Revolutions are never sudden.
The most important is commonly some silent and unobtrusive fact in history.
In the year 449 three Saxon cyules arrived on the British coast.
“Three scipen gode comen mid than flode.”
To the sick the doctors wisely recommend a change of air and scenery. Who
chains me to this dull town?
There is this moment proposed to me every kind of life that men lead anywhere
or at any time — or that imagination can paint. By another spring I
may be a mail carrier in Peru, or a South African planter, or a Siberian
exile, or a Greenland whaler, or a settler on the Columbia River, or a Canton
merchant, or a soldier in Mexico, or a mackerel fisher off Cape Sable, or a
Robinson Crusoe in the Pacific, or a silent navigator of any sea.
How many are not standing on the European coast whom another spring will find
located on the Wisconsin or the Sacramento!
I can move away from public opinion, from government, from religion, from
education, from society. Shall I be reckoned a rateable poll in the county of
Middlesex, or be rated at one spear under the palm trees of Guinea? Shall I
raise corn and potatoes in Massachusetts, or figs and olives in Asia Minor?
Sit out the day in my office in State street, or ride it out on the steppes of
Tartary? For my Brobdingnag I may sail to Patagonia, for my Lilliput to
Lapland. In Arabia and Persia my days’ adventures may surpass the
Arabian Nights entertainments. I may be a logger on the head waters of the
Penobscot, to be recorded in fable hereafter as an amphibious river God by as
sounding a name as Triton or Proteus — carry furs from Nootka to China
and so be more renowned than Jason and his Golden Fleece, or join a South Sea
exploring expedition to be recounted hereafter along with the Periplus of
Hanno.
And how many more things may I do with which there is none to be compared!
Thank Heaven here is not all the world. The buckeye does not grow in New
England, and the mocking bird is rarely heard here. Why should I fall behind
the summer and the migrations of birds? Shall we not compete with the buffalo
who keeps pace with the seasons, cropping the pastures of the Colorado till a
greener and sweeter grass awaits him by the Yellowstone? The wild-goose is a
more cosmopolite than we — he breaks his fast in Canada, takes a
luncheon in the Susquehanna, and plumes himself for the night in a Louisiana
bayou. The pigeon carries an acorn in his crop from the King of
Holland’s to
Mason and Dixon’s Line.
Yet we think if rail-fences are pulled down and stone walls set up on our
farms, bounds are henceforth set to our lives and our fates decided. If you
are chosen town-clerk forsooth, you cannot go to Tierra del Fuego this
summer.
But what would all this activity amount to?
Goosey goosey gander
Where shall I wander?
Up stairs down stairs
In a lady’s chamber?
Shall we not stretch our legs? Why shall we pause this side of sundown? We
will not then be immigrants still further into our native country. Let us
start now on that fartherest western way which does not pause at the
Mississippi or the Pacific, pushing on by day and night, sun down, moon down,
stars down, and at last earth down too.
