I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there.Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live,and could not spare any more time for that one.It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route,and make a beaten track for ourselves.I had not lived there a week before my feet wore a path from my door to the pondside;and though it is five or six years since I trod it,it is still quite distinct.It is true,I fear,that others may have fallen into it,and so helped to keep it open.The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men;and so with the paths which the mind travels.How worn and dusty,then,must be 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 extra-vagant 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 misty on that side;as our shadows reveal an insensible perspiration toward the sun.The volatile truth of our words should continually betray the inadequacy of the residual statement.Their truth is instantly translated;its literal monument alone remains.The words which express our faith and piety are not definite;yet they are significant and fragrant like frankincense to superior natures.
Why level downward to our dullest perception always,and praise that as common sense?The commonest sense is the sense of men asleep,which they express by snoring.Sometimes we are inclined to class those who are once-and-a-half-witted with the half-witted,because we appreciate only a third part of their wit.Some would find fault with the morning red,if they ever got up early enough.“They pretend,”as I hear,“that the verses of Kabir have four different senses;illusion,spirit,intellect,and the exotic doctrine of the Vedas;”but in this part of the world it is considered a ground for complaint if a man's writings admit of more than one interpretation.While England endeavors to cure the potato-rot,will not any endeavor to cure the brain-rot,which prevails so much more widely and fatally?
I do not suppose that I have attained to obscurity,but I should be proud if no more fatal fault were found with my pages on this score than was found with the Walden ice.Southern customers objected to its blue color,which is the evidence of its purity,as if it were muddy,and preferred the Cambridge ice,which is white,but tastes of weeds.The purity men love is like the mists which envelop the earth,and not like the azure ether beyond.
Some are dinning in our ears that we Americans,and moderns generally,are intellectual dwarfs compared with the ancients,or even the Elizabethan men.But what is that to the purpose?A living dog is better than a dead lion.Shall a man go and hang himself because he belongs to the race of pygmies,and not be the biggest pygmy that he can?Let every one mind his own business,and endeavor to be what he was made.
Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed and in such desperate enterprises?If a man does not keep pace with his companions,perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.Let him step to the music which he hears,however measured or far away.It is not important that he should mature as soon as an apple tree or an oak.Shall he turn his spring into summer?If the condition of things which we were made for is not yet,what were any reality which we can substitute?We will not be shipwrecked on a vain reality.Shall we with pains erect a heaven of blue glass over ourselves,though when it is done we shall be sure to gaze still at the true ethereal heaven far above,as if the former were not?
