160 
THE MAINE WOODS. 
ger’s path, but a woodman’s. The logger and pioneer 
have preceded him, like John the Baptist; eaten the 
wild honey, it may be, but the locusts also; banished 
decaying wood and the spongy mosses which feed on 
it, and built hearths and humanized Nature for him. 
But there are spirits of a yet more liberal culture, 
to whom no simplicity is barren. There are not only 
stately pines, but fragile flowers, like the orchises, com¬ 
monly described as too delicate for cultivation, which 
derive their nutriment from the crudest mass of peat. 
These remind us, that, not only for strength, but for 
beauty, the poet must, from time to time, travel the 
logger’s path and the Indian’s trail, to drink at some 
new and more bracing fountain of the Muses, far in the 
recesses of the wilderness. 
The kings of England formerly had their forests “ to 
hold the king’s game,” for sport or food, sometimes de¬ 
stroying villages to create or extend them; and I think 
that they were impelled by a true instinct. Why should 
not we, who have renounced the king’s authority, have 
our national preserves, where no villages need be de¬ 
stroyed, in which the bear and panther, and some even 
of the hunter race, may still exist, and not be “ civilized 
off the face of the earth,” — our forests, not to hold 
the king’s game merely, but to hold and preserve the 
king himself also, the lord of creation, — not for idle 
sport or food, but for inspiration and our own true re¬ 
creation ? or shall we, like villains, grub them all up, 
poaching on our own national domains ? 
