace its shadowy course till it 
spreads into some forest pool, above which that 
rare and patrician insect, the Agrion dragon-fly, 
flits and hovers perpétually, as if the darkness 
and the cool had taken wings. The dark brown 
pellucid water sleeps between banks of softest 
moss ; white stars of twin flowers creep close 
to the brink, delicate sprays of dewberry trail 
over it, and the emerald tips of drooping leaves 
