It has seemed to me sometimes as though I could see men hardening before my eyes, drawing in a feeler here, walling up an opening there.  Naming things!  Objects fall into categories for them and wear little sure channels in the brain.  A mountain is a mountain, a tree a tree to them, a field forever a field.  Life solidifies itself in words.  And finally how everything wearies them and that is old age!

Is it not the prime struggle of life to keep the mind plastic?  To see and feel and hear things newly?  To accept nothing as settled; to defend the eternal right of the questioner?  To reject every conclusion of yesterday before the surer observations of to-day?—­is not that the best life we know?

And so to the Open Road!  Not many miles from my farm there is a tamarack swamp.  The soft dark green of it fills the round bowl of a valley.  Around it spread rising forests and fields; fences divide it from the known land.  Coming across my fields one day, I saw it there.  I felt the habit of avoidance.  It is a custom, well enough in a practical land, to shun such a spot of perplexity; but on that day I was following the Open Road, and it led me straight to the moist dark stillness of the tamaracks.  I cannot here tell all the marvels I found in that place.  I trod where human foot had never trod before.  Cobwebs barred my passage (the bars to most passages when we came to them are only cobwebs), the earth was soft with the thick swamp mosses, and with many an autumn of fallen dead, brown leaves.  I crossed the track of a muskrat, I saw the nest of a hawk—­and how, how many other things of the wilderness I must not here relate.  And I came out of it renewed and refreshed; I know now the feeling of the pioneer and the discoverer.  Peary has no more than I; Stanley tells me nothing I have not experienced!

What more than that is the accomplishment of the great inventor, poet, painter?  Such cannot abide habit-hedged wildernesses.  They follow the Open Road, they see for themselves, and will not accept the paths or the names of the world.  And Sight, kept clear, becomes, curiously, Insight.  A thousand had seen apples fall before Newton.  But Newton was dowered with the spirit of the Open Road!

Sometimes as I walk, seeking to see, hear, feel, everything newly, I devise secret words for the things I see:  words that convey to me alone the thought, or impression, or emotion of a peculiar spot.  All this, I know, to some will seem the acme of foolish illusion.  Indeed, I am not telling of it because it is practical; there is no cash at the end of it.  I am reporting it as an experience in life; those who understand will understand.  And thus out of my journeys I have words which bring back to me with indescribable poignancy the particular impression of a time or a place.  I prize them more highly than almost any other of my possessions, for they come to me seemingly out of the air, and the remembrance of them enables me to recall or live over a past experience with scarcely diminished emotion.