e 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 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 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;