Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 | Page 4

politics,
the most alarming of them all,--I am pleased to see how little space
they occupy in the landscape. Politics is but a narrow field, and that
still narrower highway yonder leads to it. I sometimes direct the
traveller thither. If you would go to the political world, follow the great
road,--follow that market-man, keep his dust in your eyes, and it will
lead you straight to it; for it, too, has its place merely, and does not
occupy all space. I pass from it as from a beanfield into the forest, and
it is forgotten. In one half-hour I can walk off to some portion of the
earth's surface where a man does not stand from one year's end to

another, and there, consequently, politics are not, for they are but as the
cigar-smoke of a man.
The village is the place to which the roads tend, a sort of expansion of
the highway, as a lake of a river. It is the body of which roads are the
arms and legs,--a trivial or quadrivial place, the thoroughfare and
ordinary of travellers. The word is from the Latin villa, which, together
with via, a way, or more anciently ved and vella, Varro derives from
veho, to carry, because the villa is the place to and from which things
are carried. They who got their living by teaming were said vellaturam
facere. Hence, too, apparently, the Latin word vilis and our vile; also
villain. This suggests what kind of degeneracy villagers are liable to.
They are wayworn by the travel that goes by and over them, without
travelling themselves.
Some do not walk at all; others walk in the highways; a few walk
across lots. Roads are made for horses and men of business. I do not
travel in them much, comparatively, because I am not in a hurry to get
to any tavern or grocery or livery-stable or depot to which they lead. I
am a good horse to travel, but not from choice a roadster. The
landscape-painter uses the figures of men to mark a road. He would not
make that use of my figure. I walk out into a Nature such as the old
prophets and poets, Menu, Moses, Homer, Chaucer, walked in. You
may name it America, but it is not America: neither Americus
Vespucius, nor Columbus, nor the rest were the discoverers of it. There
is a truer account of it in mythology than in any history of America, so
called, that I have seen.
However, there are a few old roads that may be trodden with profit, as
if they led somewhere now that they are nearly discontinued. There is
the Old Marlborough Road, which does not go to Marlborough now,
methinks, unless that is Marlborough where it carries me. I am the
bolder to speak of it here, because I presume that there are one or two
such roads in every town.
THE OLD MARLBOROUGH ROAD.
Where they once dug for money, But never found any; Where

sometimes Martial Miles Singly files, And Elijah Wood, I fear for no
good: No other man, Save Elisha Dugan,-- O man of wild habits,
Partridges and rabbits, Who hast no cares Only to set snares, Who liv'st
all alone, Close to the bone, And where life is sweetest Constantly
eatest. When the spring stirs my blood With the instinct to travel, I can
get enough gravel On the Old Marlborough Road. Nobody repairs it,
For nobody wears it; It is a living way, As the Christians say. Not many
there be Who enter therein, Only the guests of the Irishman Quin. What
is it, what is it, But a direction out there, And the bare possibility Of
going somewhere? Great guide-boards of stone, But travellers none;
Cenotaphs of the towns Named on their crowns. It is worth going to see
Where you might be. What king Did the thing, Set up how or when, By
what selectmen, Gourgas or Lee, Clark or Darby? They're a great
endeavor To be something forever; Blank tablets of stone, Where a
traveller might groan, And in one sentence Grave all that is known;
Which another might read, In his extreme need. I know one or two
Lines that would do, Literature that might stand All over the land,
Which a man could remember Till next December, And road again in
the spring, After the thawing. If with fancy unfurled You leave your
abode, You may go round the world By the Old Marlborough Road.
At present, in this vicinity, the best part of the land is not private
property; the landscape is not owned, and the walker enjoys
comparative freedom. But possibly the day will come when it will be
partitioned off into so-called pleasure-grounds, in which a few will take
a