Where they once dug for money,
But never found any;
Where sometimes Martial Miles
Singly files,
And Elijah Wood,
I fear for no good:
No other man,
Save Elisha Dugan,--
O man of wild habits,
Partridges and rabbits,
Who hast no cares
Only to set snares,
Who liv'st all alone,
Close to the bone,
And where life is sweetest
Constantly eatest.
When the spring stirs my blood
With the instinct to travel,
I can get enough gravel
On the Old Marlborough Road.
Nobody repairs it,
For nobody wears it;
It is a living way,
As the Christians say.
Not many there be
Who enter therein,
Only the guests of the
Irishman Quin.
What is it, what is it,
But a direction out there,
And the bare possibility
Of going somewhere?
Great guideboards of stone,
But travelers none;
Cenotaphs of the towns
Named on their crowns.
It is worth going to see
Where you _might_ be.
What king
Did the thing,
I am still wondering;
Set up how or when,
By what selectmen,
Gourgas or Lee,
Clark or Darby?
They're a great endeavor
To be something forever;
Blank tablets of stone,
Where a traveler might groan,
And in one sentence
Grave all that is known;
Which another might read,
In his extreme need.
I know one or two
Lines that would do,
Literature that might stand
All over the land,
Which a man could remember
Till next December,
And read again in the spring,
After the thawing.
If with fancy unfurled
You leave your abode,
You may go round the world
By the Old Marlborough Road.
At present, in this vicinity, the best part of the land is not private
property; the landscape is not owned, and the walker enjoys comparative
freedom. But possibly the day will come when it will be partitioned off
into so-called pleasure-grounds, in which a few will take a narrow and
exclusive pleasure only,--when fences shall be multiplied, and man-traps
and other engines invented to confine men to the _public_ road, and
walking over the surface of God's earth shall be construed to mean
trespassing on some gentleman's grounds. To enjoy a thing exclusively is
commonly to exclude yourself from the true enjoyment of it. Let us
improve our opportunities, then, before the evil days come.
* * * * *
What is it that makes it so hard sometimes to determine whither we will
walk? I believe that there is a subtile magnetism in Nature, which, if
we unconsciously yield to it, will direct us aright. It is not
indifferent to us which way we walk. There is a right way; but we are
very liable from heedlessness and stupidity to take the wrong one. We
would fain take that walk, never yet taken by us through this actual
world, which is perfectly symbolical of the path which we love to travel
in the interior and ideal world; and sometimes, no doubt, we find it
difficult to choose our direction, because it does not yet exist
distinctly in our idea.
When I go out of the house for a walk, uncertain as yet whither I will
bend my steps, and submit myself to my instinct to decide for me, I
find, strange and whimsical as it may seem, that I finally and
inevitably settle southwest, toward some particular wood or meadow or
deserted pasture or hill in that direction. My needle is slow to
settle,--varies a few degrees, and does not always point due south-west,
it is true, and it has good authority for this variation, but it always
settles between west and south-south-west. The future lies that way to
me, and the earth seems more unexhausted and richer on that side. The
outline which would bound my walks would be, not a circle, but a
parabola, or rather like one of those cometary orbits which have been
thought to be non-returning curves, in this case opening westward, in
which my house occupies the place of the sun. I turn round and round
irresolute sometimes for a quarter of an hour, until I decide, for a
thousandth time, that I will walk into the southwest or west. Eastward I
go only by force; but westward I go free. Thither no business leads me.
It is hard for me to believe that I shall find fair landscapes or
sufficient wildness and freedom behind the eastern horizon. I am not
excited by the prospect of a walk thither; but I believe that the forest
which I see in the western horizon stretches uninterruptedly toward the
setting sun, and there are no towns nor cities in it of enough
consequence to disturb me. Let me live where I will, on this side is the
city, on that the wilderness, and ever I am leaving the city more and
more, and withdrawing into the wilderness. I should not lay so much
stress on this fact, if I did not believe that something like this is
the prevailing tendency of my countrymen. I must walk toward Oregon, and
not toward Europe. And that way the nation is moving, and I may say that
mankind progress from east to west. Within a few years we have witnessed
the phenomenon of a southeastward migration, in the settlement of
Australia; but this affects us as a retrograde movement, and judging
from the moral and physical character of the first generation of
Australians, has not yet proved a successful experiment. The eastern
Tartars think that there is nothing west beyond Thibet. "The world ends
there," say they, "beyond there is nothing but a shoreless sea." It is
unmitigated East where they live.
We go eastward to realize history and study the works of art and
literature, retracing the steps of the race; we go westward as into the
future, with a spirit of enterprise and adventure. The Atlantic is a
Lethean stream, in our passage over which we have had an opportunity to
forget the Old World and its institutions. If we do not succeed this
time, there is perhaps one more chance for the race left before it
arrives on the banks of the Styx; and that is in the Lethe of the
Pacific, which is three times as wide.
I know not how significant it is, or how far it is an evidence of
singularity, that an individual should thus consent in his pettiest walk
with the general movement of the race; but I know that something akin to
the migratory instinct in birds and quadrupeds,--which, in some
instances, is known to have affected the squirrel tribe, impelling them
to a general and mysterious movement, in which they were seen, say some,
crossing the broadest rivers, each on its particular chip, with its tail
raised for a sail, and bridging narrower streams with their dead,--that
something like the _furor_ which affects the domestic cattle in the
spring, and which is referred to a worm in their tails,--affects both
nations and individuals, either perennially or from time to time. Not a
flock of wild geese cackles over our town, but it to some extent
unsettles the value of real estate here, and, if I were a broker, I
should probably take that disturbance into account.
"Than longen folk to gon on pilgrimages,
And palmeres for to seken strange strondes."
Every sunset which I witness inspires me with the desire to go to a West
as distant and as fair as that into which the sun goes down. He appears
to migrate westward daily, and tempt us to follow him. He is the Great
Western Pioneer whom the nations follow. We dream all night of those
mountain-ridges in the horizon, though they may be of vapor only, which
were last gilded by his rays. The island of Atlantis, and the islands
and gardens of the Hesperides, a sort of terrestrial paradise, appear to
have been the Great West of the ancients, enveloped in mystery and
poetry. Who has not seen in imagination, when looking into the sunset
sky, the gardens of the Hesperides, and the foundation of all those
fables?
Columbus felt the westward tendency more strongly than any before. He
obeyed it, and found a New World for Castile and Leon. The herd of men
in those days scented fresh pastures from afar.
"And now the sun had stretched out all the hills,
And now was dropped into the western bay;
At last _he_ rose, and twitched his mantle blue;
To-morrow to fresh woods and pastures new."
Where on the globe can there be found an area of equal extent with that
occupied by the bulk of our States, so fertile and so rich and varied in
its productions, and at the same time so habitable by the European, as
this is? Michaux, who knew but part of them, says that "the species of
large trees are much more numerous in North America than in Europe; in
the United States there are more than one hundred and forty species that
exceed thirty feet in height; in France there are but thirty that attain
this size." Later botanists more than confirm his observations. Humboldt
came to America to realize his youthful dreams of a tropical vegetation,
and he beheld it in its greatest perfection in the primitive forests of
the Amazon, the most gigantic wilderness on the earth, which he has so
eloquently described. The geographer Guyot, himself a European, goes
farther,--farther than I am ready to follow him; yet not when he
says,--"As the plant is made for the animal, as the vegetable world is
made for the animal world, America is made for the man of the Old
World.... The man of the Old World sets out upon his way. Leaving the
highlands of Asia, he descends from station to station towards Europe.
Each of his steps is marked by a new civilization superior to the
preceding, by a greater power of development. Arrived at the Atlantic,
he pauses on the shore of this unknown ocean, the bounds of which he
knows not, and turns upon his footprints for an instant." When he has
exhausted the rich soil of Europe, and reinvigorated himself, "then
recommences his adventurous career westward as in the earliest ages." So
far Guyot.
From this western impulse coming in contact with the barrier of the
Atlantic sprang the commerce and enterprise of modern times. The younger
Michaux, in his _Travels West of the Alleghanies in 1802_, says that the
common inquiry in the newly settled West was, "'From what part of the
world have you come?' As if these vast and fertile regions would
naturally be the place of meeting and common country of all the
inhabitants of the globe."
To use an obsolete Latin word, I might say, _Ex Oriente lux; ex
Occidente_ FRUX. From the East light; from the West fruit.
Sir Francis Head, an English traveler and a Governor-General of Canada,
tells us that "in both the northern and southern hemispheres of the New
World, Nature has not only outlined her works on a larger scale, but has
painted the whole picture with brighter and more costly colors than she
used in delineating and in beautifying the Old World.... The heavens of
America appear infinitely higher, the sky is bluer, the air is fresher,
the cold is intenser, the moon looks larger, the stars are brighter, the
thunder is louder, the lightning is vivider, the wind is stronger, the
rain is heavier, the mountains are higher, the rivers longer, the
forests bigger, the plains broader." This statement will do at least to
set against Buffon's account of this part of the world and its
productions.
Linnæus said long ago, "Nescio quæ facies _læta, glabra_ plantis
Americanis: I know not what there is of joyous and smooth in the aspect
of American plants;" and I think that in this country there are no, or
at most very few, _Africanæ bestiæ_, African beasts, as the Romans
called them, and that in this respect also it is peculiarly fitted for
the habitation of man. We are told that within three miles of the center
of the East-Indian city of Singapore, some of the inhabitants are
annually carried off by tigers; but the traveler can lie down in the
woods at night almost anywhere in North America without fear of wild
beasts.
These are encouraging testimonies. If the moon looks larger here than in
Europe, probably the sun looks larger also. If the heavens of America
appear infinitely higher, and the stars brighter, I trust that these
facts are symbolical of the height to which the philosophy and poetry
and religion of her inhabitants may one day soar. At length, perchance,
the immaterial heaven will appear as much higher to the American mind,
and the intimations that star it as much brighter. For I believe that
climate does thus react on man,--as there is something in the
mountain-air that feeds the spirit and inspires. Will not man grow to
greater perfection intellectually as well as physically under these
influences? Or is it unimportant how many foggy days there are in his
life? I trust that we shall be more imaginative, that our thoughts will
be clearer, fresher, and more ethereal, as our sky,--our understanding
more comprehensive and broader, like our plains,--our intellect
generally on a grander scale, like our thunder and lightning, our rivers
and mountains and forests,--and our hearts shall even correspond in
breadth and depth and grandeur to our inland seas. Perchance there will
appear to the traveler something, he knows not what, of _læta_ and
_glabra_, of joyous and serene, in our very faces. Else to what end does
the world go on, and why was America discovered?