Page:The first and last journeys of Thoreau - lately discovered among his unpublished journals and manuscripts.djvu/175

 many miles of Bedford and Carlisle and Acton my eye ranged, even into Billerica and Framingham,—which never had occurred to me before, though I was familiar with the roads leading thither,—the nearest horizon seemed proportionately to extend itself, and to embrace many Actons and Carlisles; and I thought I would not travel to see these places, and balk the Fates who placed them thus under my eyes. The most familiar and best-known facts leave no distinct impression on our minds; no man can tell how his horizon looks at evening. We do not know, till the time comes, which way the river runs, which hills range, or that the hill takes in our homestead in its sweep. At first our birth and existence sunder all things, as if, like a wedge, we had been thrust up through into Nature, and not till the wound heals do we begin to see her unity.

Page xxvii.—The passage beginning, "Here the Woodcutters" has nothing to do with the preceding passage on Music, and should have been detached from it. In connection with it, however, may now be read [125]