Our village life would stagnate if it were not for the unexplored forests and meadows which surround it. We need the tonic of wilderness-to wade in sometimes in marshes where the bitteren and the meadow-hen hawk lurk, and hear the booming of the snipe, to smell the whispering sedge where only some wilder and more solitary fowl builds her nest…We can never have enough of Nature. We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor, vast and Titanic features, the sea-coast with its wrecks, the wilderness with its living and decaying trees, the thunder cloud, and the rain which lasts three weeks and produces freshets. We need to witness our own limits transgressed and some life pasturing freely where we never wander.

— Thoreau, from his essay entitled Spring (Ibid:205).