And therefore all we have related in Two long octaves, passed in a little minute; But in the same small minute, every sin Contrived to get itself comprised within it. The very cannon, deafened by the din, Grew dumb, for you might almost hear a linnet, As soon as thunder, 'midst the general noise Of Human Nature's agonizing voice! LX. The town was entered. Oh Eternity!-- "God made the country, and man made the town," So Cowper says[440]--and I begin to be Of his opinion, when I see cast down Rome--Babylon-Tyre-Carthage--Nineveh-- All walls men know, and many never known; And pondering on the present and the past, To deem the woods shall be our home at last:-- LXI. Of all men, saving Sylla,[441] the man-slayer, Who passes for in life and death most lucky, Of the great names which in our faces stare, The General Boon, back-woodsman of Kentucky,[442] Was happiest amongst mortals anywhere; For killing nothing but a bear or buck, he Enjoyed the lonely, vigorous, harmless days Of his old age in wilds of deepest maze. LXII. Crime came not near him--she is not the child Of solitude; Health shrank not from him--for Her home is in the rarely trodden wild, Where if men seek her not, and death be more Their choice than life, forgive them, as beguiled By habit to what their own hearts abhor-- In cities caged. The present case in point I Cite is, that Boon lived hunting up to ninety; LXIII. And, what's still stranger, left behind a name For which men vainly decimate the throng, Not only famous, but of that _good_ fame, Without which Glory's but a tavern song-- Simple, serene, the _antipodes_ of Shame, Which Hate nor Envy e'er could tinge with wrong; An active hermit, even in age the child Of Nature--or the Man of Ross[443] run wild. LXIV. 'T is true he shrank from men even of his nation, When they built up unto his darling trees,-- He moved some hundred miles off, for a station Where there were fewer houses and more ease; The inconvenience of civilisation Is, that you neither can be pleased nor please; But where he met the individual man, He showed himself as kind as mortal can. LXV. He was not all alone: around him grew A sylvan tribe of children of the chase, Whose young, unwakened world was ever new, Nor sword nor sorrow yet had left a trace On her unwrinkled brow, nor could you view A frown on Nature's or on human face; The free-born forest found and kept them free, And fresh as is a torrent or a tree. LXVI.