Walden

heard the whip-poor-will, the brown thrasher, the veery, the wood
pewee, the chewink, and other birds.  I had heard the wood thrush
long before.  The phoebe had already come once more and looked in at
my door and window, to see if my house was cavern-like enough for
her, sustaining herself on humming wings with clinched talons, as if
she held by the air, while she surveyed the premises.  The
sulphur-like pollen of the pitch pine soon covered the pond and the
stones and rotten wood along the shore, so that you could have
collected a barrelful.  This is the "sulphur showers" we bear of.
Even in Calidas' drama of Sacontala, we read of "rills dyed yellow
with the golden dust of the lotus."  And so the seasons went rolling
on into summer, as one rambles into higher and higher grass.
    Thus was my first year's life in the woods completed; and the
second year was similar to it.  I finally left Walden September 6th,
1847.

                            Conclusion

    To the sick the doctors wisely recommend a change of air and
scenery.  Thank Heaven, here is not all the world.  The buckeye does
not grow in New England, and the mockingbird is rarely heard here.
The wild goose is more of a cosmopolite than we; he breaks his fast
in Canada, takes a luncheon 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 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 you may go to the land of
infernal fire nevertheless.  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
picking oakum.  The other side of the globe is but the home of our
correspondent.  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 nobler game to shoot one's self.--

          "Direct your eye right inward, and you'll find
           A thousand regions in your mind
           Yet undiscovered.  Travel them, and be
           Expert in home-cosmography."

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 continent,
that we would find?  Are these the problems which most concern
mankind?  Is Franklin the only man who is lost, that his wife should
be so earnest to 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 oceans; explore your own higher latitudes --
with shiploads of preserved meats to support you, if they be
necessary; and pile the empty cans sky-high for a sign.  Were
preserved meats invented to preserve meat merely?  Nay, be a
Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new
channels, 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 can 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
Exploring Expedition, with all its parade and expense, but an
indirect recognition of the fact that there are continents and seas
in the moral world to which every man is an isthmus or an inlet, yet
unexplored by him, but that it is easier to sail many thousand miles
through cold and storm and cannibals, in a government ship, with
five hundred men and boys to assist one, than it is to explore the
private sea, the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean of one's being alone.

          "Erret, et extremos alter scrutetur Iberos.
           Plus habet hic vitae, plus habet ille viae."

    Let them wander and scrutinize the outlandish Australians.
    I have more of God, they more of the road.

It is not worth the while to go round the world to count the cats in
Zanzibar.  Yet do this even till you can do better, and you may
perhaps find some "Symmes' Hole" by which to get at the inside at
last.  England and France, Spain and Portugal, Gold Coast and Slave
Coast, all front on this private sea; but no bark from them has
ventured out of sight of land, though it is without doubt the direct
way to India.  If you would learn to speak all tongues and conform
to the customs of all nations, if you would travel farther than all
travellers, be naturalized in all climes, and cause the Sphinx to
dash her head against a stone, even obey the precept of the old
philosopher, and Explore thyself.  Herein are demanded the eye and
the nerve.  Only the defeated and deserters go to the wars, cowards
that run away and enlist.  Start now on that farthest western way,
which does not pause at the Mississippi or the Pacific, nor conduct
toward a wornout China or Japan, but leads on direct, a tangent to
this sphere, summer and winter, day and night, sun down, moon down,
and at last earth down too.
    It is said that Mirabeau took to highway robbery "to ascertain
what degree of resolution was necessary in order to place one's self