Conclusion

To the sick the doctors wisely recommend a change of air and

scenery. Thank Heaven, here is not all the world. The buckeye does

not grow in New England, and the mockingbird is rarely heard here.

The wild goose is more of a cosmopolite than we; he breaks his fast

in Canada, takes a luncheon in the Ohio, and plumes himself for the

night in a southern bayou. Even the bison, to some extent, keeps

pace with the seasons cropping the pastures of the Colorado only

till a greener and sweeter grass awaits him by the Yellowstone. Yet

we think that if rail fences are pulled down, and stone walls piled

up on our farms, bounds are henceforth set to our lives and our

fates decided. If you are chosen town clerk, forsooth, you cannot

go to Tierra del Fuego this summer: but you may go to the land of

infernal fire nevertheless. The universe is wider than our views of

it.

Yet we should oftener look over the tafferel of our craft, like

curious passengers, and not make the voyage like stupid sailors

picking oakum. The other side of the globe is but the home of our

correspondent. Our voyaging is only great-circle sailing, and the

doctors prescribe for diseases of the skin merely. One hastens to

southern Africa to chase the giraffe; but surely that is not the

game he would be after. How long, pray, would a man hunt giraffes

if he could? Snipes and woodcocks also may afford rare sport; but I

trust it would be nobler game to shoot ones self.--

"Direct your eye right inward, and youll find

A thousand regions in your mind

Yet undiscovered. Travel them, and be

Expert in home-cosmography."

What does Africa -- what does the West stand for? Is not our own

interior white on the chart? black though it may prove, like the

coast, when discovered. Is it the source of the Nile, or the Niger,

or the Mississippi, or a Northwest Passage around this continent,

that we would find? Are these the problems which most concern

mankind? Is Franklin the only man who is lost, that his wife should

be so earnest to find him? Does Mr. Grinnell know where he himself

is? Be rather the Mungo Park, the Lewis and Clark and Frobisher, of

your own streams and oceans; explore your own higher latitudes --

with shiploads of preserved meats to support you, if they be

necessary; and pile the empty cans sky-high for a sign. Were

preserved meats invented to preserve meat merely? Nay, be a

Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new

channels, not of trade, but of thought. Every man is the lord of a

realm beside which the earthly empire of the Czar is but a petty

state, a hummock left by the ice. Yet some can be patriotic who

have no self-respect, and sacrifice the greater to the less. They

love the soil which makes their graves, but have no sympathy with

the spirit which may still animate their clay. Patriotism is a

maggot in their heads. What was the meaning of that South-Sea

Exploring Expedition, with all its parade and expense, but an

indirect recognition of the fact that there are continents and seas

in the moral world to which every man is an isthmus or an inlet, yet

unexplored by him, but that it is easier to sail many thousand miles

through cold and storm and cannibals, in a government ship, with

five hundred men and boys to assist one, than it is to explore the

private sea, the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean of ones being alone.

"Erret, et extremos alter scrutetur Iberos.

Plus habet hic vitae, plus habet ille viae."

Let them wander and scrutinize the outlandish Australians.

I have more of God, they more of the road.

It is not worth the while to go round the world to count the cats in

Zanzibar. Yet do this even till you can do better, and you may

perhaps find some "Symmes Hole" by which to get at the inside at

last. England and France, Spain and Portugal, Gold Coast and Slave

Coast, all front on this private sea; but no bark from them has

ventured out of sight of land, though it is without doubt the direct

way to India. If you would learn to speak all tongues and conform

to the customs of all nations, if you would travel farther than all

travellers, be naturalized in all climes, and cause the Sphinx to

dash her head against a stone, even obey the precept of the old

philosopher, and Explore thyself. Herein are demanded the eye and

the nerve. Only the defeated and deserters go to the wars, cowards

that run away and enlist. Start now on that farthest western way,

which does not pause at the Mississippi or the Pacific, nor conduct

toward a wornout China or Japan, but leads on direct, a tangent to

this sphere, summer and winter, day and night, sun down, moon down,

and at last earth down too.

It is said that Mirabeau took to highway robbery "to ascertain

what degree of resolution was necessary in order to place ones self

in formal opposition to the most sacred laws of society." He

declared that "a soldier who fights in the ranks does not require

half so much courage as a footpad" -- "that honor and religion have

never stood in the way of a well-considered and a firm resolve."

This was manly, as the world goes; and yet it was idle, if not

desperate. A saner man would have found himself often enough "in

formal opposition" to what are deemed "the most sacred laws of

society," through obedience to yet more sacred laws, and so have

tested his resolution without going out of his way. It is not for a

man to put himself in such an attitude to society, but to maintain

himself in whatever attitude he find himself through obedience to

the laws of his being, which will never be one of opposition to a

just government, if he should chance to meet with such.

I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps

it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not

spare any more time for that one. It is remarkable how easily and

insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track

for ourselves. I had not lived there a week before my feet wore a

path from my door to the pond-side; and though it is five or six

years since I trod it, it is still quite distinct. It is true, I

fear, that others may have fallen into it, and so helped to keep it

open. The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet

of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels. How worn and

dusty, then, must be the highways of the world, how deep the ruts of

tradition and conformity! I did not wish to take a cabin passage,

but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for

there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains. I do not

wish to go below now.

I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances

confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live

the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success

unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will

pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws

will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old

laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal

sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of

beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the

universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be

solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have

built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where

they should be. Now put the foundations under them.

It is a ridiculous demand which England and America make, that

you shall speak so that they can understand you. Neither men nor

toadstools grow so. As if that were important, and there were not

enough to understand you without them. As if Nature could support

but one order of understandings, could not sustain birds as well as

quadrupeds, flying as well as creeping things, and hush and whoa,

which Bright can understand, were the best English. As if there

were safety in stupidity alone. I fear chiefly lest my expression

may not be extravagant enough, may not wander far enough beyond the

narrow limits of my daily experience, so as to be adequate to the

truth of which I have been convinced. Extra vagance! it depends on

how you are yarded. The migrating buffalo, which seeks new pastures

in another latitude, is not extravagant like the cow which kicks

over the pail, leaps the cowyard fence, and runs after her calf, in

milking time. I desire to speak somewhere without bounds; like a

man in a waking moment, to men in their waking moments; for I am

convinced that I cannot exaggerate enough even to lay the foundation

of a true expression. Who that has heard a strain of music feared

then lest he should speak extravagantly any more forever? In view

of the future or possible, we should live quite laxly and undefined

in front, our outlines dim and misty on that side; as our shadows

reveal an insensible perspiration toward the sun. The volatile

truth of our words should continually betray the inadequacy of the

residual statement. Their truth is instantly translated; its

literal monument alone remains. The words which express our faith

and piety are not definite; yet they are significant and fragrant

like frankincense to superior natures.

Why level downward to our dullest perception always, and praise

that as common sense? The commonest sense is the sense of men

asleep, which they express by snoring. Sometimes we are inclined to

class those who are once-and-a-half-witted with the half-witted,

because we appreciate only a third part of their wit. Some would

find fault with the morning red, if they ever got up early enough.

"They pretend," as I hear, "that the verses of Kabir have four

different senses; illusion, spirit, intellect, and the exoteric

doctrine of the Vedas"; but in this part of the world it is

considered a ground for complaint if a mans writings admit of more

than one interpretation. While England endeavors to cure the

potato-rot, will not any endeavor to cure the brain-rot, which

prevails so much more widely and fatally?

I do not suppose that I have attained to obscurity, but I should

be proud if no more fatal fault were found with my pages on this

score than was found with the Walden ice. Southern customers

objected to its blue color, which is the evidence of its purity, as

if it were muddy, and preferred the Cambridge ice, which is white,

but tastes of weeds. The purity men love is like the mists which

envelop the earth, and not like the azure ether beyond.

Some are dinning in our ears that we Americans, and moderns

generally, are intellectual dwarfs compared with the ancients, or

even the Elizabethan men. But what is that to the purpose? A

living dog is better than a dead lion. Shall a man go and hang

himself because he belongs to the race of pygmies, and not be the

biggest pygmy that he can? Let every one mind his own business, and

endeavor to be what he was made.

Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed and in such

desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his

companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let

him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.

It is not important that he should mature as soon as an apple tree

or an oak. Shall he turn his spring into summer? If the condition

of things which we were made for is not yet, what were any reality

which we can substitute? We will not be shipwrecked on a vain

reality. Shall we with pains erect a heaven of blue glass over

ourselves, though when it is done we shall be sure to gaze still at

the true ethereal heaven far above, as if the former were not?

There was an artist in the city of Kouroo who was disposed to

strive after perfection. One day it came into his mind to make a

staff. Having considered that in an imperfect work time is an

ingredient, but into a perfect work time does not enter, he said to

himself, It shall be perfect in all respects, though I should do

nothing else in my life. He proceeded instantly to the forest for

wood, being resolved that it should not be made of unsuitable

material; and as he searched for and rejected stick after stick, his

friends gradually deserted him, for they grew old in their works and

died, but he grew not older by a moment. His singleness of purpose

and resolution, and his elevated piety, endowed him, without his

knowledge, with perennial youth. As he made no compromise with

Time, Time kept out of his way, and only sighed at a distance

because he could not overcome him. Before he had found a stock in

all respects suitable the city of Kouroo was a hoary ruin, and he

sat on one of its mounds to peel the stick. Before he had given it

the proper shape the dynasty of the Candahars was at an end, and

with the point of the stick he wrote the name of the last of that

race in the sand, and then resumed his work. By the time he had

smoothed and polished the staff Kalpa was no longer the pole-star;

and ere he had put on the ferule and the head adorned with precious

stones, Brahma had awoke and slumbered many times. But why do I

stay to mention these things? When the finishing stroke was put to

his work, it suddenly expanded before the eyes of the astonished

artist into the fairest of all the creations of Brahma. He had made

a new system in making a staff, a world with full and fair

proportions; in which, though the old cities and dynasties had

passed away, fairer and more glorious ones had taken their places.

And now he saw by the heap of shavings still fresh at his feet,

that, for him and his work, the former lapse of time had been an

illusion, and that no more time had elapsed than is required for a

single scintillation from the brain of Brahma to fall on and inflame

the tinder of a mortal brain. The material was pure, and his art

was pure; how could the result be other than wonderful?

No face which we can give to a matter will stead us so well at

last as the truth. This alone wears well. For the most part, we

are not where we are, but in a false position. Through an infinity

of our natures, we suppose a case, and put ourselves into it, and

hence are in two cases at the same time, and it is doubly difficult

to get out. In sane moments we regard only the facts, the case that

is. Say what you have to say, not what you ought. Any truth is

better than make-believe. Tom Hyde, the tinker, standing on the

gallows, was asked if he had anything to say. "Tell the tailors,"

said he, "to remember to make a knot in their thread before they

take the first stitch." His companions prayer is forgotten.

However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it

and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks

poorest when you are richest. The fault-finder will find faults

even in paradise. Love your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps

have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poorhouse.

The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the almshouse as

brightly as from the rich mans abode; the snow melts before its

door as early in the spring. I do not see but a quiet mind may live

as contentedly there, and have as cheering thoughts, as in a palace.

The towns poor seem to me often to live the most independent lives

of any. Maybe they are simply great enough to receive without

misgiving. Most think that they are above being supported by the

town; but it oftener happens that they are not above supporting

themselves by dishonest means, which should be more disreputable.

Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble

yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Turn

the old; return to them. Things do not change; we change. Sell

your clothes and keep your thoughts. God will see that you do not

want society. If I were confined to a corner of a garret all my

days, like a spider, the world would be just as large to me while I

had my thoughts about me. The philosopher said: "From an army of

three divisions one can take away its general, and put it in

disorder; from the man the most abject and vulgar one cannot take

away his thought." Do not seek so anxiously to be developed, to

subject yourself to many influences to be played on; it is all

dissipation. Humility like darkness reveals the heavenly lights.

The shadows of poverty and meanness gather around us, "and lo!

creation widens to our view." We are often reminded that if there

were bestowed on us the wealth of Croesus, our aims must still be

the same, and our means essentially the same. Moreover, if you are

restricted in your range by poverty, if you cannot buy books and

newspapers, for instance, you are but confined to the most

significant and vital experiences; you are compelled to deal with

the material which yields the most sugar and the most starch. It is

life near the bone where it is sweetest. You are defended from

being a trifler. No man loses ever on a lower level by magnanimity

on a higher. Superfluous wealth can buy superfluities only. Money

is not required to buy one necessary of the soul.

I live in the angle of a leaden wall, into whose composition was

poured a little alloy of bell-metal. Often, in the repose of my

mid-day, there reaches my ears a confused tintinnabulum from

without. It is the noise of my contemporaries. My neighbors tell

me of their adventures with famous gentlemen and ladies, what

notabilities they met at the dinner-table; but I am no more

interested in such things than in the contents of the Daily Times.

The interest and the conversation are about costume and manners

chiefly; but a goose is a goose still, dress it as you will. They

tell me of California and Texas, of England and the Indies, of the

Hon. Mr. --- of Georgia or of Massachusetts, all transient and

fleeting phenomena, till I am ready to leap from their court-yard

like the Mameluke bey. I delight to come to my bearings -- not walk

in procession with pomp and parade, in a conspicuous place, but to

walk even with the Builder of the universe, if I may -- not to live

in this restless, nervous, bustling, trivial Nineteenth Century, but

stand or sit thoughtfully while it goes by. What are men

celebrating? They are all on a committee of arrangements, and

hourly expect a speech from somebody. God is only the president of

the day, and Webster is his orator. I love to weigh, to settle, to

gravitate toward that which most strongly and rightfully attracts

me -- not hang by the beam of the scale and try to weigh less -- not

suppose a case, but take the case that is; to travel the only path I

can, and that on which no power can resist me. It affords me no

satisfaction to commerce to spring an arch before I have got a solid

foundation. Let us not play at kittly-benders. There is a solid

bottom everywhere. We read that the traveller asked the boy if the

swamp before him had a hard bottom. The boy replied that it had.

But presently the travellers horse sank in up to the girths, and he

observed to the boy, "I thought you said that this bog had a hard

bottom." "So it has," answered the latter, "but you have not got

half way to it yet." So it is with the bogs and quicksands of

society; but he is an old boy that knows it. Only what is thought,

said, or done at a certain rare coincidence is good. I would not be

one of those who will foolishly drive a nail into mere lath and

plastering; such a deed would keep me awake nights. Give me a

hammer, and let me feel for the furring. Do not depend on the

putty. Drive a nail home and clinch it so faithfully that you can

wake up in the night and think of your work with satisfaction -- a

work at which you would not be ashamed to invoke the Muse. So will

help you God, and so only. Every nail driven should be as another

rivet in the machine of the universe, you carrying on the work.

Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth. I sat

at a table where were rich food and wine in abundance, and

obsequious attendance, but sincerity and truth were not; and I went

away hungry from the inhospitable board. The hospitality was as

cold as the ices. I thought that there was no need of ice to freeze

them. They talked to me of the age of the wine and the fame of the

vintage; but I thought of an older, a newer, and purer wine, of a

more glorious vintage, which they had not got, and could not buy.

The style, the house and grounds and "entertainment" pass for

nothing with me. I called on the king, but he made me wait in his

hall, and conducted like a man incapacitated for hospitality. There

was a man in my neighborhood who lived in a hollow tree. His

manners were truly regal. I should have done better had I called on

him.

How long shall we sit in our porticoes practising idle and musty

virtues, which any work would make impertinent? As if one were to

begin the day with long-suffering, and hire a man to hoe his

potatoes; and in the afternoon go forth to practise Christian

meekness and charity with goodness aforethought! Consider the China

pride and stagnant self-complacency of mankind. This generation

inclines a little to congratulate itself on being the last of an

illustrious line; and in Boston and London and Paris and Rome,

thinking of its long descent, it speaks of its progress in art and

science and literature with satisfaction. There are the Records of

the Philosophical Societies, and the public Eulogies of Great Men!

It is the good Adam contemplating his own virtue. "Yes, we have

done great deeds, and sung divine songs, which shall never die" --

that is, as long as we can remember them. The learned societies and

great men of Assyria -- where are they? What youthful philosophers

and experimentalists we are! There is not one of my readers who has

yet lived a whole human life. These may be but the spring months in

the life of the race. If we have had the seven-years itch, we have

not seen the seventeen-year locust yet in Concord. We are

acquainted with a mere pellicle of the globe on which we live. Most

have not delved six feet beneath the surface, nor leaped as many

above it. We know not where we are. Beside, we are sound asleep

nearly half our time. Yet we esteem ourselves wise, and have an

established order on the surface. Truly, we are deep thinkers, we

are ambitious spirits! As I stand over the insect crawling amid the

pine needles on the forest floor, and endeavoring to conceal itself

from my sight, and ask myself why it will cherish those humble

thoughts, and bide its head from me who might, perhaps, be its

benefactor, and impart to its race some cheering information, I am

reminded of the greater Benefactor and Intelligence that stands over

me the human insect.

There is an incessant influx of novelty into the world, and yet

we tolerate incredible dulness. I need only suggest what kind of

sermons are still listened to in the most enlightened countries.

There are such words as joy and sorrow, but they are only the burden

of a psalm, sung with a nasal twang, while we believe in the

ordinary and mean. We think that we can change our clothes only.

It is said that the British Empire is very large and respectable,

and that the United States are a first-rate power. We do not

believe that a tide rises and falls behind every man which can float

the British Empire like a chip, if he should ever harbor it in his

mind. Who knows what sort of seventeen-year locust will next come

out of the ground? The government of the world I live in was not

framed, like that of Britain, in after-dinner conversations over the

wine.

The life in us is like the water in the river. It may rise this

year higher than man has ever known it, and flood the parched

uplands; even this may be the eventful year, which will drown out

all our muskrats. It was not always dry land where we dwell. I see

far inland the banks which the stream anciently washed, before

science began to record its freshets. Every one has heard the story

which has gone the rounds of New England, of a strong and beautiful

bug which came out of the dry leaf of an old table of apple-tree

wood, which had stood in a farmers kitchen for sixty years, first

in Connecticut, and afterward in Massachusetts -- from an egg

deposited in the living tree many years earlier still, as appeared

by counting the annual layers beyond it; which was heard gnawing out

for several weeks, hatched perchance by the heat of an urn. Who

does not feel his faith in a resurrection and immortality

strengthened by hearing of this? Who knows what beautiful and

winged life, whose egg has been buried for ages under many

concentric layers of woodenness in the dead dry life of society,

deposited at first in the alburnum of the green and living tree,

which has been gradually converted into the semblance of its

well-seasoned tomb -- heard perchance gnawing out now for years by

the astonished family of man, as they sat round the festive board --

may unexpectedly come forth from amidst societys most trivial and

handselled furniture, to enjoy its perfect summer life at last!

I do not say that John or Jonathan will realize all this; but

such is the character of that morrow which mere lapse of time can

never make to dawn. The light which puts out our eyes is darkness

to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more

day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.