Any transcendentalist who wishes to furbish up his philosophic furniture will find this a good workshop for the purpose.  There is ample room for any school, positive or negative,—­plenty of cloud-land for all conceits.  Kant could have picked up pure reason among the crowds of simply reasoning creatures who have possessed the scene since long before the brain of man was created.  Covies of immemorial Thoreaus bivouac under those hazy woods, and pre-glacial Emersons are circling overhead.  The problem of successfully living they have all solved.  What more have any of us done?  The greatest good of the greatest number they unpresumingly display as a practically triumphant principle; and the greatest number is not by any means with them, any more than with us, number one.  Had it been, they would all have been extinct long ago.  Nature may be “red with tooth and claw,” but not suicidally so.  It is to quite a peaceable, if not wholly loving, world that she invites us.  And just here we can see so much of it; we can study it so broadly and so freely.  Concord and Walden dwindle into the microscopic.  It was under precisely such a sun as this, in a warm, dry atmosphere, on a nearly treeless soil, that the Stagyrite did all the thinking of sixty generations.  Could he have done it in an overcoat and muffler, with a chronic catarrh?

If, impatient of a host of inarticulate instructors, we prefer communing with our kind and falling back on human story, some of that, too, is at hand.  Half a century ago, to a year, a short string of forlorn and forlorn-looking people crossed the prairie close by, from west to east, from the Colorado to the Brazos.  The head of it was Sam Houston’s “army,” three or four hundred strong, with all its materiel in one wagon.  The rest consisted of the debris of all the Anglo-American settlements, women, children, cows, and what poor household stuff could be moved.  Slowly ferrying the Brazos, and as slowly making its way down the left bank, picking up as it went the rest of the homesteads and some more fighting-men, it turned to the right at the head of the estuary.  Then the little column, strengthened with some sea-borne supplies and relieved of its wards, turned to face its pursuers.  These were twice its numbers, with four or five thousand reserves some days behind.  Generalship was given the go-by on both sides, the cul-de-sac of San Jacinto being closed at both ends.  Thirty minutes of noise and smoke, and the empire of Cortez and Montezuma was split in two.  Clio nibbed another quill, steel pens not having then been invented.  The gray geese who might have supplied it recomposed themselves on the prairie, and all the rest of their feathered friends followed their example, as the military interlude melted away and left them their ancient solitary reign.