the instant
indiscreet wish, and says, "I go."

_June 5, 1864._ Provincetown. Came in here to get cheated in buying a
boat, and succeeded admirably! It was taken on board, not quite breaking
beneath its own weight; the anchor soon followed; we were away. Past the
long spit of sand on the north and west; past the new batteries, over
which floated the flag that for months would not again gladden our eyes,
save at the mast-head of some wandering ship; then, with change of
course, past the long curving neck of the desert cape; and so out upon
the open ocean we sped, with a free wind, a crested wave, and a white
wake. The land grew a low, blue cloud in the west, then melted into the
horizon. But before it faded, the heart of one man clung to it,
regretful, penitent, saying, "It was not well to go; it were better to
have stayed and suffered, as you, O Land, must suffer."

But when it was gone; then the Before built to itself also a cloudland
and drew me on. The mystic North reached forth the wand by which it had
fascinated me so often, and renewed its spell. Who has not felt it?
Thoreau wrote of "The Wild" as he alone could write; but only in the
North do you find it,--unless you make it, as he did, by your
imagination. And even he could in this but partially succeed. Talk of
finding it in a ten-acre swamp! Why, man, you are just from a cornfield,
the echoes of your sister's piano are still in your ears, and you called
at the post-office for a letter as you came! Verdure and a mild heaven
are above; _clunking_ frogs and plants that keep company with man are
beneath. But in the North Nature herself is wild. Of man she has never
so much as heard. She has seen, perchance, a biped atomy creeping
through her snows; but he is not Man, lording it in power of thought and
performance; he is a muffled imbecility, that can do nothing but hug and
hide its existence, lest some careless breath of hers should blow it
out; his pin-head taper must be kept under a bushel, or cease to be even
the covert pettiness it is. The wildness of the North is not scenic and
pictorial merely, but goes to the very heart of things, immeasurable,
immitigable, infinite; deaf and blind to all but itself and its own, it
prevails, it is, and it is all.

The desert and the sea are indeed untamable, but the North is more. They
hold their own, and Civilization is but a Mrs. Partington, trying to
sweep _in_ at their doors. But Commerce, though it cannot subdue,