We have as yet had no adequate account of a primitive pine-forest.  I have noticed that in a physical atlas lately published in Massachusetts, and used in our schools, the “wood land” of North America is limited almost solely to the valleys of the Ohio and some of the Great Lakes, and the great pine-forests of the globe are not represented.  In our vicinity, for instance, New Brunswick and Maine are exhibited as bare as Greenland.  It may be that the children of Greenville, at the foot of Moosehead Lake, who surely are not likely to be scared by an owl, are referred to the valley of the Ohio to get an idea of a forest; but they would not know what to do with their moose, bear, caribou, beaver, etc., there.  Shall we leave it to an Englishman to inform us, that “in North America, both in the United States and Canada, are the most extensive pine-forests in the world”?  The greater part of New Brunswick, the northern half of Maine, and adjacent parts of Canada, not to mention the northeastern part of New York and other tracts further off, are still covered with an almost unbroken pine-forest.

But Maine, perhaps, will soon be where Massachusetts is.  A good part of her territory is already as bare and common-place as much of our neighborhood, and her villages generally are not so well shaded as ours.  We seem to think that the earth must go through the ordeal of sheep-pasturage before it is habitable by man.  Consider Nahant, the resort of all the fashion of Boston,—­which peninsula I saw but indistinctly in the twilight, when I steamed by it, and thought that it was unchanged since the discovery.  John Smith described it in 1614 as “the Mattahunts, two pleasant isles of groves, gardens, and cornfields”; and others tell us that it was once well wooded, and even furnished timber to build the wharves of Boston.  Now it is difficult to make a tree grow there, and the visitor comes away with a vision of Mr. Tudor’s ugly fences a rod high, designed to protect a few pear-shrubs.  And what are we coming to in our Middlesex towns?—­a bald, staring town-house, or meeting-house, and a bare liberty-pole, as leafless as it is fruitless, for all I can see.  We shall be obliged to import the timber for the last, hereafter, or splice such sticks as we have;—­and our ideas of liberty are equally mean with these.  The very willow-rows lopped every three years for fuel or powder,—­and every sizable pine and oak, or other forest tree, cut down within the memory of man!  As if individual speculators were to be allowed to export the clouds out of the sky, or the stars out of the firmament, one by one.  We shall be reduced to gnaw the very crust of the earth for nutriment.