Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 | Page 5

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 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 the 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 towards the setting sun, and
that 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,