The weapons with which we have gained our most important victories, which should be handed down as heirlooms from father to son, are not the sword and the lance, but the bush-whack, the turf-cutter, the spade, and the bog-hoe, rusted with the blood of many a meadow, and begrimed with the dust of many a hard-fought field.  The very winds blew the Indian’s cornfield into the meadow, and pointed out the way which he had not the skill to follow.  He had no better implement with which to intrench himself in the land than a clamshell.  But the farmer is armed with plough and spade.

In Literature it is only the wild that attracts us.  Dulness is but another name for lameness.  It is the uncivilized free and wild thinking in “Hamlet” and the “Iliad,” in all the Scriptures and Mythologies, not learned in the schools, that delights us.  As the wild duck is more swift and beautiful than the tame, so is the wild—­the mallard—­thought, which ’mid falling dews wings its way above the fens.  A truly good book is something as natural, and as unexpectedly and unaccountably fair and perfect, as a wild flower discovered on the prairies of the West or in the jungles of the East.  Genius is a light which makes the darkness visible, like the lightning’s flash, which perchance shatters the temple of knowledge itself,—­and not a taper lighted at the hearth-stone of the race, which pales before the light of common day.

English literature, from the days of the minstrels to the Lake Poets,—­Chaucer and Spenser and Milton, and even Shakespeare, included,—­breathes no quite fresh and in this sense wild strain.  It is an essentially tame and civilized literature, reflecting Greece and Rome.  Her wilderness is a green-wood,—­her wild man a Robin Hood.  There is plenty of genial love of Nature, but not so much of Nature herself.  Her chronicles inform us when her wild animals, but not when the wild man in her, became extinct.

The science of Humboldt is one thing, poetry is another thing.  The poet to-day, notwithstanding all the discoveries of science, and the accumulated learning of mankind, enjoys no advantage over Homer.

Where is the literature which gives expression to Nature?  He would be a poet who could impress the winds and streams into his service, to speak for him; who nailed words to their primitive senses, as farmers drive down stakes in the spring, which the frost has heaved; who derived his words as often as he used them,—­transplanted them to his page with earth adhering to their roots; whose words were so true and fresh and natural that they would appear to expand like the buds at the approach of spring, though they lay half-smothered between two musty leaves in a library,—­ay, to bloom and bear fruit there, after their kind, annually, for the faithful reader, in sympathy with surrounding Nature.