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 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