Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 | Page 6

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 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."