I never heard a girl or woman express so strong a love for nature.
She purposes to return to that lonely ruin, and dwell there alone, since her mother and sister will not accompany her; says that she knows all about farming and keeping sheep and spinning and weaving, though it would puzzle her to shingle the old house. There she thinks she can "live free.”
I was pleased to hear of her plans, because they were quite cheerful and original, not professedly reformatory, but growing out of her love for "Squire's Brook and the Middleborough ponds.”
A strong love for outward nature is singularly rare among both men and women.
The scenery immediately about her homestead is quite ordinary, yet she appreciates and can use that part of the universe as no other being can. Her own sex, so tamely bred, only jeer at her for entertaining such an idea, but she has a strong head and a love for good reading, which may carry her through. I would by no means discourage, nor yet particularly encourage her, for I would have her so strong as to succeed in spite of all ordinary discouragements.
It is very rare that I hear one express a strong and imperishable attachment to a particular scenery, or to the whole of nature, — I mean such as will control their whole lives and characters. Such seem to have a true home in nature, a hearth in the fields and woods, whatever tenement may be burned. The soil and climate is warm to them.
They alone are naturalized, but most are tender and callow creatures that wear a house as their outmost shell and must get their lives insured when they step abroad from it. They are lathed and plastered in from all natural influences, and their delicate lives are a long battle with the dyspepsia.
The others are fairly rooted in the soil, and are the noblest plant it bears, more hardy and natural than sorrel. The dead earth seems animated at the prospect of their coming, as if proud to be trodden on by them. It recognizes its lord. Children of the Golden Age. Hospitals and almshouses are not their destiny.
When I hear of such an attachment in a reasonable, a divine, creature to a particular portion of the earth, it seems as if then first the earth succeeded and rejoiced, as if it had been made and existed only for such a use. These various soils and reaches which the farmer plods over, which the traveller glances at and the geologist dryly describes, then first flower and bear their fruit. Does he chiefly own the land who coldly uses it and gets corn and potatoes out of it, or he who loves it and gets inspiration from it?
How rarely a man's love for nature becomes a ruling principle with him, like a youth's affection for a maiden, but more enduring!
All nature is my bride.
That nature which to one is a stark and ghastly solitude is a sweet, tender, and genial society to another.
They told me at New Bedford that one of their whalers came in the other day with a black man aboard whom they had picked up swimming in the broad Atlantic, without anything to support him, but nobody could understand his language or tell where he came from -- he was in good condition and well-behaved. My respect for my race rose several degrees when I heard this, and I thought they had found the true merman at last.
"What became of him?" I inquired.
"I believe they sent him to the State Almshouse," was the reply.
Could anything have been more ridiculous? That he should be beholden to Massachusetts for his support who floated free where Massachusetts with her State Almshouse could not have supported herself for a moment. They should have dined him, then accompanied him to the nearest cape and bidden him good-by.
The State would do well to appoint an intelligent standing committee on such curious [sic], in behalf of philologists, naturalists, and so forth, to see that the proper disposition is made of such visitors.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, April 23, 1857
All nature is my bride. See January 26, 1852 ("Let us preserve, secure, protect the coincidence of our life with the life of nature.”); May 6, 1854 (“All that a man has to say or do that can possibly concern mankind, is in some shape or other to tell the story of his love, — to sing; and, if he is fortunate and keeps alive, he will be forever in love. This alone is to be alive to the extremities.”); August 29, 1854 (“My mistress is at a more respectful distance, for, by the coolness of the air, I am more continent in my thought and held aloof from her, while by the genial warmth of the sun I am more than ever attracted to her.”); December 1, 1856 ("I love and could embrace the shrub oak with its scanty garment of leaves rising above the snow . . . I felt a positive yearning toward one bush this afternoon. There was a match found for me at last. I fell in love with a shrub oak.”);January 23, 1858 (" 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?"); August 30, 1856 (“[T]here are square rods in Middlesex County as purely primitive and wild as they were a thousand years ago, which have escaped the plow and the axe and the scythe and the cranberry-rake, little oases of wildness in the desert of our civilization, wild as a square rod on the moon, supposing it to be uninhabited. I believe almost in the personality of such planetary matter, feel something akin to reverence for it, can even worship it as terrene, titanic matter extant in my day. We are so different we admire each other, we healthily attract one another. I love it as a maiden”); May 27, 1859 ("The dark river, now that shades are increased, is like the dark eye of a maiden.”); also Walking("All good things are wild and free.”).
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