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ZengXiangyu
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pg19

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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 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 rest were the discoverers of it. There is a truer
amount of it in mythology than in any history of America, so called,
that I have seen.
However, there are a few old roads that may be trodden with profit, as
if they led somewhere now that they are nearly discontinued. There
is the Old Marlborough Road, which does not go to Marlborough now,
me-thinks, unless that is Marlborough where it carries me. I am the
bolder to speak of it here, because I presume that there are one or two
such roads in every town.
THE OLD MARLBOROUGH ROAD
Where they once dug for money,
But never found any;
Where sometimes Martial Miles
Singly files,
And Elijah Wood,
I fear for no good:
No other man,
Save Elisha Dugan--
O man of wild habits,
Partridges and rabbits
Who hast no cares
Only to set snares,
Who liv'st all alone,
Close to the bone
And where life is sweetest
Constantly eatest.
When the spring stirs my blood
With the instinct to travel,
I can get enough gravel
On the Old Marlborough Road.
Nobody repairs it,
For nobody wears it;
It is a living way,
As the Christians say.
Not many there be
Who enter therein,
Only the guests of the
Irishman Quin.
What is it, what is it
But a direction out there,