e the highways of the world,
how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity! I did not wish to take a
cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the
world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains. I do
not wish to go below now.

I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances
confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the
life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in
common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible
boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish
themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and
interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with
the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies
his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and
solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness
weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be
lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.

It is a ridiculous demand which England and America make, that you shall
speak so that they can understand you. Neither men nor toadstools grow
so. As if that were important, and there were not enough to understand
you without them. As if Nature could support but one order of
understandings, could not sustain birds as well as quadrupeds, flying as
well as creeping things, and hush and whoa, which Bright can understand,
were the best English. As if there were safety in stupidity alone. I
fear chiefly lest my expression may not be extravagant enough, may not
wander far enough beyond the narrow limits of my daily experience, so
as to be adequate to the truth of which I have been convinced. Extra
vagance! it depends on how you are yarded. The migrating buffalo, which
seeks new pastures in another latitude, is not extravagant like the cow
which kicks over the pail, leaps the cowyard fence, and runs after her
calf, in milking time. I desire to speak somewhere without bounds;
like a man in a waking moment, to men in their waking moments; for I am
convinced that I cannot exaggerate enough even to lay the foundation of
a true expression. Who that has heard a strain of music feared then lest
he should speak extravagantly any more forever? In view of the future
or possible, we should live quite laxly and undefined in front, our
outlines dim and mist