CONCLUSION. 
345 
and deserters go to tlie wars, cowards that run away 
and enlist. Start now on that farthest western way, 
which does not pause at the Mississippi or the Pacific, 
nor conduct toward a worn-out China or Japan, but leads 
on direct a tangent to this sphere, summer and winter, 
day and night, sun down, moon down, and at last earth 
down too. 
It is said that Mirabeau took to highway robbery “ to 
ascertain what degree of resolution was necessary in or¬ 
der to place one’s self in formal opposition to the most 
sacred laws of society.” He declared that “a soldier 
who fights in the ranks does not require half so much 
courage as a foot-pad,”—“that honor and religion have 
never stood in the way of a well-considered and a firm 
resolve.” This was manly, as the world goes; and yet 
it was idle, if not desperate. A saner man would have 
found himself often enough “in formal opposition” to 
what are deemed “the most sacred laws of society,” 
through obedience to yet more sacred laws, and so have 
tested his resolution without going out of his way. It 
is not for a man to put himself in such an attitude to 
society, but to maintain himself in whatever attitude he 
find himself through obedience to the laws of his being, 
which will never be one of opposition to a just govern¬ 
ment, if he should chance to meet with such. 
I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. 
Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives 
to live, and could not spare any more time for that one. 
It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into 
a particular route, and make a beaten track for our¬ 
selves. I had not lived there a week before my feet 
wore a path from my door to the pond-side; and though 
it is five or six years since I trod it, it is still quite 
