"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".
