Page:Mexico, California and Arizona - 1900.djvu/336

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316
OLD MEXICO AND HER LOST PROVINCES.

ing-off place," the final verge of the latest of the continents. An excellent situation in which to feel it is to lie on the brown heather at the point above the Golden Gate-though it is a raw and gusty place in which to lie too long-or to look down from the parapeted road or piazza of the Cliff House.

Here practically nothing intervenes between you and Japan, except we make mention of the clump of Seal Rocks, upon which the grouty sea-lions are floundering and roaring, down there in the surf in front.

"Ah! when a man has travelled," says Thoreau, "when he has robbed the horizon of his native fields of its mystery, tarnished the blue of distant mountains with his feet, he may begin to think of another world."

Very well. Perhaps it may do a man no harm to think of another world now and then, if not upon one pretext, on another. At evening the Golden Gate is the way to the sunset. The orb of day settles into the sea at the end of the gleaming strait, precisely in that East where we always figure it to ourselves as rising in the morning. The great circle is at last complete; and, as the extremes of every kind, even of love and hate, are said to be identical, the old, quiescent East has become the bound of the new, impetuous West.

"What is a world to do," you idly ask, "when it has no longer a West? How is it to get on without that vague open region on its borders, always the safety-valve and outlet for surplus population and uneasy spirits?"

"But when the race has quite arrived at this farther shore, will it stop here? or will it possibly start round the world again? Will it go on yet many times more, always beginning with the highest perfection yet attained, weaker types dying out in front to make room, till it shall become in its march a dazzling army of light?