The land is the appointed remedy for whatever is false and fantastic in our culture. The continent we inhabit is to be physic and food for our mind, as well as our body. The land, with its tranquilizing sanative influences is to repair the errors of a scholastic and traditional education, and bring us into just relations with men and things. The habit of living in the presence of these invitations of natural wealth is not inoperative, and this habit, combined with the moral sentiment which, in the recent years, has interrogated every institution, usage, and law, has naturally, given a strong direction to the wishes and aims of active young men to withdraw from the cities and cultivate the soil.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson