No More Learning

"Than longen folk to gon on pilgrimages,
And palmeres for to seken strange strondes. "

Every sunset which I witness inspires me with the desire to go to a
West as distant and as fair as that into which the sun goes down. He
appears to migrate westward daily, and tempt us to follow him. He is
the Great Western Pioneer whom the nations follow. We dream all night
of those mountain-ridges in the horizon, though they may be of vapor
only, which were last gilded by his rays. The island of Atlantis, and
the islands and gardens of the Hesperides, a sort of terrestrial
paradise, appear to have been the Great West of the ancients,
enveloped in mystery and poetry. Who has not seen in imagination, when
looking into the sunset sky, the gardens of the Hesperides, and the
foundation of all those fables?

Columbus felt the westward tendency more strongly than any before. He
obeyed it, and found a New World for Castile and Leon. The herd of men
in those days scented fresh pastures from afar.

"And now the sun had stretched out all the hills,
And now was dropped into the western bay;
At last _he_ rose, and twitched his mantle blue;
To-morrow to fresh woods and pastures new. "

Where on the globe can there be found an area of equal extent with
that occupied by the bulk of our States, so fertile and so rich and
varied in its productions, and at the same time so habitable by the
European, as this is? Michaux, who knew but part of them, says that
"the species of large trees are much more numerous in North America
than in Europe; in the United States there are more than one hundred
and forty species that exceed thirty feet in height; in France there
are but thirty that attain this size. " Later botanists more than
confirm his observations. Humboldt came to America to realize his
youthful dreams of a tropical vegetation, and he beheld it in its
greatest perfection in the primitive forests of the Amazon, the most
gigantic wilderness on the earth, which he has so eloquently
described.
The geographer Guyot, himself a European, goes
farther,--farther than I am ready to follow him; yet not when he says:
"As the plant is made for the animal, as the vegetable world is made
for the animal world, America is made for the man of the Old World. . . .
The man of the Old World sets out upon his way. Leaving the highlands
of Asia, he descends from station to station towards Europe. Each of
his steps is marked by a new civilization superior to the preceding,
by a greater power of development. Arrived at the Atlantic, he pauses
on the shore of this unknown ocean, the bounds of which he knows not,
and turns upon his footprints for an instant. " When he has exhausted
the rich soil of Europe, and reinvigorated himself, "then recommences
his adventurous career westward as in the earliest ages. " So far
Guyot.

From this western impulse coming in contact with the barrier of the
Atlantic sprang the commerce and enterprise of modern times. The
younger Michaux, in his "Travels West of the Alleghanies in 1802,"
says that the common inquiry in the newly settled West was, "'From
what part of the world have you come? ' As if these vast and fertile
regions would naturally be the place of meeting and common country of
all the inhabitants of the globe. "

To use an obsolete Latin word, I might say, _Ex Oriente lux; ex
Occidente_ FRUX. From the East light; from the West fruit.

Sir Francis Head, an English traveler and a Governor-General of
Canada, tells us that "in both the northern and southern hemispheres
of the New World, Nature has not only outlined her works on a larger
scale, but has painted the whole picture with brighter and more costly
colors than she used in delineating and in beautifying the Old
World.