To the sick the doctors wisely reend a ge of air and
sery. Thank Heaven, here is not all the world. The buckeye does
not grow in New England, and the mogbird is rarely heard here.
The wild goose is more of a opolite than we; he breaks his fast
in ada, takes a lun in the Ohio, and plumes himself for the
night in a southern bayou. Even the bison, to some extent, keeps
pace with the seasons cropping the pastures of the Colorado only
till a greener and sweeter grass awaits him by the Yellowstone. Yet
we think that if rail fences are pulled down, and stone walls piled
up on our farms, bounds are heh set to our lives and our
fates decided. If you are chosen town clerk, forsooth, you ot
go to Tierra del Fuego this summer: but you may go to the land of
infernal fire heless. The universe is wider than our views of
it.
Yet we should oftener look over the tafferel of our craft, like
curious passengers, and not make the voyage like stupid sailors
pig oakum. The other side of the globe is but the home of our
correspo. Our voyaging is only great-circle sailing, and the
doctors prescribe for diseases of the skin merely. One hastens to
southern Africa to chase the giraffe; but surely that is not the
game he would be after. How long, pray, would a man hunt giraffes
if he could? Snipes and woodcocks also may afford rare sport; but I
trust it would be name to shoot ones self.--
"Direct your eye right inward, and youll find
A thousand regions in your mind
Yet undiscovered. Travel them, and be
Expert in home-ography."
What does Africa -- what does the West stand for? Is not our own
interior white on the chart? black though it may prove, like the
coast, when discovered. Is it the source of the Nile, or the Niger,
or the Mississippi, or a Northwest Passage around this ti,
that we would find? Are these the problems which most
mankind? Is Franklin the only man who is lost, that his wife should
be so earo find him? Does Mr. Grinnell know where he himself
is? Be rather the Mungo Park, the Lewis and Clark and Frobisher, of
your own streams and os; explore your own higher latitudes --
with shiploads of preserved meats to support you, if they be
necessary; and pile the empty s sky-high for a sign. Were
preserved meats ied to preserve meat merely? Nay, be a
bus to whole new tis and worlds within you, opening new
els, not of trade, but of thought. Every man is the lord of a
realm beside which the earthly empire of the Czar is but a petty
state, a hummock left by the ice. Yet some be patriotic who
have no self-respect, and sacrifice the greater to the less. They
love the soil which makes their graves, but have no sympathy with
the spirit which may still animate their clay. Patriotism is a
maggot in their heads. What was the meaning of that South-Sea
Expl Expedition, with all its parade and expense, but an
i reition of the fact that there are tis and seas
in the moral world to which every man is an isthmus or an i, yet
unexplored by him, but that it is easier to sail many thousand miles
through cold and storm and ibals, in a gover ship, with
five hundred men and boys to assist ohan it is to explore the
private sea, the Atlantid