n,
but it to some extent unsettles the value of real estate here, and if I
were a broker I should probably take that disturbance into account.

"Than longen folk to gon on pilgrimages,
And palmeres for to seken strange strondes."

Every sunset which I witness inspires me with the desire to go to a
West as distant and as fair as that into which the sun goes down. He
appears to migrate westward daily, and tempts us to follow him. He is
the Great Western Pioneer whom the nations follow. We dream all night
of those mountain-ridges in the horizon, though they may be of vapor
only, which were last gilded by his rays. The island of Atlantis, and
the islands and gardens of the Hesperides, a sort of terrestrial
paradise, appear to have been the Great West of the ancients, enveloped
in mystery and poetry. Who has not seen in imagination, when looking
into the sunset sky, the gardens of the Hesperides, and the foundation
of all those fables?

Columbus felt the westward tendency more strongly than any before. He
obeyed it, and found a New World for Castile and Leon. The herd of men
in those days scented fresh pastures from afar.

"And now the sun had stretched out all the hills,
And now was dropped into the western bay;
At last he rose, and twitched his mantle blue;
To-morrow to fresh woods and pastures new."

Where on the globe can there be found an area of equal extent with that
occupied by the bulk of our States, so fertile and so rich and varied
in its productions, and at the same time so habitable by the European,
as this is? Michaux, who knew but part of them, says that "the species
of large trees are much more numerous in North America than in Europe;
in the United States there are more than one hundred and forty species
that exceed thirty feet in height; in France there are but thirty that
attain this size." Later botanists more than confirm his observations.
Humboldt came to America to realize his youthful dreams of a tropical
vegetation, and he beheld it in its greatest perfection in the
primitive forests of the Amazon, the most gigantic wilderness on the
earth, which he has so eloquently described. The geographer Guyot,
himself a European, goes farther--farther than I am ready to follow
him; yet not when he says: "As the plant is made for the animal, as the
vegetable world is made for the animal world, America is made for the
man of the Old World. . . . The man of the Old World sets out u