Page:New lands - (IA newlands00fort).pdf/17



ANDS in the sky— That they are nearby— That they do not move.

I take for a principle that all being is the infinitely serial, and that whatever has been will, with differences of particulars, be again—

The last quarter of the fifteenth century—land to the west!

This first quarter of the twentieth century—we shall have revelations.

There will be data. There will be many. Behind this book, unpublished collectively, or held as constituting its reserve forces, there are other hundreds of data, but independently I take for a principle that all existence is a flux and a re-flux, by which periods of expansion follow periods of contraction; that few men can even think widely when times are narrow times, but that human constrictions cannot repress extensions of thoughts and lives and enterprise and dominion when times are wider times—so then that the pageantry of foreign coasts that was revealed behind blank horizons after the year 1492, cannot be, in the course of development, the only astounding denial of seeming vacancy—that the spirit, or the animation, and the stimulations and the needs of the fifteenth century are all appearing again, and that requital may appear again—

Aftermath of war, as in the year 1492: demands for readjustments; crowded and restless populations, revolts against limitations, intolerable restrictions against emigrations. The young man is no longer urged, or is no longer much inclined, to go westward. He will, or must, go somewhere. If directions alone no longer invite him, he may hear invitation in dimensions. There are