What is it that makes it so hard sometimes to determine whither
we will walk? I believe that there is a subtle 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