Page:Winter - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/250

236 of improvement, that of the red man, a history of fixed habits or stagnation.

To insure health, a man's relation to nature must come very near to a personal one. He must be conscious of a friendliness in her. When human friends fail or die, she must stand in the gap to him. I cannot conceive of any life which deserves the name, unless there is in it a certain tender relation to nature. This it is which makes winter warm, and supplies society in the desert and wilderness. Unless nature sympathizes with and speaks to us, as it were, the most fertile and blooming regions are barren and dreary. I do not see that I can live tolerably without affection for nature. If I feel no softening toward the rocks, what do they signify.

The dog is to the fox as the white man to the red. The former has attained to more clearness in his bark; it is more ringing and musical, more developed; he explodes the vowels of his alphabet better, and besides he has made his place so good in the world that he can run without skulking in the open field. What a smothered, ragged, feeble, and unmusical sound is the bark of the fox! It seems as if he scarcely dared raise his voice lest he should catch the ear of his tame cousin and inveterate foe.

I do not think much of that chemistry that