Introduction 
where I was going. Doomed to be ‘carried of 
the spirit into the wilderness,’ I suppose. I 
wish I could be more moderate in my desires, 
but I cannot, and so there is no rest.” 
The letter noted above was written only two 
days before he started on his long walk to 
Florida. If the concluding sentences still re- 
flect indecision, they also convey a hint of the 
overmastering impulse under which he was 
acting. The opening sentences of his journal, 
afterwards crossed out, witness to this sense of 
inward compulsion which he felt.“ Few bodies,” 
he wrote, “are inhabited by so satisfied a soul 
that they are allowed exemption from extra- 
ordinary exertion through a whole life.” After 
reciting illustrations of nature’s periodicity, of 
the ebbs and flows of tides, and the pulsation 
of other forces, visible and invisible, he observes 
that “so also there are tides not only in the af- 
fairs of men, but in the primal thing of life it- 
self. In some persons the impulse, being slight, 
is easily obeyed or overcome. But in others it 
is constant and cumulative in action until its 
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