...is not Nature, rightly read, that of which she is commonly taken to be the symbol merely?

Wildness is the preservation of the World.

You were once wild here

In wilderness is the preservation of the world.

We need the tonic of wildness...At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.

I frequently tramped eight or ten miles through the deepest snow to keep an appointment with a beech-tree, or a yellow birch, or an old acquaintance among the pines.