When Every
Other Path Would Fail, With Singular And Unerring Confidence We
Advance On Our Particular Course.
What risks we run!
Famine and
fire and pestilence, and the thousand forms of a cruel fate, - and
yet every man lives till he - dies. How did he manage that? Is
there no immediate danger? We wonder superfluously when we hear
of a somnambulist walking a plank securely, - we have walked a
plank all our lives up to this particular string-piece where we
are. My life will wait for nobody, but is being matured still
without delay, while I go about the streets, and chaffer with
this man and that to secure it a living. It is as indifferent
and easy meanwhile as a poor man's dog, and making acquaintance
with its kind. It will cut its own channel like a mountain
stream, and by the longest ridge is not kept from the sea at
last. I have found all things thus far, persons and inanimate
matter, elements and seasons, strangely adapted to my resources.
No matter what imprudent haste in my career; I am permitted to be
rash. Gulfs are bridged in a twinkling, as if some unseen
baggage-train carried pontoons for my convenience, and while from
the heights I scan the tempting but unexplored Pacific Ocean of
Futurity, the ship is being carried over the mountains piecemeal
on the backs of mules and lamas, whose keel shall plough its
waves, and bear me to the Indies. Day would not dawn if it were
not for
THE INWARD MORNING
Packed in my mind lie all the clothes
Which outward nature wears,
And in its fashion's hourly change
It all things else repairs.
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