This afternoon’s experience suggested to me how base or coarse are the motives which commonly carry men into the wilderness.  The explorers and lumberers generally are all hirelings, paid so much a day for their labor, and as such they have no more love for wild nature than wood-sawyers have for forests.  Other white men and Indians who come here are for the most part hunters, whose object is to slay as many moose and other wild animals as possible.  But, pray, could not one spend some weeks or years in the solitude of this vast wilderness with other employments than these,—­ employments perfectly sweet and innocent and ennobling?  For one that comes with a pencil to sketch or sing, a thousand come with an axe or rifle.  What a coarse and imperfect use Indians and hunters make of Nature!  No wonder that their race is so soon exterminated.  I already, and for weeks afterward, felt my nature the coarser for this part of my woodland experience, and was reminded that our life should be lived as tenderly and daintily as one would pluck a flower.

With these thoughts, when we reached our camping-ground, I decided to leave my companions to continue moose-hunting down the stream, while I prepared the camp, though they requested me not to chop much nor make a large fire, for fear I should scare their game.  In the midst of the damp fir-wood, high on the mossy bank, about nine o’clock of this bright moonlight night, I kindled a fire, when they were gone, and, sitting on the fir-twigs, within sound of the falls, examined by its light the botanical specimens which I had collected that afternoon, and wrote down some of the reflections which I have here expanded; or I walked along the shore and gazed up the stream, where the whole space above the falls was filled with mellow light.  As I sat before the fire on my fir-twig seat, without walls above or around me, I remembered how far on every hand that wilderness stretched, before you came to cleared or cultivated fields, and wondered if any bear or moose was watching the light of my fire; for Nature looked sternly upon me on account of the murder of the moose.

Strange that so few ever come to the woods to see how the pine lives and grows and spires, lifting its evergreen arms to the light,—­to see its perfect success; but most are content to behold it in the shape of many broad boards brought to market, and deem that its true success!  But the pine is no more lumber than man is, and to be made into boards and houses is no more its true and highest use than the truest use of a man is to be cut down and made into manure.  There is a higher law affecting our relation to pines as well as to men.  A pine cut down, a dead pine, is no more a pine than a dead human carcass is a man.  Can he who has discovered only some of the values of whalebone and whale oil be said to have discovered the true use of the whale?  Can he who slays the elephant for his ivory be said to have “seen the elephant”?  These are petty and accidental uses; just as if a stronger race were to kill us in order to make buttons and flageolets of our bones; for everything may serve a lower as well as a higher use.  Every creature is better alive than dead, men and moose and pine-trees, and he who understands it aright will rather preserve its life than destroy it.