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 south-eastward
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 realise 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 tow