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The Lost Wolves of New England
By the mid-nineteenth century, our New England sages were already lamenting the loss of wildness in both landscape and society, and invoking wolves rather than eagles as a sort of national icon. In his gnomic epigraph to “Self-Reliance,” Emerson admonished his countrymen to
Cast the bantling on the rocks,
Suckle him with the she-wolf’s teat;
Wintered with the hawk and fox,
Power and speed be hands and feet.
Thoreau expanded the allure of a Romulus-and-Remus education in the wild:
It is because the children of the empire were not suckled by wolves that they were conquered & displaced by the children of the northern forests who were.
Thoreau added, as though throwing down the national gauntlet, “America is the she wolf today.”
Cast the bantling on the rocks,
Suckle him with the she-wolf’s teat;
Wintered with the hawk and fox,
Power and speed be hands and feet.
Thoreau expanded the allure of a Romulus-and-Remus education in the wild:
It is because the children of the empire were not suckled by wolves that they were conquered & displaced by the children of the northern forests who were.
Thoreau added, as though throwing down the national gauntlet, “America is the she wolf today.”
http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2013/jan/22/lost-wolves-new-england/