CHESTJNCOOK. 
159 
monly, places merely where somebody is making money, 
it may be counterfeiting. The virtue of making two 
blades of grass grow where only one grew before does 
not begin to be superhuman. 
Nevertheless, it was a relief to get back to our smooth, 
but still varied landscape. For a permanent residence, 
it seemed to me that there could be no comparison 
between this and the wilderness, necessary as the latter 
is for a resource and a background, the raw material 
of all our civilization. The wilderness is simple, almost 
to barrenness. The partially cultivated country it is 
which chiefly has inspired, and will continue to inspire, 
the strains of poets, such as compose the mass of any 
literature. Our woods are sylvan, and their inhabitants 
woodmen and rustics, ■— that is, selvaggia, and the in¬ 
habitants are salvages. A civilized man, using the w r ord 
in the ordinary sense, with his ideas and associations, 
must at length pine there, like a cultivated plant, which 
clasps its fibres about a crude and undissolved mass of 
peat. At the extreme North, the voyagers are obliged 
to dance and act plays for employment. Perhaps our 
own woods and fields, —• in the best wooded towns, 
where we need not quarrel about the huckleberries, — 
with the primitive swamps scattered here and there in 
their midst, but not prevailing over them, are the per¬ 
fection of parks and groves, gardens, arbors, paths, vistas, 
and landscapes. They are the natural consequence of 
what art and refinement we as a people have, — the 
common which each village possesses, its true paradise, 
in comparison with which all elaborately and wilfully 
wealth-constructed parks and gardens are paltry imita¬ 
tions. Or, I would rather say, such were our groves 
twenty years ago. The poet’s commonly, is not a log- 
