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, 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?