Ahab's Adventure's In Wonderland; or The Rabbit

Chapter Fourteen

I was idling by one of the South field fences, one of the ones furthest away from the cabin, where I wasn't likely to encounter the foreman or be harangued for my devil's laziness, and the memory of my sister came to mind. I remembered her as a girl, when she would consider in her own mind (as well as she could, for such hot days made her feel very sleepy and stupid), whether the pleasure of making a daisy-chain would be worth the trouble of getting up and picking the daisies, and I realized how much alike we were.

I looked with sympathetic awe and fearfulness upon my sister. Wonderfullest things are ever the unmentionable; deep memories yield no epitaphs; this six-inch chapter is the stoneless grave of my sister. Let me only say that it fared with her as with the storm-drenched traveller, who miserably drives along the land. The town would fain give succor; the town is pitiful; in the town is safety, comfort, hearthstone, supper, warm blankets, friends, all that's kind to our mortalities. But in that gale, the town, the land, is that traveller's direst jeopardy; she must fly all hospitality; one touch of civilization, though it but graze the heel, would make her shudder through and through. With all her might she crowds into the wilderness; in so doing, fights 'gainst the very roads that fain would lead her homeward; seeks all the green field's homelessness again; for refuge's sake forlornly rushing into peril; her only friend her bitterest foe!

Know ye now, sister? Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her fields; while the wildest roads of heaven and earth conspire to drive her to the treacherous, slavish town?

But as in homelessness alone resides the highest truth, indefinite as God--so better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the road, even if that were safety! For worm-like, then, oh! who would craven crawl to town! Terrors of the terrible! is all this agony so vain? Take heart, take heart, O sister! Bear thee grimly, demigod! Up from the grasses of thy perishing--straight up, grows the new daisies of spring!