He wasn't a fan of civilisation. Probably the first great blow to my psyche was the discovery that I couldn't live without it.
Here's the link.
I believe this is where I grew up:
When I would recreate myself, I seek the darkest wood, the thickest and most interminable, and, to the citizen, most dismal swamp. I enter a swamp as a sacred place — a sanctum sanctorum. There is the strength — the marrow of Nature. The wild wood covers the virgin mould, — and the same soil is good for men and for trees. A man's health requires as many acres of meadow to his prospect as his farm does loads of muck. There are the strong meats on which he feeds. A town is saved, not more by the righteous men in it, than by the woods and swamps that surround it. A township where one primitive forest waves above, while another primitive forest rots below-such a town is fitted to raise not only corn and potatoes, but poets and philosophers for the coming ages. In such a soil grew Homer and Confucius and the rest, and out of such a wilderness comes the reformer eating locusts and wild honey.
Well, perhaps your 1830s and '40s reformer more resembled John the Baptist than later incarnations do. They don't say, "Repent! For the Kingdom of Heaven is nigh!" anymore. They say, "Be good now and take this medicine. It'll be good for you."
If I had read "Walking" when I was a kid, I'd still be in the woods now. When you find the paragraph with this thought,
As the wild duck is more swift and beautiful than the tame, so is the wild-the mallard-thought, which, 'mid falling dews wings its way above the fens
you be cavorting in a field of wildflowers.
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