sun. I turn round and round irresolute sometimes for a quarter of an hour,
until I decide, for a 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 toward
the setting sun, and 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 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