82 
THE MAINE WOODS. 
a noise, except by a few tinkling, lisping birds and 
trickling rills ? 
What a place to live, what a place to die and be 
buried in! There certainly men would live forever, 
and laugh at death and the grave. There they could 
have no such thoughts as are associated with the village 
graveyard, — that make a grave out of one of those 
moist evergreen hummocks! 
Die and be buried who will, 
I mean to live here still; 
My nature grows ever more young 
The primitive pines among. 
I am reminded by my journey how exceedingly new 
this country still is. You have only to travel for a few 
days into the interior and back parts even of many of 
the old States, to come to that very America which the 
Northmen, and Cabot, and Gosnold, and Smith, and Ra¬ 
leigh visited. If Columbus was the first to discover the 
islands, Americus Yespucius and Cabot, and the Puri¬ 
tans, and we their descendants, have discovered only the 
shores of America. While the republic has already 
acquired a history world-wide, America is still unsettled 
and unexplored. Like the English in New Holland, 
we live only on the shores of a continent even yet, and 
hardly know where the rivers come from which float 
our navy. The very timber and boards and shingles of 
which our houses are made, grew but yesterday in a 
wilderness where the Indian still hunts and the moose 
runs wild. New York has her wilderness within her 
own borders; and though the sailors of Europe are 
familiar with the soundings of her Hudson, and Fulton 
long since invented the steamboat on its waters, an In- 
