It is all human, and yet all
intensely practical with Thoreau. He envies the Indian not because
he is "wild," or "free," or any such nonsense, but for his
instinctive adaptations to his background,--because nature has
become traditional, stimulative with him. And simply, almost
naively, he sets down what he has discovered. The land I live in
is like this or that; such and such life lives in it; and this is
what it all means for me, the transplanted European, for us,
Americans, who have souls to shape and characters to mold in a new
environment, under influences subtler than we guess. "I make it my
business to extract from Nature whatever nutriment she can furnish
me, though at the risk of endless iteration. I milk the sky and
the earth." And again: "Surely it is a defect in our Bible that it
is not truly ours, but a Hebrew Bible. The most pertinent
illustrations for us are to be drawn not from Egypt or Babylonia,
but from New England. Natural objects and phenomena are the
original symbols or types which express our thoughts and feelings.
Yet American scholars, having little or no root in the soil,
commonly strive with all their might to confine themselves to the
imported symbols alone.
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