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It is a surprising and memorable, as well
as valuable experience, to be lost in the woods any time. Often in
a snow-storm, even by day, one will come out upon a well-known road
and yet find it impossible to tell which way leads to the village.
Though he knows that he has travelled it a thousand times, he cannot
recognize a feature in it, but it is as strange to him as if it were
a road in Siberia. By night, of course, the perplexity is
infinitely greater. In our most trivial walks, we are constantly,
though unconsciously, steering like pilots by certain well-known
beacons and headlands, and if we go beyond our usual course we still
carry in our minds the bearing of some neighboring cape; and not
till we are completely lost, or turned round -- for a man needs only
to be turned round once with his eyes shut in this world to be lost
-- do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of nature. Every
man has to learn the points of compass again as often as be awakes,
whether from sleep or any abstraction.


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