In Wildness is the preservation of the World.

The sentence comes in “Walking”, near the middle of the essay, after a long celebration of the West. Thoreau has described a panorama of the Mississippi and has felt that this was “the heroic age itself, though we know it not”. Then he turns the argument: “The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild; and what I have been preparing to say is, that” the line. He goes on: every tree sends its fibres forth in search of the wild; from the forest come “the tonics and barks which brace mankind”; the story of Romulus and Remus suckled by a wolf “is not a meaningless fable”.

Thoreau first gave “Walking” as a lecture in Concord in 1851. He prepared it for the press on his deathbed, and it appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in June 1862, a month after he died.

The sentence became the motto of the American conservation movement, usually misquoted as “In wilderness is the preservation of the world”; Thoreau wrote wildness, a quality, not a place.

Walking, The Atlantic Monthly, 1862

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