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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Walking by Henry David Thoreau: mould is exhausted, and it is compelled to make manure of the
bones of its fathers. There the poet sustains himself merely by
his own superfluous fat, and the philosopher comes down on his
marrow-bones.
It is said to be the task of the American "to work the virgin
soil," and that "agriculture here already assumes proportions
unknown everywhere else." I think that the farmer displaces the
Indian even because he redeems the meadow, and so makes himself
stronger and in some respects more natural. I was surveying for a
man the other day a single straight line one hundred and
thirty-two rods long, through a swamp at whose entrance might
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