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
woodside. 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 traveler 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 bean
field 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 travelers. 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,
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 traveling
themselves.
Some do not walk at all; others walk in the highways; a few walk
across lots. Roads are made for horses and men of business. I do
not travel in them much, comparatively, because I am not in a
hurry to get to any tavern or grocery or livery-stable or depot
to which they lead. I am a good horse to travel, but not from
choice a roadster. The landscape-painter uses the figures of men
to mark a road. He would not make that use of my figure. I walk
out into a nature such as the old prophets and poets, Menu,
Moses, Homer, Chaucer, walked in. You may name it America, but it
is not America; neither Americus Vespueius, nor Columbus, nor the