I confess that I am partial to these wild
fancies, which transcend the order of time and development. They
are the sublimest recreation of the intellect. The partridge
loves peas, but not those that go with her into the pot.
In short, all good things are wild and free. There is something
in a strain of music, whether produced by an instrument or by the
human voice--take the sound of a bugle in a summer night, for
instance--which by its wildness, to speak without satire, reminds
me of the cries emitted by wild beasts in their native forests.
It is so much of their wildness as I can understand. Give me for
my friends and neighbors wild men, not tame ones. The wildness of
the savage is but a faint symbol of the awful ferity with which
good men and lovers meet.
I love even to see the domestic animals reassert their native
rights--any evidence that they have not wholly lost their
original wild habits and vigor; as when my neighbor's cow breaks
out of her pasture early in the spring and boldly swims the
river, a cold, gray tide, twenty-five or thirty rods wide,
swollen by the melted snow. It is the buffalo crossing the
Mississippi.
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