"I do not know
of any poetry to quote which adequately expresses this yearning for
the Wild. Approached from this side, the best poetry is tame. I do not know where to
find in any literature, ancient or modern, any account which contents me of that
Nature with which even I am acquainted. You will perceive that I demand something
which no Augustan nor Elizabethan age, which no culture, in short, can give.
Mythology comes nearer to it than anything. How much more fertile a Nature, at least,
has Grecian mythology its root in than English literature! Mythology is the crop which
the Old World bore before its soil was exhausted, before the fancy and imagination
were affected with blight; and which it still bears, wherever its pristine vigor is
unabated. All other literatures endure only as the elms which overshadow our
houses; but this is like the great dragon- tree of the Western Isles, as old as
mankind, and, whether that does or not, will endure as long; for the decay of other
literatures makes the soil in which it thrives".
