“What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.”

Of Fortune
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Source: As I Lay Dying

Source: The Blue Jay's Dance: A Birth Year

Source: The Turtles of Tasman

“Wisconsin: Marshland Elegy”, p. 101.
A Sand County Almanac, 1949, "Wisconsin: Marshland Elegy," "Wisconsin: The Sand Counties" "Wisconsin: On a Monument to the Pigeon," and "Wisconsin: Flambeau"
Source: A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There
Context: To build a road is so much simpler than to think of what the country really needs. A roadless marsh is seemingly as worthless to the alphabetical conservationist as an undrained one was to the empire-builders. Solitude, the one natural resource still undowered of alphabets, is so far recognized as valuable only by ornithologists and cranes.
Thus always does history, whether of marsh or market place, end in paradox. The ultimate value in these marshes is wildness, and the crane is wildness incarnate. But all conservation of wildness is self-defeating, for to cherish we must see and fondle, and when enough have seen and fondled, there is no wilderness left to cherish.

Discussing the business of Cuban baseball defectors, from the Boston Globe article "Hardball" http://apse.dallasnews.com/contest/2000/writing/all.investigative.third1.html by Steve Fainaru and Shira Springer (28 May 2000)

Source: Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

Each and All, st. 3
1840s, Poems (1847)
Variant: I wiped away the weeds and foam,
And fetched my sea-born treasures home;
But the poor, unsightly, noisome things
Had left their beauty on the shore
With the sun, and the sand, and the wild uproar.

Variant: "And now," cried Max, "let the wild rumpus start!"
Source: Where the Wild Things Are (1963)