Where they once dug for money,
Where sometimes Martial Miles
But never found any;
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 guide-boards of stone,
But travellers 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 traveller 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 subtle 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 southwest,
it is true, and it has good authority for this variation, but it always
settles between west and south-southwest. 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 south-eastward
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 realise 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 tempts 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 traveller 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.
Linnaeus said long ago, "Nescio quae facies _laeta, 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, _Africanae bestiae_, 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
centre of the East Indian city of Singapore, some of the inhabitants
are annually carried off by tigers; but the traveller 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 traveller something, he knows not
what, of _laeta_ and _glabra_, of joyous and serene, in our very faces.
Else to what end does the world go on, and why was America discovered?