Down through the nineteenth century, the American wilderness was often celebrated as lost Eden. The wild was the good; the natural man was the man of spiritual health. No Pauline dichotomy between natural and spiritual troubled this faith, which reached its highest expression in the loose-limbed paganism of Whitman:
Me imperturbe,
Me standing at ease in Nature,
Master of all, or mistress of all—aplomb in the midst of
irrational things,
Imbued as they—passive, receptive, silent as they,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Me, wherever my life is to be lived, O to be self-balanced
for contingencies!
O to confront night, storms, hunger, ridicule, accidents,
rebuffs, as the trees and animals do.47
Central to this faith was mother earth, the goodness of her energies, her brutal innocence. Even sky-minded Emerson sang her praises, though Margaret Fuller complained that his head was too far in the clouds: “We doubt this friend raised himself too early to the perpendicular and did not lie along the ground long enough to hear the secret whispers of our parent life. We could wish he might be thrown by conflicts on the lap of mother earth, to see if he would not rise again with added powers.”48
Yet all these eloquent tributes to nature presupposed physical health. Emerson himself wrote: “I dilate and conspire with the morning wind. How does Nature deify us with a few and cheap elements! Give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous.”49 But suppose the health were not given. After all, nature maimed and withheld and destroyed as much as she gave. Did the wounded lark sing hymns at heaven’s gates?