Nowadays almost all man’s improvements, so called, as the building of houses, and the cutting down of the forest and of all large trees, simply deform the landscape, and make it more and more tame and cheap.  A people who would begin by burning the fences and let the forest stand!  I saw the fences half consumed, their ends lost in the middle of the prairie, and some worldly miser with a surveyor looking after his bounds, while heaven had taken place around him, and he did not see the angels going to and fro, but was looking for an old post-hole in the midst of paradise.  I looked again, and saw him standing in the middle of a boggy, stygian fen, surrounded by devils, and he had found his bounds without a doubt, three little stones, where a stake had been driven, and looking nearer, I saw that the Prince of Darkness was his surveyor.

I can easily walk ten, fifteen, twenty, any number of miles, commencing at my own door, without going by any house, without crossing a road except where the fox and the mink do:  first along by the river, and then the brook, and then the meadow and the wood-side.  There are square miles in my vicinity which have no inhabitant.  From many a hill I can see civilization and the abodes of man afar.  The farmers and their works are scarcely more obvious than woodchucks and their burrows.  Man and his affairs, church and state and school, trade and commerce, and manufactures and agriculture, even politics, the most alarming of them all,—­I am pleased to see how little space they occupy in the landscape.  Politics is but a narrow field, and that still narrower highway yonder leads to it.  I sometimes direct the traveller thither.  If you would go to the political world, follow the great road,—­follow that market-man, keep his dust in your eyes, and it will lead you straight to it; for it, too, has its place merely, and does not occupy all space.  I pass from it as from a beanfield into the forest, and it is forgotten.  In one half-hour I can walk off to some portion of the earth’s surface where a man does not stand from one year’s end to another, and there, consequently, politics are not, for they are but as the cigar-smoke of a man.

The village is the place to which the roads tend, a sort of expansion of the highway, as a lake of a river.  It is the body of which roads are the arms and legs,—­a trivial or quadrivial place, the thoroughfare and ordinary of travellers.  The word is from the Latin villa, which, together with via, a way, or more anciently ved and vella, Varro derives from veho, to carry, because the villa is the place to and from which things are carried.  They who got their living by teaming were said vellaturam facere.  Hence, too, apparently, the Latin word vilis and our vile; also villain.  This suggests what kind of degeneracy villagers are liable to.  They are wayworn by the travel that goes by and over them, without travelling themselves.