Camp-Fire Musings: Life and Good Times in the Woods (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from Camp-Fire Musings: Life and Good Times in the Woods

Mankind has never willingly relinquished the camp fire. It is not preference, but necessity, that has driven him indoors. Even there he Carried and rekindled its embers, and it became the hearth-fire: a flame, sister to the flame of love. So much he res cued from the wreck of Paradise. It is not till the overcrowding of his own kind has exterminated the game, and ravaged the forests with steel and fire; and not till the increase of competing herds has exhausted the pastures, that man will fence in for himself a patch of the wilderness, domesticate for himself a few of its birds_and quadrupeds, and build for himself a castle. Civilization is to him a choice of evils, and he has never forgotten nor ceased to long for Paradise. It is not for civilization to vaunt itself over barbarism. Let us first produce a better moralist and legislator than the Shepherd of Midian, a better bard than he of Chios, a sweeter singer than the shepherd boy of Bethlehem, seers more sublime than they who saw and followed the Star, better soldiers than the forest ers who crushed imperial Rome.

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