of beauty--for beauty is inward,
not outward--we find ourselves hastening from land to land, gathering
mere curious resemblances which, like unassimilated property, possess no
power of fecundation. With what pathetic diligence we collect peaks and
passes in Switzerland; how we come laden from England with vain
cathedrals!

Beauty? What is it but a new way of approach? For wilderness, for
foreignness, I have no need to go a mile: I have only to come up through
my thicket or cross my field from my own roadside--and behold, a new
heaven and a new earth!

Things grow old and stale, not because they are old, but because we
cease to see them. Whole vibrant significant worlds around us disappear
within the sombre mists of familiarity. Whichever way we look the roads
are dull and barren. There is a tree at our gate we have not seen in
years: a flower blooms in our door-yard more wonderful than the shining
heights of the Alps!

It has seemed to me sometimes as though I could see men hardening before
my eyes, drawing in a feeler here, walling up an opening there. Naming
things! Objects fall into categories for them and wear little sure
channels in the brain. A mountain is a mountain, a tree a tree to them,
a field forever a field. Life solidifies itself in words. And finally
how everything wearies them and that is old age!

Is it not the prime struggle of life to keep the mind plastic? To see
and feel and hear things newly? To accept nothing as settled; to defend
the eternal right of the questioner? To reject every conclusion of
yesterday before the surer observations of to-day?--is not that the best
life we know?

And so to the Open Road! Not many miles from my farm there is a tamarack
swamp. The soft dark green of it fills the round bowl of a valley.
Around it spread rising forests and fields; fences divide it from the
known land. Coming across my fields one day, I saw it there. I felt the
habit of avoidance. It is a custom, well enough in a practical land, to
shun such a spot of perplexity; but on that day I was following the Open
Road, and it led me straight to the moist dark stillness of the
tamaracks. I cannot here tell all the marvels I found in that place. I
trod where human foot had never trod before. Cobwebs barred my passage
(the bars to most passages when we came to them are only cobwebs), the
earth was soft with the thick swamp mosses, and with many an autumn of
fallen dead, brown leaves. I crossed the track of