“and when has happiness ever required much evidence to begin its leaf-green breathing?”

I find it very interesting that these two poems are placed right next to each other in Mary Oliver's selected poems:

Magellan

Like Magellan, let us find our islands

To die in, far from home, from anywhere

Familiar. Let us risk the wildest places,

Lest we go down in comfort, and despair.

For years we have labored over common roads,

Dreaming of ships that sail into the night.

Let us be heroes, or, if that's not in us,

Let us find men to follow, honor-bright.

For what is life but reaching for an answer?

And what is death but a refusal to grow?

Magellan had a dream he had to follow.

The sea was big, his ships were awkward, slow.

And when the fever would not set him free,

To his thin crew, “Sail on, sail on!” he cried.

And so they did, carried the frail dream homeward.

And thus Magellan lives, although he died.

Going to Walden

It isn't very far as highways lie.

I might be back by nightfall, having seen

The rough pines, and the stones, and the clear water.

Friends argue that I might be wiser for it.

They do not hear that far-off Yankee whisper:

How dull we grow from hurrying here and there!

Many have gone, and think me half a fool

To miss a day away in the cool country.

Maybe. But in a book I read and cherish,

Going to Walden is not so easy a thing

As a Green visit. It is the slow and difficult

Trick of living, and finding it where you are.