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SIXPENCE, NETT.
WRi,
�JUST PUBLISHED.
Crown Svo, cloth gilt, 2s. nett, post 2s. 3a.
An important new work by
EDWARD CARPENTER.
PRISONS, POLICE .
. an u rumoiiiWElM.
AND PUNISHMENT.
An Inquiry into the Causes and Treatment of Crime and Criminals
K
■•“J
never writes without a message
°* v e J)re,s®nt generation. He
of one at least prepared thus t'o’s’peaY feaXs^v^^1 for.*e presence
hysterical, filled with a fieru
JL
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desire our readers to circulate as widely as^ossibl’e.”
™ earnestly
enforced he tT^XinteresTkg
’’“'Tol'll’0Ft*voluntary for the
suggestive.”
7 lncerestmS- • ■ 10 all alike this volume will prove
A New and
heaper Edition of
game of life. b7 bolton
Author of Even as Y
Hall's wise and pun;
parables of the great
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THE diary of an old soul9
tC
■
and other spiritual verse. By GEORGE MACDONAT n
THE WHITE SLAVES
OF ENGLAND.
By R. H. SHERARD.
With.80 page appendix,
inusternateed°f This^isTb'T^ "from bTuTSs.^F®
uustratea. This is a book no social reformer should be without fM
nett- B°staSe 3rf. Paper edition, without append*, £ost freii, S’
London : ARTHUR C. FIFIELD, 44, Fleet Street, E.C.
�OF WALKING
“ I beieve in the forest, and in
the meadow, and in the night in
which he corn grows” Thoreau.
“ One of the pleasantest things
in the world is going a wurney.”
Kazlitt.
“ J foot and in the open road,
one has a fair start in life at
last. There is no hindrance now.
Le; him put his best foot for
ward.”
Burroughs.
��IN PRAISE
OF WALKING
THOREAU, WHITMAN,
BURROUGHS, HAZLITT
*
LONDON:
ARTHUR C. FIFIELD
THE SIMPLE LIFE PRESS
44 FLEET STREET E.C
1905
�CONTENTS
PAGE
WALKING, AND THE WILD. Thoreau .
.
5
THE SONG OF THE OPEN ROAD. Whitman . 45
THE EXHILARATIONS OF THE ROAD.
Burroughs............................................................... 59
ON GOING A JOURNEY. Hazlitt
... 75
�WALKING, AND THE WILD
H. D. THOREAU
“ The West of which I speak is but another name
for the Wild, and what I have been preparing
to say is, that in wildness is the preservation o f
the world.”—Thoreau.
“ I believe in the forest, in the meadow, and in the
night in which the corn grows.”—Thoreau.
WISH to speak a word for Nature, for absolute
freedom and wildness, as contrasted with
a freedom and culture merely civil,—to regard
man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of
Nature, rather than a member of society. I
wish to make an extreme statement, if so I may
make an emphatic one, for there are enough cham
pions of civilization : the minister and the school
committee, and every one of you will take care
of that.
I
I
I have met with but one or two persons in the
* course of my life who understood the art of Walk! ing, that is, of taking walks,—who had a genius,
so to speak, for sauntering : which word is beauti
fully derived “ from idle people who roved about
the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity,
under pretence of going a la Sainte Terre,” to the
Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, “ There goes
5
�6
IN PRAISE OF WALKING
a Sainte-Terrer,” a Saunterer—a Holy-Lander.
They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks,
as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vaga
bonds ; but they who do go there are saunterers
n the good sense, such as I mean. Some, how
ever, would derive the word from sans terre, without
land or a home, which therefore, in the good sense,
will mean, having no particular home, but equally
at home everywhere. For this is the secret of
successful sauntering. He who sits still in a house
all the time may be the greatest vagrant of all;
but the saunterer, in the good sense, is no more
vagrant than the meandering river, which is all
the while sedulously seeking the shortest course to
the sea. But I prefer the first, which indeed is the
most probable derivation. For every walk is a
sort of crusade, preached by some Peter the Hermit
in us, to go forth and reconquer this Holy Land
from the hands of the Infidels.
It is true we are but faint-hearted crusaders,
even the walkers, nowadays, who undertake no
persevering, never-ending enterprises. Our ex
peditions are but tours, and come round again at
evening to the old hearth-side from which we set
out. Half the walk is but retracing our steps.
We should go forth on the shortest walk, per
chance, in the spirit of undying adventure, never
to return—prepared to send back our embalmed
hearts only as relics to our desolate kingdoms.
If you are ready to leave father and mother, and
brother and sister, and wife and child and friends,
and never see them again—if you have paid your
debts, and made your will, and settled all your
affairs, and are a free man, then you are ready for
a walk
To come down to my own experience, my com-
�WALKING, AND THE WILD
7
panion and I, for I sometimes have a companion,
take pleasure in fancying ourselves knights of a
new, or rather an old, order—not Equestrians
or Chevaliers, not Ritters or riders, but Walkers,
a still more ancient and honourable class, I trust
The chivalric and heroic spirit which once belonged
to the Rider seems now to reside in, or perchance
to have subsided into, the Walker,—not the
Knight, , but Walker Errant. He is a sort of fourth
estate, outside of Church and State and People.
We have felt that we almost alone hereabouts
practised this noble art; though, to tell the truth,
at least if their own assertions are to be received,
most of my townsmen would fain walk sometimes,
as I do, but they cannot. No wealth can buy
■ the requisite leisure, freedom, and independence,
r which are the capital in this profession. It comes
• only by the grace of God. It requires a direct
' dispensation from Heaven to become a walker.
You must be born into the family of the Walkers.
Ambulator nascitur, non fit. Some of my towns
men, it is true, can remember and have described
to me some walks which they took ten years ago,
in which they were so blessed as to lose themselves
for half-an-hour in the woods ; but I know very
well that they have confined themselves to the
highway ever since, whatever pretensions they may
make to belong to this select class. No doubt
they were elevated for a moment as by the re
miniscence of a previous state of existence, when
even they were foresters and outlaws.
“ When he came to grene mode,
In a mery mornynge,
There he herde the notes small
Of byrdes mery svngynge.
�8
IN PRAISE OF WALKING
“ It is ferre gone, sayd Robyn,
That I was last here ;
Me lyste a lytell for to shote
At the donne dere.”
I think that I cannot preserve my health and
spirits unless I spend four hours a day at least—
and it is commonly more than that—sauntering
through the woods and over the hills and fields,
absolutely free from all worldly engagements.
You may safely say, A penny for your thoughts,
or a thousand pounds. When sometimes I am
reminded that the mechanics and shopkeepers
stay in their shops not only all the forenoon, but
all the afternoon too, sitting with crossed legs, so
many of them—as if the legs were made to sit
upon, and not to stand or walk upon—I think
that they deserve some credit for not having all
committed suicide long ago.
I, who cannot stay in my chamber for a single
day without acquiring some rust, and when some
times I have stolen forth for a walk at the eleventh
hour of four o’clock in the afternoon, too late to
redeem the day, when the shades of night were
already beginning to be mingled with the daylight,
have felt as if I had committed some sin to be
atoned for,—I confess that I am astonished at the
power of endurance, to say nothing of the moral
insensibility, of my neighbours who confine them
selves to shops and offices the whole day for weeks
and months, ay, and years almost together. I
know not what manner of stuff they are of—sitting
there now at three o’clock in the afternoon, as if
it were three o’clock in the morning. Bonaparte
may talk of the three-o’clock-in-the-morning
courage, but it is nothing to the courage which
�WALKING, AND THE WILD
9
can sit down cheerfully at this hour in the after
noon over against one’s self whom you have known
all the morning, to starve out a garrison to whom
you are bound by such strong ties of sympathy.
I wonder that about this time, or say between four
and five o’clock in the afternoon, too late for the
morning papers and too early for the evening
ones, there is not a general explosion heard up
and down the street, scattering a legion of anti
quated and house-bred notions and whims to the
four winds for an airing—and so the evil cure
itself.
How womankind, who are confined to the house
still more than men, stand it I do not know ;
but I have ground to suspect that most of them
do not stand it at all. When, early in a summer
afternoon, we have been shaking the dust of the
village from the skirts of our garments, making
haste past those houses with purely Doric or
Gothic fronts, which have such an air of repose
about them, my companion whispers that pro
bably about these times their occupants are all
gone to bed. Then it is that I appreciate the
beauty and the glory of architecture, which itself
never turns in, but for ever stands out and erect,
keeping watch over the slumberers.
No doubt temperament, and, above all, age,
have a good deal to do with it. As a man grows
older, his ability to sit still and follow indoor
occupations increases. He grows vespertinal in
his habits as the evening of life approaches, till
at last he comes forth only just before sundown,
and gets all the walk that he requires in half-anhour.
But the walking of which I speak has nothing
in it akin to taking exercise, as it is called, as the
�IO
IN PRAISE OF WALKING
sick take medicine at stated hours—as the swing
ing of dumb-bells or chairs; but is itself the
enterprise and adventure of the day. If you
would get exercise, go in search of the springs of
life. Think of a man’s swinging dumb-bells for
his health, when those springs are bubbling up in
far-off pastures unsought by him !
Moreover, you must walk like a camel, which
is said to be the only beast which ruminates when
walking. When a traveller asked Wordsworth’s
servant to show him her master’s study, she
answered, “ Here is his library, but his study is
out of doors.”
Living much out of doors, in the sun and wind,
will no doubt produce a certain roughness of
character—will cause a thicker cuticle to grow
over some of the finer qualities of our nature, as
on the face and hands, or as severe manual labour
robs the hands of some of their delicacy of touch.
So staying in the house, on the other hand, may
produce a softness and smoothness, not to say
thinness of skin, accompanied by an increased
sensibility to certain impressions. Perhaps we
should be more susceptible to some influences
important to our intellectual and moral growth
if the sun had shone and the wind blown on us
a little less ; and no doubt it is a nice matter to
proportion rightly the thick and thin skin. But
methinks that is a scurf that will fall off fast
enough—that the natural remedy is to be found
in the proportion which the night bears to the
day, the winter to the summer, thought to experi
ence. There will be so much the more air and
sunshine in our thoughts. The callous palms of
the labourer are conversant with finer tissues of
self-respect and heroism, whose touch thrills the
�WALKING, AND THE WILD
II
heart, than the languid fingers of idleness. That
is mere sentimentality that lies abed by day and
thinks itself white, far from the tan and callus of
experience.
When we walk, we naturally go to the fields
and woods : what would become of us if we walked
only in a garden or a mall ? Even some sects of
philosophers have felt the necessity of importing
the woods to themselves, since they did not go to
the woods. “ They planted groves and walks of
Platanes,” where they took subdiales ambulationes in porticos open to the air. Of course it
is of no use to direct our steps to the woods if
they do not carry us thither. I am alarmed when
it happens that I have walked a mile into the
woods bodily without getting there in spirit. In
my afternoon walk I would fain forget all my morn
ing occupations and my obligations to society.
But it sometimes happens that I cannot easily
shake off the village. The thought of some work
will run in my head, and I am not where my body
is—I am out of my senses. In my walks I would
fain return to my senses. What business have I
in the woods, if I am thinking of something out
of the woods ? I suspect myself, and cannot help
a shudder, when I find myself so implicated even
in what are called good works—for this may
sometimes happen.
My vicinity affords many good walks; and
though for so many years I have walked almost
every day, and sometimes for several days to
gether, I have not yet exhausted them. An
absolutely new prospect is a great happiness,
| and I can still get this any afternoon. Two or
I three hours’ walking will carry me to as strange a
I country as I expect ever to see. A single farm-
�12
IN PRAISE OF WALKING
house which I had not seen before is sometimes
as good as the dominions of the King of Dahomey.
There is in fact a sort of harmony discoverable
between the capabilties of the landscape within
a circle of ten miles’ radius, or the limits of an
afternoon walk, and the threescore years and
ten of human life. It will never become quite
familiar to you.
Nowadays almost all man’s improvements, so
called, as the building of houses, and the cutting
down of the forest and of all large trees, simply
deform the landscape, and make it more and more
tame and cheap. A people who would begin by
burning the fences and let the forest stand ! I
saw the fences half consumed, their ends lost in
the middle of the prairie, and some worldly miser
with a surveyor looking after his bounds, while
heaven had taken place around him, and he did not
see the angels going to and fro, but was looking
for an old posthole in the midst of paradise. I
looked again, and saw him standing in the middle
of a boggy, stygian fen, surrounded by devils^
and he had found his bounds without a doubt,
three little stones, where a stake had been driven,’
and looking nearer, I saw that the Prince of Dark
ness was his surveyor.
I can easily walk ten, fifteen, twenty, any
number of miles, commencing at my own door,
without going by any house, without crossing a
road except where the fox and the mink do : first
along by the river, and then the brook, and then
the meadow and the wood-side. There are square
miles in my vicinity which have no inhabitant.
From many a hill I can see civilization and the
abodes of man afar. The farmers and their works
are scarcely more obvious than woodchucks and
�WALKING, AND THE WILD
13
their burrows. Man and his affairs, church and
state and school, trade and commerce, and manu
factures and agriculture, even politics, the most
alarming of them all,—I am pleased to see how little
space they occupy in the landscape. Politics is
but a narrow field, and that still narrower highway
yonder leads to it. I sometimes direct the traveller
thither. If you would go to the political world,
follow the great road—follow that market-man,
keep his dust in your eyes, and it will lead you
straight to it; for it, too, has its place merely,
and does not occupy all space. I pass from it
as from a bean-field into the forest, and it
is forgotten. In one half-hour I can walk off
to some portion of the earth’s surface where a
man does not stand from one year’s end to another
and there, consequently, politics are not, for they
are but as the cigar-smoke of a man.
The village is the place to which the roads tend,
a sort of expansion of the highway, as a lake of
a river. It is the body of which roads are the
arms and legs—a trivial or quadrivial place, the
thoroughfare and ordinary of travellers. The
word is from the Latin villa, which, together with
via, a way, or more anciently ved and vella, Varro
derives from veho, to carry, because the villa
is the place to and from which things are carried.
They who get their living by teaming were said
vellaturam facere. Hence, too, apparently, the
Latin word vilis and our vile ; also villain. This
suggests what kind of degeneracy villagers are
liable to. They are wayworn by the travel that
goes by and over them, without travelling them
selves.
Some do not walk at all; others walk in the
highways; a few walk across lots. Roads are
�14
IN PRAISE OF WALKING
made for horses and men of business. I do not
travel in them much, comparatively, because
I am not in a hurry to get to any tavern or grocery
or livery-stable or depot to which they lead. I
am a good horse to travel, but not from choice
a roadster. The landscape-painter uses the figures
of men to mark a road. He would not make that
use of my figure. I walk out into a Nature such
as the old prophets and poets, Menu, Moses, Homer,
Chaucer, walked in. You may name it America,
but it is not America : neither Americus Vespucius,
nor Columbus, nor the rest were the discoverers
of it. There is a truer account of it in mythology
than in any history of America, so called, that I
have seen.
At present, in this vicinity, the best part of
the land is not private property; the landscape
is not owned, and the walker enjoys comparative
freedom. But possibly the day will come when
it will be partitioned oft into so-called pleasure
grounds, in which a few will take a narrow and
exclusive pleasure only,—when fences shall be
multiplied, and man-traps and other engines
invented to confine men to the 'public road, and
walking over the surface of God’s earth shall be
construed to mean trespassing on some gentle
man’s grounds. To enjoy a thing exclusively
is commonly to exclude yourself from the true
enjoyment of it. Let us improve our opportunities
then, before the evil days come.
What is it that makes it so hard sometimes to
determine whither we will walk ? I believe that
there is a subtile magnetism in Nature which, if
we unconsciously yield to it, will direct us aright.
It is not indifferent to us which way we walk.
�WALKING, AND THE WILD
15
There is a right way ; but we are very liable from
heedlessness and stupidity to take the wrong one.
We would fain take that walk, never yet taken by
us through this actual world, which is perfectly
symbolical of the path which we love to travel
in the interior and ideal world; and sometimes,
no doubt, we find it difficult to choose our direction,
because it does not yet exist distinctly in our idea
When I go out of the house for a walk, uncertain
as yet whither I will bend my steps, and submit
myself to my instinct to decide for me, I find,
strange and whimsical as it may seem, that I
finally and inevitably settle south-west, toward
some particular wood or meadow or deserted
pasture or hill in that direction. My needle is
slow to settle,—varies a few degrees, and does not
always point due south-west, it is true, and it has
good authority for this variation, but it always
settles between west and south-south-west. The
future lies that way to me, and the earth seems
more unexhausted and richer on that side. The
outline which would bound my walks would be,
not a circle, but a parabola, or rather like one of
those cometary orbits which have been thought to
be non-returning curves, in this case opening
westward, in which my house occupies the place
of the sun. I turn round and round irresolute,
sometimes for a quarter of an hour, until I decide,
for a thousandth time, that I will walk into the
south-west or west. Eastward I go only by force ;
but westward I go free. Thither no business leads
me. It is hard for me to believe that I shall find
fair landscapes or sufficient wildness and freedom
behind the eastern horizon. I am not excited by
the prospect of a walk thither ; but I believe that
the forest which I see in the western horizon stretches
�i6
IN PRAISE OF WALKING
uninterruptedly toward the setting sun, and there
are no towns nor cities in it of enough consequence
to disturb me. Let me live where I will, on this
side is the city, on that the wilderness, and ever
I am leaving the city more and more, and with
drawing into the wilderness. I should not lay so
much stress on this fact, if I did not believe that
something like this is the prevailing tendency of
my countrymen. I must walk toward Oregon,
and not toward Europe. And that way the nation
is moving, and I may say that mankind progress
from east to west. Within a few years we have
witnessed the phenomenon of a south-eastward
migration in the settlement of Australia ; but this
affects us as a retrograde movement, and, judging
from the moral and physical character of the first
generation of Australians, has not yet proved a
successful experiment. The eastern Tartars think
that there is nothing west beyond Thibet. “ The
world ends there,” say they; “ beyond there is
nothing but a shoreless sea.” It is unmitigated
East where they live.
We go eastward to realize history and study
the works of art and literature, retracing the steps
of the race ; we go westward as into the future,
with a spirit of enterprise and adventure. The
Atlantic is a Lethean stream, in our passage over
which we have had an opportunity to forget the
Old World and its institutions. If we do not
succeed this time, there is perhaps one more chance
for the race left before it arrives on the banks
of the Styx ; and that is in the Lethe of the Pacific,
which is three times as wide.
I know not how significant it is, or how far it
is an evidence of singularity, that an individual
should thus consent in his pettiest walk with the
�WALKING, AND THE WILD
17
general movement of the race ; but I know that
something akin to the migratory instinct in birds
and quadrupeds,—which, in some instances, is
known to have affected the squirrel tribe, impelling
them to a general and mysterious movement,
in which they were seen, say some, crossing the
broadest rivers, each on its particular chip, with
its tail raised for a sail, and bridging narrower
streams with their dead,—that something like the
furor which affects the domestic cattle in the spring,
and which is referred to a worm in their tails,—
affects both nations and individuals, either perenni
ally or from time to time. Not a flock of wild
geese cackles over our town, but it to some extent
unsettles the value of real estate here, and, if I were
a broker, I should probably take that disturbance
into account.
“ Than longen folk to gon on 'pilgrimages,
And palmeres for to seken strange strondes.”
Every sunset which I witness inspires me with
the desire to go to a West as distant and as fair
as that into which the sun goes down. He appears
to migrate westward daily, and tempts us to follow
him. He is the Great Western Pioneer whom
the nations follow. We dream all night of those
mountain-ridges in the horizon, though they may
be of vapour only, which were last gilded by his
rays. The island of Atlantis, and the islands and
gardens of the Hesperides, a sort of terrestrial
paradise, appear to have been the Great West of
the ancients, enveloped in mystery and poetry.
Who has not seen in imagination, when looking into
the sunset sky, the gardens of the Hesperides, and
the foundation of all those fables ?
B
�i8
IN PRAISE OF WALKING
Columbus felt the westward tendency more
strongly than any before. He obeyed it, and found
a New World for Castile and Leon. The herd of
men in those days scented fresh pastures from
afar.
“ And now the sun had stretched out all the hills,
And now was dropped into the western bay;
At last he rose, and twitched his mantle blue;
To-morrow to fresh woods and pastures new.”
Where on the globe can there be found an area
of equal extent with that occupied by the bulk
of our States, so fertile and so rich and varied in
its productions, and at the same time so habitable
by the European, as this is ? Michaux, who knew
but part of them, says that “ the species of large
trees are much more numerous in North America
than in Europe; in the United States there are
more than one hundred and forty species that
exceed thirty feet in height; in France there are
but thirty that attain this size.” Later botanists
more than confirm his observations. Humboldt
came to America to realize his youthful dreams of
a tropical vegetation, and he beheld it in its greatest
perfection in the primitive forests of the Amazon,
the most gigantic wilderness on the earth, which
he has so eloquently described. The geographer
Guyot, himself a European, goes farther—farther
than I am ready to follow him; yet not when he
says : “As the plant is made for the animal, as
the vegetable world is made for the animal world,
America is made for the man of the Old World. . . .
The man of the Old World sets out upon his way.
Leaving the highlands of Asia, he descends from
station to station towards Europe. Each of his
�WALKING, AND THE WILD
steps is marked by a new civilization superior to
the preceding, by a greater power of development.
Arrived at the Atlantic, he pauses on the shore of
this unknown ocean, the bounds of which he knows
not, and turns upon his footprints for an instant.”
When he has exhausted the rich soil of Europe, and
reinvigorated himself, “ then recommences his
adventurous career westward as in the earliest
ages.” So far Guyot.
From this western impulse coming in contact
with the barrier of the Atlantic sprang the com
merce and enterprise of modern times. The
younger Michaux, in his Travels West of the Alleghanies in 1802, says that the common inquiry in
the newly settled West was, “ ‘ From what part
of the world have you come ? ’ As if these vast
and fertile regions would naturally be the place of
meeting and common country of all the inhabit
ants of the globe.”
To use an obselete Latin word, I might say,
Ex Oriente lux; ex Occidente frux. From the
East light; from the West fruit.
Sir Francis Head, an English traveller and a
Governor-General of Canada, tells us that “ in
both the northern and southern hemispheres of
the New World, Nature has not only outlined her
words on a larger scale, but has painted the whole
picture with brighter and more costly colours than
she used in delineating and in beautifying the Old
I World. . . . The heavens of America appear
infinitely higher, the sky is bluer, the air is fresher,
the cold is in tenser, the moon looks larger, the stars
are brighter, the thunder is louder, the lightning
is vivider, the wind is stronger, the rain is heavier,
the mountains are higher, the rivers longer, the
forests bigger, the plains broader.” This statement
�20
IN PRAISE OF WALKING
will do at least to set against Buffon’s account of
this part of the world and its productions.
Linnaeus said long ago, “ Nescio quae facies
lata, glabra plantis Americanis : I know not what
there is of joyous and smooth in the aspect of
American plants ; ” and I think that in this country
there are no, or at most very few, African# bestice,
African beasts, as the Romans called them, and
that in this respect also it is peculiarly fitted for
the habitation of man. We are told that within
three miles of the centre of the East Indian city
of Singapore, some of the inhabitants are annually
carried off by tigers; but the traveller can lie
down in the woods at night almost anywhere
in North America without fear of wild beasts.
These are encouraging testimonies. If the
moon looks larger here than in Europe, probably
the sun looks larger also. If the heavens of America
appear infinitely higher, and the stars brighter, I
trust that these facts are symbolical of the height
to which the philosophy and poetry and religion of
her inhabitants may one day soar. At length,
perchance, the immaterial heaven will appear as
much higher to the American mind, and the
intimations that star it as much brighter. For
I believe that climate does thus react on man—as
there is something in the mountain air that feeds
the spirit and inspires. Will not man grow to
greater perfection intellectually as well as physically
under these influences ? Or is it unimportant how
many foggy days there are in his life? I trust
that we shall be more imaginative, that our thoughts
will be clearer, fresher, and more ethereal, as our
sky—our understanding more comprehensive and
broader, like our plains—our intellect generally
on a grander scale, like our thunder and lightning,
�WALKING, AND THE WILD
21
our rivers and mountains and forests—and our
hearts shall even correspond in breadth and depth
and grandeur to our inland seas. Perchance there
will appear to the traveller something, he knows
not what, of lata and glabra, of joyous and serene,
in our very faces. Else to what end does the world
go on, and why was America discovered ?
To Americans I hardly need to say—
“ Westward the star of empire takes its way.”
As a true patriot, I should be ashamed to think
that Adam in paradise was more favourably
situated on the whole than the backwoodsman in
this country.
Our sympathies in Massachusetts are not con
fined to New England; though we may be estranged
from the South, we sympathize with the West.
There is the home of the younger sons, as among
the Scandinavians they took to the sea for their
inheritance. It is too late to be studying Hebrew ;
it is more important to understand even the slang
of to-day.
Some months ago I went to see a panorama of
the Rhine. It was like a dream of the Middle
Ages. I floated down its historic stream in some
thing more than imagination, under bridges built
by the Romans, and repaired by later heroes, past
cities and castles whose very names were music
to my ears, and each of which was the subject of
a legend. There were Ehrenbreitstein and Rolandseck and Coblentz, which I knew only in history.
They were ruins that interested me chiefly. There
seemed to come up from its waters and its vine-clad
hills and valleys a hushed music as of Crusaders
departing for the Holy Land. I floated along
�22
IN PRAISE OF WALKING
under the spell of enchantment, as if I had been
transported to an heroic age, and breathed an
atmosphere of chivalry.
Soon after I went to see a panorama of the Missis
sippi, and as I worked my way up the river in the
light of to-day, and saw the steamboats wooding up,
counted the rising cities, gazed on the fresh ruins
of Nauvoo, beheld the Indians moving west across
the stream, and, as before I had looked up the
Moselle, now looked up the Ohio and the Missouri
and heard the legends of Dubuque and of Wenona’s
Cliff,—still thinking more of the future than of
the past or present,—I saw that this was a Rhine
stream of a different kind; that the foundations
of castles were yet to be laid, and the famous
bridges were yet to be thrown over the river;
and I felt that this was the heroic age itself, though
we know it not, for the hero is commonly the
simplest and obscurest of men.
The West of which I speak is but another name
for the Wild; and what I have been preparing
to say is, that in Wildness is the preservation of
the World. Every tree sends its fibres forth in
search of the Wild. The cities import it at any
price. Men plough and sail for it. From the
forest and wilderness come the tonics and barks
which brace mankind. Our ancestors were sav
ages. The story of Romulus and Remus being
suckled by a wolf is not a meaningless fable. The
founders of every State which has risen to eminence
have drawn their nourishment and vigour from a
similar wild source. It was because" the children
of the Empire were not suckled by the wolf that
they were conquered and displaced by the children
of the Northern forests who were.
�WALKING, AND THE WILD
23
I believe in the forest, and in the meadow, and
in the night in which the corn grows. We require
an infusion of hemlock-spruce or arbor-vitae m
our tea. There is a difference between eating
and drinking for strength and from mere gluttony
The Hottentots eagerly devour the marrow of
the koodoo and other antelopes raw, as a matter
of course. Some of our Northern Indians eat raw
the marrow of the Arctic reindeer, as well as
various other parts, including the summits of the
antlers, as long as they are soft. And herein,
perchance, they have stolen a march on the cooks
of Paris. They get what usually goes to feed the
fire. This is probably better than stall-fed beef
and slaughter-house pork to make a man of.
Give me a wildness whose glance no civilization
can endure,—as if we lived on the marrow of
koodoos devoured raw.
There are some intervals which border the strain
‘of the wood-thrush, to which I would migrate,
i wild lands where no settler has squatted; to
I which, methinks, I am already acclimated.
;
The African hunter Cummings tells us that the
skin of the eland, as well as that of most other
antelopes just killed, emits the most delicious
perfume of trees and grass. I would have every
man so much like a wild antelope, so much a part
and parcel of Nature, that his very person should
thus sweetly advertise our senses of his presence,
and remind us of those parts of Nature which he
most haunts. I feel no disposition to be satirical,
when the trapper’s coat emits the odour of mus
quash even ; it is a sweeter scent to me than that
which commonly exhales from the merchant’s
or the scholar’s garments. When I go into their
wardrobes and handle their vestments, I am
�24
IN PRAISE OF WALKING
reminded of no grassy plains and flowery meads
which they have frequented, but of dusty mer
chants’ exchanges and libraries rather.
A tanned skin is something more than respect
able, and perhaps olive is a fitter colour than white
for a man—a denizen of the woods. “ The pale
white man! ” I do not wonder that the African
pitied him. Darwin the naturalist says, “ A
white man bathing by the side of a Tahitian was
like a plant bleached by the gardener’s art, com
pared with a fine, dark green one, growing vigor
ously in the open fields.”
Ben Jonson exclaims—
“ How near to good is what is fair 1 ”
So I would say—
How near to good is what is wild !
Life consists with wildness. The most alive is
the wildest. Not yet subdued to man, its presence
refreshes him. One who pressed forward inces
santly and never rested from his labours, who
grew fast and made infinite demands on life,
would always find himself in a new country or
wilderness, and surrounded by the raw material
of life. He would be climbing over the prostrate
stems of primitive forest trees.
Hope and the future for me are not in lawns
and cultivated fields, not in towns and cities, but
in the impervious and quaking swamps. When,
formerly, I have analysed my partiality for some
farm which I had contemplated purchasing, I
have frequently found that I was attracted solely
by a few square rods of impermeable and unfath-
�WALKING, AND THE WILD
25
omable bog—a natural sink in one corner of it.
That was the jewel which dazzled me. I derive
more of my subsistence from the swamps which
surround my native town than from the cultivated
gardens in the village. There are no richer
parterres to my eyes than the dense beds of dwarf
andromeda {Cassandra calyculata) which cover
these tender places on the earth’s surface. Botany
cannot go further than tell me the names of the
shrubs which grow there—the high-blueberry,
panicled andromeda, lambkill, azalea, and rhodora
—all standing in the quaking sphagnum. I often
think that I should like to have my house front on
this mass of dull red bushes, omitting other flower
plots and borders, transplanted spruce and trim
box, even gravelled walks—to have this fertile
spot under my windows, not a few imported barrowfulls of soil only to cover the sand which was
thrown out in digging the cellar. Why not put
my house, my parlour, behind this plot, instead
of behind that meagre assemblage of curiosities,
that poor apology for a Nature and Art which I
call my front-yard ? It is an effect to clear up and
make a decent appearance when the carpenter
and mason have departed, though done as much
for the passer-by as the dweller within. The most
tasteful front-yard fence was never an agreeable
object of study to me ; the most elaborate orna
ments, acorn-tops, or what not, soon wearied and
disgusted me. Bring your sills up to the very
edge of the swamp, then (though it may not be
the best place for a dry cellar), so that there be
no access on that side to citizens. Front-yards
are not made to walk in, but, at most, through,
and you could go in the back way.
Yes, though you may think me perverse, if it
�26
IN PRAISE OF WALKING
were proposed to me to dwell in the neighbourhood
of the most beautiful garden that ever human art
contrived, or else of a dismal swamp, I should
certainly decide for the swamp. How vain, then,
have been all your labours, citizens, for me !
My spirits infallibly rise in proportion to the
outward dreariness. Give me the ocean, the
desert or the wilderness ! In the desert, pure air
and solitude compensate for want of moisture and
fertility. The traveller Burton says of it—“ Your
morale improves ; you become frank and cordial,
hospitable and single-minded. ... In the desert,
spirituous liquors excite only disgust. There is
a keen enjoyment in a mere animal existence.”
They who have been travelling long on the steppes
of Tartary say—“ On re-entering cultivated lands,
the agitation, perplexity, and turmoil of civilization
oppressed and suffocated us; the air seemed to
fail us, and we felt every moment as if about to die
of asphyxia.” When I would recreate myself, I
seek the darkest wood, the thickest and most inter
minable, and, to the citizen, most dismal swamp.
I enter a swamp as a sacred place,—a sanctum
sanctorum. There is the strength, the marrow of
Nature. The wild-wood covers the virgin mould,
—and the same soil is good for men and for trees.
A man’s health requires as many acres of meadow
to his prospect as his farm does loads of muck.
There are the strong meats on which he feeds. A
town is saved, not more by the righteous men in it
than by the woods and swamps that surround it.
A township where one primitive forest waves above
while another primitive forest rots below,—such
a town is fitted to raise not only corn and potatoes,
but poets and philosophers for the coming ages.
In such a soil grew Homer and Confucius and the
�WALKING, AND THE WILD
27
rest, and out of such a wilderness comes the Re
former eating locusts and wild honey.
To preserve wild animals implies generally the
creation of a forest for them to dwell m or resort
to. So it is with man. A hundred years ago they
sold bark in our streets peeled from our own woods.
In the very aspect of those primitive^ and rugged
trees there was, methinks, a , tanning principle
which hardened and consolidated the fibres 0
men’s thoughts. Ah! already I shudder for
these comparatively degenerate days of my native
village, when you cannot collect a load of bark ot
good thickness ; and we no longer produce tar
and turpentine.
The civilized nations—Greece, Rome, England,
have been sustained by the primitive forests which
anciently rotted where they stand. They survive
as long as the soil is not exhausted. Alas for
human culture ! little is to be expected of a nation
when the vegetable mould is exhausted, and it is
compelled to make manure of the . bones of its
fathers. There the poet sustains himself merely
by his own superfluous fat, and the philosopher
comes down on his marrow-bones.
.
(
It is said to be the task of the American to
work the virgin soil,” and that “ agriculture here
already assumes proportions unknown everywhere
else.” I think that the farmer displaces the Indian
even because he redeems the meadow, and so
makes himself stronger and in some respects more
natural. I was surveying for a man the other day
a single straight line one hundred and thirty-two
rods long, through a swamp, at whose entrance
might have been written the words which Dante
read over the entrance to the infernal regions
“ Leave all hope, ye that enter,”—that is, of ever
�28
IN PRAISE OF WALKING
getting out again; where at one time I saw my
employer actually up to his neck and swimming
for his life in his property,, though it was still
winter. He had another similar swamp which
I could not survey at all, because it was completely
under water; and nevertheless, with regard to a
third swamp, which I did survey from a distance,
he remarked to me, true to his instincts, that he
would not part with it for any consideration, on
account of the mud which it contained. And that
man intends to put a girdling ditch round the
whole in the course of forty months, and so redeem
it by the magic of his spade. I refer to him only as
the type of a class.
The weapons with which we have gained our
most important victories, which should be handed
down as heirlooms from father to son, are not the
sword and the lance, but the bush-whack, the turf
cutter, the spade, and the bog-hoe, rusted with the
blood of many a meadow, and begrimed with the
dust of many a hard-fought field. The very winds
blew the Indian s corn-field into the meadow, and
pointed out the way which he had not the skill
to follow. He had no better implement with
which to intrench himself in the land than a clam
shell. But the farmer is armed with plough and
spade.
In Literature it is only the wild that attracts
us. . Dullness is but another name for tameness.
It is the uncivilized free and wild thinking in
Hamlet and the Iliad, in all the Scriptures and
Mythologies, not learned in the schools, that
delights us. As the wild duck is more swift and
beautiful than the tame, so is the wild—the
mallard—thought, which ’mid falling dews wings
its way above the fens. A truly good book is
�WALKING, AND THE WILD
29
something as natural, and as unexpectedly and
unaccountably fair and perfect, as a wild flower
discovered on the prairies of the-West or in the
jungles of the East. Genius is a light which makes
the darkness visible, like the lightning’s flash,
which perchance shatters the temple of knowledge
itself,—and not a taper lighted at the hearth-stone
of the race, which pales before the light of common
day.
English literature, from the days of the minstrels
to the Lake Poets—Chaucer and Spenser and
Milton, and even Shakespeare, included—breathes
no quite fresh and in this sense wild strain. It is
an essentially tame and civilized literature, reject
ing Greece and Rome. Her wilderness is a green
wood,—her wild man a Robin Hood. There is
plenty of genial love of Nature, but not so much
of Nature herself. Her chronicles inform us when
her wild animals, but not when the wild man in
her, became extinct.
The science of Humboldt is one thing, poetry
is another thing. The poet to-day, notwithstand
ing all the discoveries of science, and the accumu
lated learning of mankind, enjoys no advantage
over Homer.
«•
Where is the literature which gives expression
to Nature ? He would be a poet who could impress
the winds and streams into his service, to speak
for him ; who nailed words to their primitive
senses, as farmers drive down stakes in the spring,
which the frost has heaved ; who derived his words
as often as he used them—transplanted them to his
page with earth adhering to their roots ; whose
words were so true and fresh and natural that they
would appear to expand like the buds at the
approach of spring, though they lay half-smothered
�30
IN PRAISE OF WALKING
between two musty leaves in a library,—ay, to
bloom and bear fruit there, after their kind,
annually, for the faithful reader, in sympathy with
surrounding Nature.
I do not know of any poetry to quote which
adequately expresses this yearning for the Wild.
Approached from this side, the best poetry is
tame. I do not know where to find in any litera
ture, ancient or modern, any account which con
tents me of that Nature with which even I am
acquainted. You will perceive that I demand
something which no Augustan nor Elizabethan
age, which no culture, in short, can give. Mytho
logy comes nearer to it than anything. How
much more fertile a Nature, at least, has Grecian
mythology its root in than English literature.
Mythology is the crop which the Old World bore
before its soil was exhausted, before the fancy
and imagination were affected with blight; and,
which it still bears, wherever its pristine vigour
is unabated. All other literatures endure only
as the elms which overshadow our houses ; but
this is like the great dragon-tree of the Western
Isles, as old as mankind, and, whether that does
or not, will endure as long ; for the decay of other
literatures makes the soil in which it thrives.
The West is preparing to add its fables to those
of the East. The valleys of the Ganges, the Nile,
and the Rhine, having yielded their crop, it remains
to be seen what the valleys of the Amazon, the
Plate, the Orinoco, the St. Lawrence, and the
Mississippi will produce. Perchance, when, in the
course of ages, American liberty has become a fic
tion of the past—as it is to some extent a fiction
of the present—the poets of the world will be
inspired by American mythology.
�WALKING, AND THE WILD
31
The wildest dreams of wild men, even, are not
the less true, though they may not recommend
themselves to the sense which is most common
among Englishmen and Americans to-day. It is
not every truth that recommends itself to the
common sense. Nature has a place for the wild
clematis as well as for the cabbage. Some expres
sions of truth are reminiscent,—others merely
sensible, as the phrase is,—others prophetic. Some
forms of disease, even, may prophesy forms of
health. The geologist has discovered that the
figures of serpents, griffins, flying dragons, and
other fanciful embellishments of heraldry, have
their prototypes in the forms of fossil species which
were extinct before man was created, and hence
“ indicate a faint and shadowy knowledge of a
previous state of organic existence.” The Hindoos
dreamed that the earth rested on an elephant, and
the elephant on a tortoise, and the tortoise on a
serpent; and though it may be an unimportant
coincidence, it will not be out of place here to
state that a fossil tortoise has lately been discovered
in Asia large enough to support an elephant. I
confess that I am partial to these wild fancies,
which transcend the order of time and develop
ment. They are the sublimest recreation of the
intellect. The partridge loves peas, but not those
that go with her into the pot.
In short, all good things are wild and free. There
is something in a strain of music, whether produced
by an instrument or by the human voice,—take
the sound of a bugle in a summer night, for in
stance,—which by its wildness, to speak without
satire, reminds me of the cries emitted by wild
beasts in their native forests. It is so much of
their wildness ' as I can understand. Give me
�32
S ”'
IN PRAISE OF WALKING
for my friends and neighbours wild men, not
tame ones. The wilderness of the savage is but
a faint symbol of the awful ferity with which good
men and lovers meet.
I love even to see the domestic animals reassert
their native rights,—any evidence that they have
not wholly lost their original wild habits and
vigour; as when my neighbour’s cow breaks out
of her pasture early in the spring and boldly swims
the river, a cold, grey tide, twenty-five or thirty
rods wide, swollen by the melted snow. It is
the buffalo crossing the Mississippi. This exploit
confers some dignity on the herd in my eyes—
already dignified. The seeds of instinct are pre
served under the thick hides of cattle and horses,
like seeds in the bowels of the earth, an indefinite
period.
Any sportiveness in cattle is unexpected. I
saw one day a herd of a dozen bullocks and cows
running about and frisking in unwieldy sport, like
huge rats, even like kittens. They shook their
heads, raised their tails, and rushed up and down
a hill, and I perceived by their horns, as well as
by their activity, their relation to the deer tribe.
But, alas ! a sudden loud Whoa! would have
damped their ardour at once, reduced them from
venison to beef, and stiffened their sides and sinews
like the locomotive. Who but the Evil One has
cried, “ Whoa ! ” to mankind ? Indeed, the life
of cattle, like that of many men, is but a sort of
locomotiveness ; they move a side at a time, and
man, by his machinery, is meeting the horse and
the ox half-way. Whatever part the whip has
touched is thenceforth palsied. Who would ever
think of a side of any of the supple cat tribe, as we
speak of a side of beef ?
�WALKING, AND THE WILD
33
I rejoice that horses and steers have to be broken
before they can be made the slaves of men, and
that men themselves have some wild oats still
left to sow before they become submissive members
of society. Undoubtedly, all men are not equally
fit subjects for civilization; and because the
majority, like dogs and sheep, are tame by inher
ited disposition, this is no reason why the others
should have their natures broken that they may
be reduced to the same level. Men are in the main
alike, but they were made several in order that
they might be various. If a low use is to be served,
one man will do nearly or quite as well as another ;
if a high one, individual excellence is to be regarded.
Any man can stop a hole to keep the wind away,
but no other man could serve so rare a use as the
author of this illustration did. Confucius says—
“ The skins of the tiger and the leopard, when
they are tanned, are as the skins of the dog and
the sheep tanned.” But it is not the part of a
true culture to tame tigers, any more than it is to
make sheep ferocious ; and tanning their skins for
shoes is not the best use to which they can be put.
When looking over a list of men’s names in a
foreign language, as of military officers, or of
authors who have written on a particular subject,
I am reminded once more that there is nothing
in a name. The name Menschikoff, for instance,
has nothing in it to my ears more human than a
whisker, and it may belong to a rat. As the names
of the Poles and Russans are to us, so are ours to
them. It is as if they had been named by the
child’s rigmarole—levy wiery ichery van, tittletol-tan. I see in my mind a herd of wild creatures
swarming over the earth, and to each the herds-
�34
IN PRAISE OF WALKING
man has affixed some barbarous sound in his own
dialect. The names of men are of course as cheap
and meaningless as Bose and Tray, the names of
dogs.
Methinks it would be some advantage to philo
sophy if men were named merely in the gross, as
they are known.
It would be necessary only to
know the genus, and perhaps the race or variety,
to know the individual.
We are not prepared to
believe that every private soldier in a Roman army
had a name of his own, because we have not sup
posed that he had a character of his own. At
present, our only true names are nicknames. I
knew a boy who, from his peculiar energy, was
called “Buster ” by his playmates, and this rightly
supplanted his Christian name. Some travellers
tell us that an Indian had no name given him at
first, but earned it, and his name was his fame ;
and among some tribes he acquired a new name
with every new exploit. It is pitiful when a man
bears a name for convenience merely, who has
earned neither name nor fame.
I will not allow mere names to make distinctions
for me, but still see men in herds for all them.
A familiar name cannot make a man less strange
to me. It may be given to a savage who retains
in secret his own wild title earned in the woods.
We have a wild savage in us, and a savage name
is perchance somewhere recorded as ours. I see
that my neighbour, who bears the familiar epithet
William, or Edwin, takes it off with his jacket. It
does not adhere to him when asleep or in anger, or
aroused by any passion or inspiration. I seem to
hear pronounced by some of his kin at such a time
his original wild name in some jaw-breaking or
else melodious tongue.
�WALKING, AND THE WILD
I
i
5
35
Here is this vast, savage, howling mother of
ours, Nature, lying all around, with such beauty,
and such affection for her children, as the leopard ;
and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to
society, to that culture which is exclusively an
interaction of man on man—a sort of breeding in
and in, which produces at most a merely English
nobility, a civilization destined to have a speedy
limit.
In society, in the best institutions of men, it is
easy to detect a certain precocity. When we
should still be growing children, we are already
little men. Give me a culture which imports
much muck from the meadows, and deepens the
soil—not that which trusts to heating manures and
improved implements and modes of culture only.
Many a poor sore-eyed student that I have
heard of would grow faster, both intellectually
and physically, if, instead of sitting up so very late,
he honestly slumbered a fool’s allowance.
There may be an excess even of informing light.
Niepce, a Frenchman, discovered “ actinism,”
that power in the sun’s rays which produces a
chemical effect,—that granite rocks, and stone
structures, and statues of metal, “ are all alike
destructively acted upon during the hours of sun
shine, and, but for provisions of Nature no less
wonderful, would soon perish under the delicate
touch of the most subtile of the agencies of the
universe.” But he observed that “ those bodies
which underwent this, change during the daylight
possessed the power of restoring themselves, to
their original conditions during the hours of night,
when this excitement was no longer influencing
them.” Hence it has been inferred that “ the
hours of darkness are as necessary to the
�36
IN PRAISE OF WALKING
creation as we know night and sleep are to the
organic kingdom.” Not even does the moon shine
every night, but gives place to 1 darkness.
I would not have every man nor every part of
man cultivated, any more than I would have every
acre of earth cultivated : part will be tillage,
but the greater part will be meadow and forest,
not only serving an immediate use, but preparing
a mould against a distant future, by the annual
decay of the vegetation which it supports.
There are other letters for the child to learn
than those which Cadmus invented. The Span
iards have a good term to express this wild and
dusky knowledge,—Gramatica parda, tawny gram
mar,—a kind of mother-wit derived from that
same leopard to which I have referred.
We have heard of a Society for the Diffusion of
Useful Knowledge. It is said that knowledge
is power ; and the like. Methinks there is equal
need of a Society for the Diffusion of Useful Ignor
ance, what we will call Beautiful Knowledge, a
knowledge useful in a higher sense : for what is
most of our boasted so-called knowledge but a
conceit that we know something, which robs us
of the advantage of our actual ignorance ? What
we call knowledge is often our positive ignorance ;
ignorance our negative knowledge. By long years
of patient industry and reading of the newspapers
—for what are the libraries of science but files
of newspapers ?—a man accumulates a myriad
facts, lays them up in his memory, and then
when in some spring of his life he saunters abroad
into the Great Fields of thought, he, as it were,
goes to grass like a horse and leaves all his harness
behind in the stable. I would say to the Society
for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, sometimes,
�WALKING, AND THE WILD
37
—Go to grass. You have eaten hay long enough.
The spring has come with its green crop. The
very cows are driven to their country pastures
before the end of May; though I have heard
of one unnatural farmer who kept his cow in the
barn and fed her on hay all the year round. So,
frequently, the Society for the Diffusion of Useful
Knowledge treats its cattle.
A man’s ignorance sometimes is not only useful,
but beautiful,—while his knowledge, so called, is
oftentimes worse than useless, besides being ugly.
Which is the best man to deal with—he who knows
nothing about a subject, and, what is extremely
rare, knows that he knows nothing, or he who
really knows something about it, but thinks that
he knows all ?
My desire for knowledge is intermittent; but
my desire to bathe my head in atmospheres un
known to my feet is perennial and constant. The
highest that we can attain to is not Knowledge,
but Sympathy with Intelligence. I do not know
that this higher knowledge amounts to anything
more definite than a novel and grand surprise on
a sudden revelation of the insufficiency of all that
we called Knowledge before—a discovery that
there are more things in heaven and earth than
are dreamed of in our philosophy. It is the light
ing up of the mist by the sun. Man cannot know
in any higher sense than this, any more than he
can look serenely and with impunity in the face
of the sun : '0$ t! votin' vv kcivov vo?/crei$,—“ You
will not perceive that, as perceiving a particu
lar thing,” say the Chaldean Oracles.
There is something servile in the habit of seek
ing after a law which we may obey. We may
study the laws of matter at and for our convenience,
�38
IN PRAISE OF WALKING
but a successful life knows no law. It is an un
fortunate discovery certainly, that of a law which
binds us where we did not know before that we
were bound. Live free, child of the mist,—and
with respect to knowledge we are all children of
the mist. The man who takes the liberty to live
is superior to all the laws, by virtue of his rela
tion to the law-maker. “ That is active duty,”
says the Vishnu Purana, “ which is not for our
bondage ; that is knowledge which is for our libera
tion : all other duty is good only unto weariness ;
all other knowledge is only the cleverness of an
artist.”
It is remarkable how few events or crises there are
in our histories; how little exercised we have
been in our minds ; how few experiences we have
had. I would fain be assured that I am growing
apace and rankly, though my very growth dis
turb this dull equanimity,—though it be with
struggle through long, dark, muggy nights or sea
sons of gloom. It would be well if all our lives
were a divine tragedy even, instead of this trivial
comedy or farce. Dante, Bunyan, and others,
appear to have been exercised in their minds
more than we : they were subjected to a kind of
culture such as our district schools and colleges
do not contemplate. Even Mahomet, though
many may scream at his name, had a good deal
more to live for, ay, and to die for, than they have
commonly.
When, at rare intervals, some thought visits one,
as perchance he is walking on a railroad, then
indeed the cars go by without his hearing them.
But soon, by some inexorable law, our life goes
by and the cars return.
�WALKING, AND THE WILD
39
“ Gentle breeze, that wanderest unseen,
And bendest the thistles round Loira of storms,
Traveller of the windy glens,
Why hast thou left my ear so soon ? ”
While almost all men feel an attraction drawing
them to society, few are attracted strongly to
Nature. In their relation to Nature men appear
to me for the most part, notwithstanding their
arts, lower than the animals. It is not often a
beautiful relation, as in the case of the animals.
How little appreciation of the beauty of the land
scape there is among us ! We shall have to be
told that the Greeks called the world Kocr/xos,
Beauty, or Order, but we do not see clearly why,
they did so, and we esteem it at best only a curious
philological fact.
For my part, I feel that with regard to Nature
I live a sort of border life, on the confines of a
world into which I make occasional and transitional
and transient forays only, and my patriotism and
allegiance to the State into whose territories I
seem to retreat are those of a moss-trooper. Unto
a life which I call natural I would gladly follow
even a will-o’-the-wisp through bogs and sloughs
unimaginable, but no moon [nor fire-fly has
shown me the causeway to it.
Nature is a
personality so vast and universal that we have never
seen one of her features. The walker in the familiar
fields which stretch around my native town
sometimes finds himself in another land than is de
scribed in their owners’ deeds, as it were in some far
away field on the confines of the actual Concord,
where her jurisdiction ceases, and the idea which
the word Concord suggests ceases to be suggested.
These farms which I have myself surveyed, these
�ijl&Jgaai
40
IN PRAISE OF WALKING
bounds which I have set up, appear dimly still as
through a mist; but they have no chemistry to fix
them ; they fade from the surface of the glass ;
and the picture which the painter painted stands
out dimly from beneath. The world with which
we are commonly acquainted leaves no trace,
and it will have no anniversary.
I took a walk on Spaulding’s Farm the other
afternoon. I saw the setting sun lighting up the
opposite side of a stately pine wood. Its golden
rays straggled into the aisles of the wood as into
some noble hall. I was impressed as if some an
cient and altogether admirable and shining family
had settled there in that part of the land called
Concord, unknown to me,—to whom the sun
was servant,—who had not gone into society in
the village,—who had not been called on. I saw
their park, their pleasure-ground, beyond through
the wood, in Spaulding’s cranberry-meadow. The
pines furnished them with gables as they grew.
Their house was not obvious to vision; the trees
grew through it. I do not know whether I heard
the sounds of a suppressed hilarity or not. They
seemed to recline on the sunbeams. They have
sons and daughters. They are quite well. The
farmer’s cart-path, which leads directly through
their hall, does not in the least put them out,—
as the muddy bottom of a pool is sometimes seen
through the reflected skies. They never heard of
Spaulding, and do not know that he is their neigh
bour,—notwithstanding I heard him whistle as he
drove his team through the house. Nothing can
equal the serenity of their lives. Their coat of
arms is simply a lichen. I saw it painted on the
pines and oaks. Their attics were in the tops of
the trees. They are of no politics. There was
�WALKING, AND THE WILD
41
no noise of labour. I did not perceive that they
were weaving or spinning. Yet I did detect, when
the wind lulled and hearing was done away, the fin
est imaginable sweet musical hum,—as of a dis
tant hive in May, which perchance was the sound
of their thinking. They had no idle thoughts,
and no one without could see their work, for their
industry was not as in knots and excrescences
embayed.
But I find it difficult to remember them. They
fade irrevocably out of my mind even now while
I speak and endeavour to recall them, and recol
lect myself. It is only after a long and serious
effort to recollect my best thoughts that I become
again aware of their cohabitancy. If it were not
for such families as this, I think I should move
out of Concord.
We are accustomed to say m New England that
few and fewer pigeons visit us every year. Our
forests furnish no mast for them. So, it would
seem, few and fewer thoughts visit each growing
man from year to year, for the grove in our minds
is laid waste,—sold to feed unnecessary fires of
ambition, or sent to mill, and there is scarcely
a twig left for them to perch on. They no longer
build nor breed with us. In some more genial
season, perchance, a faint shadow flits across the
landscape of the mind, cast by the wings of some
thought in its vernal or autumnal migration, but,
looking up, we are unable to detect the substance
of the thought itself. Our winged thoughts are
turned to poultry. They no longer soar, and
they attain only to a Shanghai and Cochin-China
grandeur. Those gra-a-ate thoughts, those gra-a-ate
men you hear of!
�42
IN PRAISE OF WALKING
We hug the earth—how rarely we mount!
Methinks we might elevate ourselves a little more.
We might climb a tree, at least. I found my
account in climbing a tree once. It was a tall
white pine, on the top of a hill; and though I got
well pitched, I was well paid for it, for I discovered
new mountains in the horizon which I had never
seen before,—so much more of the earth and the
heavens. I might have walked about the foot
of the tree for threescore years and ten, and yet
I certainly should never have seen them. But,
above all, I discovered around me,—it was near the
end of June,—on the ends of the topmost branches
only, a few minute and delicate red cone-like
blossoms, the fertile flower of the white pine look
ing heavenward. I carried straightway to the
village the topmost spire, and showed it to stranger
jurymen who walked the streets,—for it was court week,—and to farmers and lumber-dealers and
wood-choppers and hunters, and not one had ever
seen the like before, but they wondered as at a
star dropped down. Tell of ancient architects
finishing their works on the tops of columns as
perfectly as on the lower and more visible parts !
Nature has from the first expanded the minute
blossoms of the forest only toward the heavens,
above men’s heads and unobserved by them.
We see only the flowers that are under our feet
in the meadows. The pines have developed their
delicate blossoms on the highest twigs of the wood
every summer for ages, as well over the heads of
Nature’s red children as of her white ones yet
scarcely a farmer or hunter in the land has ever
seen them
Above all, we cannot afford not to live in the
�WALKING, AND THE WILD
43
present. He is blessed over all mortals who loses
no moment of the passing life in remembering
the past. Unless our philosophy hears the cock
crow in every barn-yard within our horizon, it
is belated. That sound commonly reminds us
that we are growing rusty and antique in our
employments and habits of thought. His philoso
phy comes down to a more recent time than ours.
There is something suggested by it that is a newer
testament—the gospel according to this moment.
He has not fallen astern ; he has got up early and
kept up early, and to be where he is to be in season,
in the foremost rank of time. It is an expression
of the health and soundness of Nature, a brag for
all the world,—healthiness as of a spring burst
forth, a new fountain of the Muses, to celebrate
this last instant of time. Where he lives no fugi
tive slave laws are passed. Who has not betrayed
his master many times since last he heard that note?
The merit of this bird’s strain is in its freedom
from all plaintiveness. The singer can easily
move us to tears or to laughter, but where is he
who can excite in us a pure morning joy ? When,
in doleful dumps, breaking the awful stillness of
our wooden sidewalk on a Sunday, or, perchance, a
watcher in the house of mourning, I hear a cockerel
crow far or near, I think to myself, “ There is one
of us well, at any rate,”—and with a sudden gush
return to my senses.
We had a'remarkable sunset one day last Novem
ber. I was walking in a meadow, the source
of a small brook, when the sun at last, just before
setting, after a cold grey day, reached a clear stra
tum in the horizon, and the softest, brightest
morning sunlight fell on the dry grass and on the
�44
IN PRAISE OF WALKING
stems of the trees in the opposite horizon, and on
the leaves of the shrub-oaks on the hill-side,
while our shadows stretched long over the meadow
eastward, as if we were the only motes in its beams.
It was such a light as we could not have imagined
a moment before, and the air also was so warm
and serene that nothing was wanting to make a
paradise of that meadow. When we reflected
that this was not a solitary phenomenon, never to
happen again, but that it would happen for ever and
ever an infinite number of evenings, and cheer
and reassure the latest child that walked there,
it was more glorious still.
The sun sets on some retired meadow, where no
house is visible, with all the glory and splen
dour that it lavishes on cities, and, perchance, as
it has never set before,—where there is but a soli
tary marsh-hawk to have his wings gilded by it,
or only a musquash looks out from his cabin, and
there is some little black-veined brook in the midst
of the marsh, just beginning to meander, winding
slowly round a decaying stump. We walked
in so pure and bright a light, gilding the withered
grass and leaves, so softly and serenely bright,
I thought I had never bathed in such a golden
flood, without a ripple or a murmur to it. The
west side of every wood and rising ground gleamed
like the boundary of Elysium, and the sun on our
backs seemed like a gentle herdsman driving us
home at evening.
So we saunter toward the Holy Land, till one
day the sun shall shine more brightly than ever
he has done, shall perchance shine into our minds
and hearts, and light up our whole lives with a great
awakening light, as warm and serene and golden
as on a bank-side in autumn.
�Song of the Open Road
WALT WHITMAN
FOOT and light-hearted I take to the open
road,
Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long brown path before me leading whereever I choose.
A
Henceforth I ask not good-fortune, I myself am
good fortune,
Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more,
need nothing.
Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous
criticisms,
Strong and content I travel the open road.
The earth, that is sufficient.
I do not want the constellations any nearer,
I know they are very well where they are,
1 know they suffice for those who belong to them.
(Still here I carry my old delicious burdens,
I carry them, men and women, I carry them with
me wherever I go,
I swear it is impossible for me to get rid of them,
I am fill’d with them, and I will fill them in return.)
46
�46
IN PRAISE OF WALKING
2
You road I enter upon and look around, I believe
you are not all that is here,
I believe that much unseen is also here.
Here the profound lesson of reception, nor pre
ference nor denial,
The black with his woolly head, the felon, the
diseas’d, the illiterate person, are not denied ;
The birth, the hasting after the physician, the
beggar’s tramp, the drunkard’s stagger, the
laughing party of mechanics,
The escaped youth, the rich person’s carriage,
the fop, the eloping couple,
The early market man, the hearse, the moving
of furniture into the town, the return back
from the town,
They pass, I also pass, anything passes, none can
be interdicted,
None but are accepted, none but shall be dear to
me.
3
You air that serves me with breath to speak !
You objects that call from diffusion my meanings
and give them shape !
You light that wraps me and all things in delicate
equable showers !
You paths worn in the irregular hollows by the road
sides !
I believe you are latent with unseen existences,
you are so dear to me.
�THE SONG OF THE OPEN ROAD
47
You flagg’d walks of the cities ! you strong curbs
at the edges !
You ferries ! you planks and posts of wharves !
you timber-lined sides ! you distant ships !
You rows of houses ! you window-pierc’d facades !
you roofs !
You porches and entrances ! you copings and iron
guards !
You windows whose transparent shells might
expose so much !
You doors and ascending steps! you arches!
You grey stones of interminable pavements!
you trodden crossings !
From all that has touch’d you I believe you have
imparted to yourselves, and now would impart
the same secretly to me,
From the living and the dead you have peopled
your impassive surfaces, and the spirits thereof
would be evident and amicable with me.
4
The earth expanding right hand and left hand,
The picture alive, every part in its best light,
The music falling in where it is wanted, and
stopping where it is not wanted,
The cheerful voice of the public road, the gay
fresh sentiment of the road.
0 highway I travel, do you say to me Do not
leave me ?
Do you say Venture not—if you leave me you are
lost ?
Do you say I am already prepared, I am well beaten
and undenied, adhere to me ?
�48
IN PRAISE OF WALKING
O public road, I say back I am not afraid to leave
you, yet I love you,
You express me better than I can express myself,
You shall be more to me than my poem.
I think heroic deeds were all conceiv’d in the open
air, and all free poems also,
I think I could stop here myself and do miracles,
I think whatever I meet on the road I shall like,
and whoever beholds me shall like me,
I think whoever I see must be happy.
5
From this hour I ordain myself loos’d of limits
and imaginary lines,
Going where I list, my own master total and ab
solute,
Listening to others, considering well what they say,
Pausing, searching, receiving, contemplating.
Gently, but with undeniable will, divesting myself
of the holds that would hold me.
I inhale great draughts of space.
The east and the west are mine, and the north and
the south are mine.
I am larger, better than I thought,
I did not know I held so much goodness.
All seems beautiful to me,
I can repeat over to men and women" You have
done such good to me I would do the same to
you,
�THE SONG OF THE OPEN ROAD
49
I will recruit for myself and you as I go,
I will scatter myself among men and women as
I go,
I will toss a new gladness and roughness among
them,
Whoever denies me it shall not trouble me,
Whoever accepts me he or she shall be blessed
and shall bless me.
6
Now if a thousand perfect men were to appear
it would not amaze me,
Now if a thousand beautiful forms of women
appear’d it would not astonish me.
Now I see the secret of the making of the best
persons,
It is to grow in the open air and eat and sleep
with the earth.
Here a great personal deed has room,
(Such a deed seizes upon the hearts of the whole
race of men,
Its effusion of strength and will overwhelm laws
and mocks all authority and all argument
against it.)
Here is the test of wisdom,
Wisdom is not finally tested in schools,
Wisdom cannot be pass’d from one having it to
another not having it,
Wisdom is of the soul, is not susceptible of proof,
is its own proof,
Applies to all stages and objects and qualities
and is content,
�50
IN PRAISE OF WALKING
Is the certainty of the reality and immortality
of things, and the excellence of things ;
Something there is in the float of the sight of things
that provokes it out of the soul.
Now I re-examine philosophies and religions,
They may prove well in lecture-rooms, yet not
prove at all under the spacious clouds and
along the landscape and flowing currents.
Here is realization,
Here is a man tallied—he realizes here what he
has in him,
The past, the future, majesty, love—if they are
vacant of you, you are vacant of them.
Only the kernel of every object nourishes ;
Where is he who tears off the husks for you and
me ?
Where is he that undoes stratagems and envelopes
for you and me ?
Here is adhesiveness, it is not previously fashion’d,
it is apropos;
Do you know what it is as you pass to be loved
by strangers ?
Do you know the talk of those turning eye-balls ?
7
Here is the efflux of the soul,
The efflux of the soul comes from within through
embower’d gates, ever provoking questions.
These yearnings why are they ? these thoughts in
the darkness why are they ?
Why are there men and women that while they are
nigh me the sunlight expands my blood ?
�THE SONG OF THE OPEN ROAD
51
Why when they leave me do my pennants of joy
sink flat and lank ?
Why are there trees I never walk under but large
and melodious thoughts descend upon me ?
(I think they hang there winter and summer on
those trees and almost drop fruit as I pass ;)
What is it I interchange so suddenly with strangers?
What with some driver as I ride on the seat by
his side ?
What with some fisherman drawing his seine by
" the shore as I walk by and pause ?
What gives me to be free to a woman’s and man’s
good-will ? what gives them to be free to
mine ?
8
The efflux of the soul is happiness, here is happi
ness.
I think it pervades the open air, waiting at all
times,
Now it flows unto us, we are rightly charged.
Here rises the fluid and attaching character,
The fluid and attaching character is the freshness
and sweetness of man and woman,
(The herbs of the morning sprout no fresher and
sweeter every day out of the roots of them
selves, than it sprouts fresh and sweet continu
ally out of itself.)
Toward the fluid and attaching character exudes
the sweat of the love of young and old,
From it falls distill’d the charm that mocks beauty
and attainments,
Toward it heaves the shuddering longing ache of
contact.
�52
IN PRAISE OF WALKING
9
Allons ! whoever you are come travel with me !
Travelling with me you find what never tires.
The earth never tires,
The earth is rude, silent, incomprehensible at
first, Nature is rude and incomprehensible
at first,
Be not discouraged, keep on, there are divine
things well envelop’d,
I swear to you there are divine things more beauti
ful than words can tell.
Allons ! we must not stop here,
However sweet these laid-up stores, however
convenient this dwelling we cannot remain
here,
However shelter’d this port and however calm
these waters we must not anchor here,
However welcome the hospitality that surrounds
us we are permitted to receive it but a little
while.
io
Allons ! the inducements shall be greater,
We will sail pathless and wild seas,
We will go where winds blow, waves dash, and the
Yankee clipper speeds by under full sail.
Allons ! with power, liberty, the earth, the ele
ments,
Health, defiance, gaiety, self-esteem, curiosity;
Allons ! from all formulas !
From your formulas, O bat-eyed and materialis
tic priests.
�THE SONG OF THE OPEN ROAD
53
The stale cadaver blocks up the passage—the
burial waits no longer.
Allons I yet take warning !
He travelling with me needs the best blood, thews,
endurance,
None may come to the trial till he or she bring
courage and health,
Come not here if you have already spent the best
of yourself,
Only those may come who come in sweet and
determined bodies,
No diseas’d person, no rum drinker or venereal
taint is permitted here.
(I and mine do not convince by arguments, similes,
rhymes,
We convince by our presence.)
ii
’
Listen ! I will be honest with you,
I do not offer the old smooth prizes, but offer rough
new prizes,
These are the days that must happen to you :
You shall not heap up what is call’d riches :
You shall scatter with lavish hand all that you
earn or achieve,
You but arrive at the city to which you were des
tin’d, you hardly settle yourself to satisfac
tion before you are call’d by an irresistible
call to depart,
You shall be treated to the ironical smiles and
mockings of those who remain behind you,
What beckonings of love you receive you shall only
answer with passionate kisses of parting,
You shall not allow the hold of those who spread
their reach’d hands toward you.
�54
IN PRAISE OF WALKING
12
Allons ! after the great Companions, and to belong
to them !
They too are on the road—they are the swift and
majestic men—they are the greatest women,
Enjoyers of calms of seas and storms of seas,
Sailors of many a ship, walkers of many a mile of
land,
Habitues of many distant countries, habitues
of far distant dwellings,
Trusters of men and women, observers of cities,
solitary toilers,
Pausers and contemplators of tufts, blossoms,
shells of the shore,
Dancers at wedding-dances, kissers of brides,
tender helpers of children, bearers of children,
Soldiers of revolts, standers by gaping graves,
lowerers-down of coffins,
Journeyers over consecutive seasons, over the years,
the curious years each emerging from that
which preceded it,
Journeyers as with companions, namely their own
diverse phases,
Forth-steppers from the latent unrealized babydays,
Journeyers gaily with their own youth, journeyers
with their bearded and well-grain’d manhood,
Journeyers with their womanhood, ample, unsur
pass’d, content,
Journeyers with their own sublime old age, of man
hood or womanhood,
Old age, calm, expanded, broad with the haughty
breadth of the universe,
Old age, flowing free with the delicious near-by free
dom of death.
�THE SONG OF THE OPEN ROAD
55
13
Allons ! to that which is endless as it was begin
ningless,
To undergo much, tramps of days, rests of nights,
To merge all in the travel they tend to, and the
days and nights they tend to,
Again to merge them in the start of superior
journeys,
To see nothing anywhere but what you may reach
it and pass it,
To conceive no time, however distant, but what you
may reach it and pass it,
To look up or down the road but it stretches and
waits for you, however long but it stretches
and waits for you,
To see no being, not God’s or any, but you also go
thither,
To see no possession but may possess it, enjoying
all without labour or purchase, abstracting
the feast yet not abstracting one particle of it,
To take the best of the farmer’s farm and the rich
man’s elegant villa, and the chaste blessings
of the well-married couple, and the fruits
of orchards and flowers of gardens,
To take to your use out of the compact cities as
x
you pass through,
To carry buildings and streets with you afterward
where-ever you go,
To gather the minds of men out of their brains as
you encounter them, to gather the love out
of their hearts.
To take your lovers on the road with you, for all
that you leave them behind you,
To know the universe itself as a road, as many
roads, as roads for travelling souls.
�56
IN PRAISE OF WALKING
All parts away for the progress of souls,
All religion, all solid things, arts, governments—
all that was or is apparent upon this globe
or any globe, falls into niches and corners
before the procession of souls along the grand
roads of the universe.
Of the progress of the souls of men and women
along the grand roads of the universe, all
other progress is the needed emblem and
sustenance.
Forever alive, forever forward,
Stately, solemn, sad, withdrawn, baffled, mad,
turbulent, feeble, dissatisfied,
Desperate, p oud, fond, sick, accepted by men,
rejected by men,
They go ! they go ! I know that they go, but I know
know not where they go,
But I know that they go toward the best—toward
something great.
Whoever you are, come forth ! or man or woman
come forth !
You must not stay sleeping and dallying there in
the house, though you built it, or though it
has been built for you.
Out of the dark confinement! out from behind the
screen !
It is useless to protest, I know all and expose it.
Behold through you as bad as the rest,
Through the laughter, dancing, dining, supping,
of people,
Inside of dresses and ornaments, inside of those
wash’d and trimm’d faces,
Behold a secret silent loathing and despair.
�THE SONG OF THE OPEN ROAD
57
No husband, no wife, no friend, trusted to hear
the confession,
Another self, a duplicate of every one, skulking
and hiding it goes,
Formless and wordless through the streets of the
cities, polite and bland in the parlours,
In the cars of railroads, in steamboats, in the public
assembly,
Home to the houses of men and women, at the
table, in the bed-room, everywhere,
Smartly attired, countenance smiling, form up
right, death under the breast-bones, hell under
the skull-bones,
Under the broadcloth and gloves, under the ribbons
and artificial flowers,
Keeping fair with the customs, speaking not a
syllable of itself.
Speaking of anything else, but never of itself.
14
Allons ! through struggles and wars !
The goal that was named cannot be counter
manded.
Have the past struggles succeeded ?
What has succeeded ? yourself ? your nation ?
Nature ?
Now understand me well—it is provided in the
essence of things that from any fruition of
success, no matter what, shall come forth some
thing to make a greater struggle necessary.
My call is the call of the battle, I nourish active
rebellion,
He going with me must go well arm’d,
He going with me goes often with spare diet,
poverty, angry enemies, desertions.
�58
IN PRAISE OF WALKING
15
Allons ! the road is before us !
It is safe—I have tried it—my own feet have
tried it well—be not detain’d !
Let the paper remain on the desk unwritten, and
the book on the shelf unopen’d !
Let the tools remain in the workshop ! let the
money remain unearn’d!
Let the school stand ! mind not the cry of the
teacher !
Let the preacher preach in his pulpit! let the lawyer
plead in the court, and the judge expound the
law.
Camerado, I will give you my hand!
I give you my love more precious than money,
I give you myself before preaching or law ;
Will you give me yourself ? will you come travel
with me ?
Shall we stick by each other as long as we live ?
�The Exhilarations of the Road
JOHN BURROUGHS
Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road.
—Whitman.
CCASIONALLY on the sidewalk, amid the
dapper, swiftly-moving, high-heeled boots
and gaiters, I catch a glimpse of the naked human
foot. Nimbly it scuds along, the toes spread,
the sides flatten, the heel protrudes ; it grasps
the curbing, or bends to the form of the uneven
surfaces,—a thing sensuous and alive, that seems
to take cognizance of whatever it touches or
passes. How primitive and uncivil it looks in
such company,—a real barbarian in the parlour.
We are so unused to the human anatomy, to
simple, unadorned nature, that it looks a little
repulsive ; but it is beautiful for all that. Though
it be a black foot and an unwashed foot, it shall
be exalted. It is a thing of life amid leather,
a free spirit amid cramped, a wild bird amid
caged, an athlete amid consumptives. It is the
symbol of my order, the Order of Walkers. That
unhampered, vitally playing piece of anatomy
is the type of the pedestrian, manTreturned to
first principles, in direct contact and intercourse
with the earth and the elements, his faculties
unsheathed, his mind plastic, his body toughened,
O
�6o
IN PRAISE OF WALKING
his heart light, his soul dilated : while those
cramped and distorted members in the calf and
kid are the unfortunate wretches doomed to car
riages and cushions.
I am not going to advocate the disuse of boots
and shoes, or the abandoning of the improved
modes of travel; but I am going to brag as
lustily as I can on behalf of the pedestrian, and
show how all the shining angels second and
accompany the man who goes afoot, while all
the dark spirits are ever looking out for a chance
to ride.
When I see the discomforts that able-bodied
American men will put up with rather than go
a mile or half a mile on foot, the abuses they
will tolerate and encourage, crowding the street
car on a little fall in the temperature or the
appearance of an inch or two of snow, packing
up to overflowing, dangling to the straps, tread
ing on each other’s toes, breathing each other’s
breaths, crushing the women and children, hang
ing by tooth and nail to a square inch of the
platform, imperilling their limbs and killing the
horses,—I think the commonest tramp in the
street has good reason to felicitate himself on
his rare privilege of going afoot. Indeed, a race
that neglects or despises this primitive gift,
| that fears the touch of the soil, that has no foot
paths, no community of ownership in the land
which they imply, that warns off the walker as
a trespasser, that knows no way but the highway,
the carriage-way, that forgets the stile, the foot
bridge, that even ignores the rights of the pedesi train in the public road, providing no escape
I for him but in the ditch or up the bank, is in a
j fair way to far more serious degeneracy.
�THE EXHILARATIONS OF THE ROAD
6i
Shakespeare makes the chief qualification of
the walker a merry heart :—
“Jog on, jog on, the foot-'path way,
And merrily hent the stile-a ;
A merry heart goes all the day,
Your sad tires in a mile-a.”
The human body is a steed that goes freest
and longest under a light rider, and the lightest
of all riders is a cheerful heart. Your sad, or
morose, or embittered, or preoccupied heart
settles heavily into +he saddle, and the poor
beast, the body, breaks down the first mile. In
deed, the heaviest thing in the world is a heavy
heart. Next to that the most burdensome to
the walker is a heart not in perfect sympathy and
accord with the body—a reluctant or unwilling
heart. The horse and rider must not only both
be willing to go the same way, but the rider
must lead the way and infuse his own lightness
and eagerness into the steed. Herein is no doubt
our trouble and one reason of the decay of the
noble art in this country. We are unwilling
walkers. We are not innocent and simple' hearted enough to enjoy a walk. We have fallen
from that state of grace which capacity to enjoy
a walk implies. It cannot be said that as a
people we are so positively sad, or morose, or
melancholic as that we are vacant of that sport
iveness and surplusage of animal spirits that
characterized our ancestors, and that springs
from full and harmonious life,—a sound heart
in accord with a sound body. A man must in
vest himself near at hand and in common things,
and be content with a steady and moderate
�62
IN PRAISE OF WALKING
return, if he would know the blessedness of a
cheerful heart and the sweetness of a walk over
the round earth. This is a lesson the American
has yet to learn—capability of amusement on a
low key. He expects rapid and extraordinary
returns. He would make the very elemental
laws pay usury. He has nothing to invest in a
walk ; it is too slow, too cheap. We crave the
astonishing, the exciting, the far away, and do
not know the highways of the gods when we see
them,—always a sign of the decay of the faith
and simplicity of man.
If I say to my neighbour, “ Come with me, I
have great wonders to show you,” he pricks up
his ears and comes forthwith ; but when I take
him on the hills under the full blaze of the sun,
or along the country road, our footsteps lighted
by the moon and stars, and say to him, “ Behold,
these are the wonders, these are the circuits of
the gods, this we now tread is a morning star,”
he feels defrauded, and as if I had played him a
trick. And yet nothing less than dilatation and
enthusiasm like this is the badge of the master
walker.
If we are not sad we are careworn, hurried,
discontented, mortgaging the present for the
promise of the future. If we take a walk, it is
as we take a prescription, with about the same
relish and with about the same purpose ; and the
more the fatigue the greater our faith in the
virtue of the medicine.
Of those gleesome saunters over the hills in
spring, or those sallies of the body in winter,
those excursions into space when the foot strikes
fire at every step, when the air tastes like a new
and finer mixture, when we accumulate force
�THE EXHILARATIONS OF THE ROAD
63
and gladness as we go along, when the sight of
objects by the roadside and of the fields and
woods pleases more than pictures or than all
the art in the world,—those ten or twelve mile
dashes that are but the wit and effluence of the
corporeal powers,—of such diversion and open
road entertainment, I say, most of us know very
little.
I notice with astonishment that at our fashion
able watering-places nobody walks ; that of all
those vast crowds of health-seekers and lovers
of country air, you can never catch one in the
fields or woods, or guilty of trudging along the
country road with dust on his shoes and sun-tan
on his hands and face. The sole amusement
seems to be to eat and dress and sit about the
hotels and glare at each other. The men look
bored, the women look tired, and all seem to
sigh, “ O Lord ! what shall we do to be happy
and not be vulgar ? ” Quite different from our
British cousins across the water, who have
plenty of amusement and hilarity, spending
most of the time at their watering-places in the
open air, strolling, picnicking, boating, climbing,
briskly walking, apparently with little fear of
sun-tan or of compromising their “ gentility.”
It is indeed astonishing with what ease and
hilarity the English walk. To an American it
seems a kind of infatuation. When Dickens
was in this country I imagine the aspirants to
the honour of a walk with him were not numerous.
In a pedestrian tour of England by an American,
I read that “ after breakfast with the Inde
pendent minister, he walked with us for six
miles out of town upon our road. Three little
boys and girls, the youngest six years old, also
�64
IN PRAISE OF WALKING
accompanied us. They were romping and ramb
ling about all the while, and their morning walk
must have been as much as fifteen miles ; but
they thought nothing of it, and when we parted
were apparently as fresh as when they started,
and very loath to return.”
I fear, also, the American is becoming dis
qualified for the manly art of walking, by a
falling off in the size of his foot. He cherishes
and cultivates this part of his anatomy, and
apparently thinks his taste and good breeding
are to be inferred from its diminutive size. A
small, trim foot, well booted or gaitered, is the
national vanity. How we stare at the big feet
of foreigners, and wonder what may be the price
of leather in those countries, and where all the
aristocratic blood is, that these plebeian ex
tremities so predominate. If we were admitted
to the confidences of the shoemaker to Her
Majesty or to His Royal Highness, no doubt
we would modify our views upon this latter
point, for a truly large and royal nature is never
stunted in the extremities ; a little foot never
yet supported a great character.
It is said that Englishmen when they first
come to this country are for some time under
the impression that American women all have
deformed feet, they are so coy of them and so
studiously careful to keep them hid. That
there is an astonishing difference between the
women of the two countries in this respect,
every traveller can testify ; and that there is a
difference equally astonishing between the pedes
trian habits and capabilities of the rival sisters
is also certain.
The English pedestrian, no doubt, has the
�THE EXHILARATIONS OF THE ROAD
65
advantage of us in the matter of climate ; for
notwithstanding the traditional gloom and mo
roseness of English skies, they have in that country
none of those relaxing, sinking, enervating days,
of which we have so many here, and which seem
especially trying to the female constitution—
days which withdraw all support from the back
and loins, and render walking of all things burden
some. Theirs is a climate of which it has been said
that “ it invites men abroad more days in the year
and more hours in the day than that of any other
country.”
Then their land is threaded with paths which
invite the walker, and which are scarcely less
important than the highways. I heard of a surly
nobleman near London who took it into his head
to close a foot-path that passed through his estate
near his house, and open another one a little
farther off. The pedestrians objected ; the matter
got into the courts, and after protracted litigation
the aristocrat was beaten. The path could not
be closed or moved. The memory of man ran
not to the time when there was not a foot-path
there, and every pedestrian should have the right
of way there still.
I remember the pleasure I had in the path that
connects Stratford-on-Avon with Shottery, Shake
speare’s path when he went courting Anne Hath
away. By the king’s highway the distance is
some further, so there is a well-worn path along
the hedgerows and through the meadows and
turnip patches. The traveller in it has the privilege
of crossing the railroad track, an unusual privilege
in England, and one denied to the lord in his
carriage, who must either go over or under it.
(It is a privilege, is it not, to be allowed the forE
�66
IN PRAISE OF WALKING
bidden, even if it be the privilege of being run
over by the engine ?) In strolling over the South
Downs, too, I was delighted to find that where
the hill was steepest some benefactor of the order
of walkers had made notches in the sward, so that
the foot could bite the better and firmer; the
path became a kind of stairway, which I have no
doubt the plough-man respected.
When you see an English country church with
drawn, secluded, out of the reach of wheels, stand
ing amid grassy graves and surrounded by noble
trees, approached by paths and shaded lanes,
you appreciate more than ever this beautiful
habit of the people. Only a race that knows how
to use its feet, and holds foot-paths sacred, could
put such a charm of privacy and humility into
such a structure. I think I should be tempted
to go to church myself if I saw all my neighbours
starting off across the fields or along paths that
led to such charmed spots, and was sure I would
not be jostled or run over by the rival chariots
of the worshippers at the temple doors. I think
this is what ails our religion; humility and de
voutness of heart leave one when he lays by his
walking shoes and walking clothes, and sets out
for church drawn by something.
Indeed, I think it would be tantamount to an
astonishing revival of religion if the people would
all walk to church on Sunday and walk home again.
Think how the stones would preach to them by
the wayside; how their benumbed minds would
warm up beneath the friction of the gravel; how
their vain and foolish thoughts, their desponding
thoughts, their besetting demons of one kind and
another, would drop behind them, unable to keep
up or to endure the fresh air. They would walk
�THE EXHILARATIONS OF THE ROAD
67
away from their ennui, their worldly cares, their
uncharitableness, their pride of dress; for these
devils always want to ride, while the simple vir
tues are never so happy as when on foot. Let us
walk by all means ; but if we will ride, get an ass.
Then the English claim that they are a more
hearty and robust people than we are. It is
certain they are a plainer people, have plainer
tastes, dress plainer, build plainer, speak plainer,
keep closer to facts, wear broader shoes and
coarser clothes, place a lower estimate on them
selves, etc.—all of which traits favour pedestrian
habits. The English grandee is not confined to
his carriage; but if the American aristocrat
leaves his, he is ruined. Oh, the weariness, the
emptiness, the plotting, the seeking rest and
finding none, that goes by in the carriages ! while
your pedestrian is always cheerful, alert, refreshed,
with his heart in his hand and his hand free to all.
He looks down upon nobody; he is on the common
level. His pores are all open, his circulation is
active, his digestion good. His heart is not cold,
nor his faculties asleep. He is the only real
traveller ; he alone tastes the “ gay, fresh sentiment
of the road.” He is not isolated, but one with
things, with the farms and industries on either hand.
The vital, universal currents play through him.
He knows the ground is alive ; he feels the pulses
of the wind, and reads the mute language of things.
His sympathies are all aroused; his senses are
continually reporting messages to his mind. Wind,
frost, rain, heat, cold, are something to him. He
is not merely a spectator of the panorama of
nature, but a participator in it. He experiences
the country he passes through—tastes it, feels
it, absorbs it; the traveller in his fine carriage sees
�68
IN PRAISE OF WALKING
it merely. This gives the fresh charm to that
class of books that may be called “ Views Afoot,”
and to the narratives of hunters, naturalists,
exploring parties, etc. The walker does not
need a large territory. When you get into a
railway car you want a continent, the man in
his carriage requires a township; but a walker
like Thoreau finds as much and more along the
shores of Walden Pond. The former, as it were,
has merely time to glance at the headings of the
chapters, while the latter need not miss a line,
and Thoreau reads between the lines. Then the
walker has the privilege of the fields, the woods,
the hills, the by-ways. The apples by the road
side are for him, and the berries, and the spring
of water, and the friendly shelter; and if the
weather is cold, he eats the frost grapes and the
persimmons, or even the white meated turnip,
snatched from the field he passed through, with
incredible relish.
Afoot and in the open road, one has a fair start
in life at last. There is no hindrance now. Let
him put his best foot forward. He is on the
broadest human plane. This is on the level of
all the great laws and heroic deeds. From this
platform he is eligible to any good fortune. He
was sighing for the golden age ; let him walk to
it. Every step brings him nearer. The youth
of the world is but a few days’ journey distant.
Indeed, I know persons who think they have
walked back to that fresh aforetime of a single
bright Sunday in autumn or early spring. Before
noon they felt its airs upon their cheeks, and by
nightfall, on the banks of some quiet stream, or
along some path in the wood, or on some hill-top,
aver they have heard the voices and felt the
�THE EXHILARATIONS OF THE ROAD
69
wonder and the mystery that so enchanted the
early races of men.
I think if I could walk through a country I
should not only see many things and have ad
ventures that I should otherwise miss, but that
I should come into relations with that country
at first hand, and with the men and women in
it, in a way that would afford the deepest satis
faction. Hence I envy the good fortune of all
walkers, and feel like joining myself to every
tramp that comes along. I am jealous of the
clergyman I read about the other day who footed
it from Edinburgh to London, as poor Effie Deans
did, carrying her shoes in her hand most of the
way, and over the ground that rugged Ben Jonson
strode, larking it to Scotland, so long ago. I
read with longing of the pedestrian feats of college
youths, so gay and light-hearted, with their coarse
shoes on their feet and their knapsacks on their
backs. It would have been a good draught of
the rugged cup to have walked with Wilson the
ornithologist, deserted by his companions, from
Niagara to Philadelphia through the snows of
winter. I almost wish that I had been born to
the career of a German mechanic, that I might
have had that delicious adventurous year of
wandering over my country before I settled down
to work. I think how much richer and firmergrained fife would be to me if I could journey afoot
through Florida and Texas, or follow the windings
of the Platte or the Yellowstone, or stroll through
Oregon, or browse for a season about Canada.
In the bright inspiring days of autumn I only
want the time and the companion to walk back
to the natal spot, the family nest, across two
States and into the mountains of a third. What
�7°
IN PRAISE OF WALKING
adventures we would have by the way, what
hard pulls, what prospects from hills, what spec
tacles we would behold of night and day, what
passages with dogs, what glances, what peeps
into windows, what characters we should fall in
with, and how seasoned and hardy we should
arrive at our destination !
For companion I should want a veteran of the
war ! Those marches put something into him I
like. Even at this distance his mettle is but little
softened. As soon as he gets warmed up it all
comes back to him. He catches your step and
away you go, a gay, adventurous, half predatory
couple. How quickly he falls into the old ways
of jest and anecdote and song ! You may have
known him for years without having heard him
hum an air, or more than casually revert to the
subject of his experience during the war. You
have even questioned and cross-questioned him
without firing the train you wished. But get
him out on a vacation tramp, and you can walk
it all out of him. By the camp-fire at night or
swinging along the streams by day, song, anecdote,
adventure, come to the surface, and you wonder
how your companion has kept silent so long.
It is another proof of how walking brings out
the true character of a man. The devil never
yet asked his victims to take a walk with him.
You will not be long in finding your companion
out. All disguises will fall away from him. As
his pores open his character is laid bare. His
deepest and most private self will come to the
top. It matters little whom you ride with, so
he be not a pickpocket; for both of you will,
very likely, settle down closer and firmer in your
reserve, shaken down like a measure of corn by
�THE EXHILARATIONS OF THE ROAD
& i
t
.
‘
I
i
71
the jolting as the journey proceeds. But walk
ing is a more vital copartnership ; the relation
is a closer and more sympathetic one, and you
do not feel like walking ten paces with a stranger
without speaking to him.
.
1
Hence the fastidiousness of the professional
walker in choosing or admitting a companion,
and hence the truth of a remark of Emerson that
you will generally fare better to take your dog
than to invite your neighbour. Your cur-dog is
a true pedestrian, and your neighbour is very
likely a small politician. The dog enters thoroughly into the spirit of the enterprise; he is
not indifferent or preoccupied; he is constantly
sniffing adventure, laps at every spring, looks
upon every field and wood as a new world to be
explored, is ever on some fresh trail, knows some
thing important will happen a little further on,
gazes with the true wonder-seeing eyes, whatever the spot or whatever the road finds it good
to be there—in short, is just that happy, deli
cious, excursive vagabond that touches one at so
many points, and whose human prototype in a
companion robs miles and leagues of half their
power to fatigue.
.
Persons who find themselves spent in a short
walk to the market or the post-office, or to do a
little shopping, wonder how it is that their pedes
trian friends can compass so many weary miles
and not fall down from sheer exhaustion; ignorant of the fact that the walker is a kind of
projectile that drops far or near according to
the expansive force of the motive that set it in
motion, and that it is easy enough to regulate
the charge according to the distance to be tra
versed. If I am loaded to carry only one mile
�72
IN PRAISE OF WALKING
and am compelled to walk three, I generally
feel more fatigue than if I had walked six under
the proper impetus of preadjusted resolution.
In other words, the will or corporeal mainspring,
whatever it be, is capable of being wound up
to different degrees of tension, so that one may
walk all day nearly as easy as half that time if
he is prepared beforehand. He knows his task,
and he measures and distributes his powers ac
cordingly. It is for this reason that an unknown
road is always a long road. We cannot cast the
mental eye along it and see the end from the
beginning. We are fighting in the dark, and
cannot take the measure of our foe. Every step
must be preordained and provided for in the mind.
Hence also the fact that to vanquish one mile in
the woods seems equal to compassing three in the
open country. The furlongs are ambushed, and
we magnify them.
Then, again, how annoying to be told it is
only five miles to the next place when it is really
eight or ten ! We fall short nearly half the dis
tance, and are compelled to urge and roll the spent
ball the rest of the way.
In such a case walking degenerates from a fine
art to a mechanic art; we walk merely; to get
over the ground becomes the one serious and.
engrossing thought; whereas success in walking
is not to let your right foot know what your left
foot doeth. Your heart must furnish such music
that in keeping time to it your feet will carry you
around the globe without knowing it. The walker
I would describe takes no note of distance; his
walk is a sally, a bon-mot, an unspoken jeu d’esprit;
the ground is his butt, his provocation ; it fur
nishes him the resistance his body craves ; he
�THE EXHILARATIONS OF THE ROAD
73
rebounds upon it, he glances off and returns again,
and uses it gaily as his tool.
I do not think I exaggerate the importance
or the charms of pedestrianism, or our need as
a people to cultivate the art. I think it would
tend to soften the national manners, to teach us
the meaning of leisure, to acquaint us with the
charms of the open air, to strengthen and foster
the tie between the race and the land. No one
else looks out upon the world so kindly and charit
ably as the pedestrian ; no one else gives and
takes so much from the country he passes through.
Next to the labourer in the fields, the walker
holds the closest relation to the soil; and he
holds a closer and more vital relation to Nature
because he is freer and his mind more at leisure.
Man takes root at his feet, and at best he is
no more than a potted plant in his house or carriage
till he has established communication with the
soil by the loving and magnetic touch of his soles
to it. Then the tie of association is born ; then
spring those invisible fibres and rootlets through
which character comes to smack of the soil, and
which make a man kindred to the spot of earth he
inhabits.
The roads and paths you have walked along
j^in summer and winter weather, the fields and
hills which you have looked upon in lightness
and gladness of heart, where fresh thoughts have
come into your mind, or some noble prospect
has opened before you, and especially the quiet
ways where you have walked in sweet converse
with your friend, pausing under the trees, drinking
at the spring—henceforth they are not the same ;
a new charm is added; those thoughts spring
there perennial, your friend walks there for ever.
�74
IN PRAISE OF WALKING
We have produced some good walkers and
saunterers, and some noted climbers; but as a
staple recreation, as a daily practice, the mass
of the people dislike and despise walking. Thoreau
said he was a good horse, but a poor roadster.
I chant the virtues of the roadster as well. I
sing of the sweetness of gravel, good sharp quartz
grit. It is the proper condiment for the sterner
seasons, and many a human gizzard would be
cured of half its ills by a suitable daily allowance
of it. I think Thoreau himself would have profited
immensely by it. His diet was too exclusively
vegetable. A man cannot live on grass alone.
If one has been a lotus-eater all summer, he must
turn gravel-eater in the fall and winter. Those
who have tried it know that gravel possesses an
equal though an opposite charm. It spurs to action.
The foot tastes it and henceforth rests not. The
joy of moving and surmounting, of attrition
and progression, the thirst for space, for miles
and leagues of distance, for sights and prospects,
to cross mountains and thread rivers, and defy
frost, heat, snow, danger, difficulties, seizes it;
and from that day forth its possessor is enrolled
in the noble army of walkers.
�ON GOING A JOURNEY
WILLIAM HAZLITT
NE of the pleasantest things in the world is
going a journey ; but I like to go by myself.
I can enjoy society in a room ; but out of doors
nature is company enough for me. I am then
never less alone than when alone.
O
“ The fields his study, nature was his book.”
I cannot see the wit of walking and talking at
the same time. When I am in the country, I wish
to vegetate like the country. I am not for criticis
ing hedgerows and black cattle. I go out of the
town in order to forget the town and all that is in
it. There are those who for this purpose go to
watering places, and carry the metropolis with
them. I like more elbow-room, and fewer encum
brances. I like solitv. :e, when I give myself up
to it, for the sake of solitude ; nor do I ask for
“ A friend in my retreat,
Whom I may whisper solitude is sweet.”
The soul of a journey is liberty, perfect liberty,
to think, feel, do, just as one pleases. _ We go a
journey chiefly to be free of all impediments and
of all inconveniences ; to leave ourselves behind
much more to get rid of others. It is because I
75
�IN PRAISE OF WALKING
want a little breathing-space to muse on indifferent
matters, where contemplation
May plume her feathers, and let grow her wings
That in the various bustle of resort
Were all too ruffled, and sometimes impair’d.”
that I absent myself from the town for a while
without feeling at a loss the moment I am left
by myself. Instead of a friend in a post-chaise
or in a Tilbury, to exchange good things with and
vary the same stale topics over again, for once
(let me have a truce with impertinence. Give
me the clear blue sky over my head and the green
turf beneath my feet, a winding road before me,
and a three hours march to dinner—and then to
thinking ! It is hard if I cannot start some game
on these lone heaths. I laugh, I run, I leap, I
sing for joy. From the point of yonder rolling
cloud, I plunge into my past being, and revel there,
as the sunburnt Indian plunges headlong into
the wave that wafts him to his native shore. Then
long-forgotten things, like “ sunken wrack and
sunless treasuries,” burst upon my eager sight, and
I begin to feel, think, and be myself again. Instead
of an awkward silence, broken by attempts at
wit or dull commonplaces, mine is that undisturbed
silence of the heart which alone is perfect eloquence.
No one likes puns, alliterations, antitheses,
argument, and analysis better than I do; but I
sometimes had rather be without them. “ Leave,
oh, leave me to my repose ! ” I have just now
other business in hand, which would seem idle to
you; but is with me “ very stuff o’ the con
science.” Is not this wild rose sweet without a
comment ? Does not this daisy leap to my heart
�ON GOING A JOURNEY
77
set in its coat of emerald ? Yet if I were to explain
to you the circumstance that has so endeared it to
me, you would only smile. Had I not better, then,
keep it to myself, and let it serve me to brood over,
from here to yonder craggy point, and from thence
onward to the far-distant horizon ? I should be
but bad company all that way, and therefore
prefer being alone.
I have heard it said that you may, when the
moody fit comes on, walk or ride on by yourself,
and indulge your reveries. But this looks like a
breach of manners, a neglect of others, and
you are thinking all the time that you ought to
rejoin your party. "Out upon such half-faced
fellowship ! ” say I. I like to be either entirely
to myself, or entirely at the disposal of others ;
to talk or be silent, to walk or sit still, to be sociable
or solitary. I was pleased with an observation of
Mr. Cobbett’s, that " he thought it a bad French
custom to drink our wine with our meals, and
that an Englishman ought to do only one thing
at a time.” So I cannot talk and think, or indulge
in melancholy musing and lively conversation,
by fits and starts. " Let me have a companion of
my way,” says Sterne, " were it but to remark
how the shadows lengthen as the sun declines.”
It is beautifully said ; but, in my opinion, this
continual comparing of note interferes with the
involuntary impression of things upon the mind,
and hurts the sentiment.
If you only hint what you feel in a kind of dumb
show, it is insipid; if you have to explain it, it is
making a toil of a pleasure. You cannot read
the book of nature without being perpetually
put to the trouble of translating it for the benefit
of others. I am for this synthetical method on a
�78
IN PRAISE OF WALKING
journey in preference to the analytical. I am
content to lay in a stock of ideas then, and to
examine and anatomize them afterwards. I want
to see my vague notions float like the down of the
thistle before the breeze, and not to have them
entangled in the briars and thorns of controversy.
For once, I like to have it all my own way ; and
this is impossible unless you are alone, or in such
company as I do not covet. I have no objection
to twenty miles of measured road, but not for
pleasure. If you remark the scent of a beanfield
crossing the road, perhaps your fellow-traveller
has no smell. If you point to a distant object,
perhaps he is short-sighted, and has to take out
his glass to look at it. There is a feeling in the
air, a tone in the colour of a cloud, which hits
your fancy, but the effect of which you are unable
to account for. There is then no sympathy,
but an uneasy craving after it, and a dissatisfaction
which pursues you on the way, and in the end
probably produces ill-humour.
Now, I never quarrel with myself, and take
all my own conclusions for granted till I find it
necessary to defend them against objections.
It is not merely that you may not be of accord on
the objects and circumstances that present them
selves before you—these may recall a number of
objects, and lead to associations too delicate and
refined to be possibly communicated to others.
Yet these I love to cherish, and sometimes still
fondly clutch them, when I can escape from the
throng to do so. To give way to our feelings
before company seems extravagance or affecta
tion ; and, on the other hand, to have to unravel
this mystery of our being at every turn, and to
make others take an equal interest in it (otherwise
�ON GOING A JOURNEY
79
the end is not answered), is a task to which few
are competent. We must “ give it an under
standing, but no tongue.” My old friend Cole
ridge, however, could do both. He could go on
in the most delightful explanatory way over hill
and dale a summer’s day, and convert a landscape
into a didactic poem or a Pindaric ode. “ He
talked far above singing.” If I could so clothe
my ideas in sounding and flowing words, I might
perhaps wish to have some one with me to admire
the swelling theme ; or I could be more content,
were it possible for me still to hear his echoing
voice in the woods of All-Forden. They had
“ that fine madness in them which our first poets
had ” ; and if they could have been caught by
some rare instrument, would have breathed such
strains as the following:
“ Here the woods as green
As any, air likewise as fresh and sweet
As when smooth Zephyrus plays on the fleet
Face of the curled streams, with flow’rs as many
As the young spring gives, and as choice as any ;
Here be all new delights, cool streams and wells,
Arbours o’ergrown with woodbines, caves and dells ;
Choose where thou wilt, whilst I sit by and sing,
Or gather rushes to make many a ring
For thy long fingers ; tell thee tales of love,
How the pale Phoebe, hunting in a grove,
First saw the boy Endymion, from whose eyes
She took eternal fire that never dies ;
How she conveyed him softly in a sleep,
His temples bound with poppy, to the steep
Head of old Laimos, where she stoops each night,
Gilding the mountain with her brother's light,
To kiss her sweetest.”
—(Fletcher’s “ Faithful Shepherdess.”
�8o
IN PRAISE OF WALKING
Had I words and images at command like these,
I would attempt to wake the thoughts that he
slumbering on golden ridges in the evening clouds;
but at the sight of nature my fancy, poor as it is,
droops and closes up its leaves, like flowers at
sunset. I can make nothing out on the spot : I
must have time to collect myself.
In general, a good thing spoils out-of-door
prospects ; it should be reserved for Table-Talk.
Lamb is, for this reason, I take it, the worst com
pany in the world out-of-doors ; because he is the
best within. I grant there is one subject on which
it is pleasant to talk on a journey, and that is,
what we shall have for supper when we get to our
inn at night. The open air improves this sort
of conversation or friendly altercation, by setting
a keener edge on appetite.
Every mile of the
road heightens the flavour of the viands we expect
at the end of it. How fine it is to enter some old
town, walled and turreted, just at the approach
of nightfall; or to come to some straggling
village, with the lights streaming through the sur
rounding gloom ; and then after inquiring for the
best entertainment that the place affords, to
“ take one’s ease at one’s inn ! ”
These eventful moments in our lives’ history
are too precious, too full of solid, heartfelt happi
ness, to be frittered and dribbled away in imperfect
sympathy. I would have them all to myself,
and drain them to the last drop ; they will do to
talk of or to write about afterwards. What a
delicate speculation it is, after drinking whole
goblets of tea,
“ The cups that cheer, but not inebriate.”
and letting the fumes ascend into the brain, to sit
�8l
ON GOING A JOURNEY
considering what we shall have for supper—eggs
and a rasher, a rabbit smothered in onions, or an
excellent veal-cutlet! Sancho in such a situation
once fixed on cow-heel; and his choice, though
he could not help it, is not to be disparaged. Then,
in the intervals of pictured scenery and shaudean
contemplation, to catch the preparation and
the stir in the kitchen (getting ready for the
gentleman in the parlour), Procul, o procul esti
profani / These hours are sacred to silence and
to musing, to be treasured up in the memory, and
to feel the source of smiling thoughts hereafter.
I would not waste them in idle talk ; or if I must
have the integrity of fancy broken in upon, I
would rather it were by a stranger than a friend.
A stranger takes his hue and character from
the time and place; he is a part of the furniture
and costume of an inn. If he is a Quaker, or
from the West Riding of Yorkshire, so much
the better. I do not even try to sympathize with
him, and he breaks no squares. How I love to
see the camps of the gypsies, and to sigh my soul
into that sort of life ! If I express this feeling
to another, he may qualify and spoil it with some
objection. I associate nothing with my travelling
companion but present objects and passing events.
In his ignorance of me and my affairs, I in a
manner forget myself. But a friend reminds
me of other things, rips up old grievances, and
destroys the abstraction of the scene. He comes
in ungraciously between us and our imaginary
character. Something is dropped in the course
of conversation that gives a hint of your profession
" and pursuits ; or from having some one with you
that knows the less sublime portions of your his
tory, it seems that other people do. You are
F
�82
IN PRAISE OF WALKING
no longer a citizen of the world; but your “ un
housed free condition is put into circumspection
and confine.”
The incognito of an inn is one of its striking
privileges—“lord of one’s self, uncumbered with a
name.” Oh, it is great to shake off the trammels
of the world and of public opinion; to lose our
importunate, tormenting, everlasting personal
identity in the elements of nature, and become
the creature of the moment, clear of all ties; to
hold to the universe only by a dish of sweet
breads, and to owe nothing but the score of the
evening; and no longer seeking for applause and
meeting with contempt, to be known by no other
title than the gentleman in the parlour !
One may take one’s choice of all characters in
this romantic state of uncertainty as to one’s real
pretensions, and become indefinitely respectable
and negatively right-worshipful. We baffle pre
judice and disappoint conjecture ; and from being
so to others, begin to be objects of curiosity and
wonder even to ourselves. We are no more those
hackneyed commonplaces that we appear in the
world; an inn restores us to the level of nature,
and quits scores with society ! I have certainly
spent some enviable hours at inns—sometimes
when I have been left entirely to myself, and
have tried to solve some metaphysical problem,
as once at Witham Common, where I found out
the proof that likeness is not a case of the associa
tion of ideas—at other times, when there have been
pictures in the room, as at St. Neot’s (I think it
was), where I first met with Gribelins’ engravings
of the Cartoons, into which I entered at once,
and at a bttle inn on the borders of Wales, where
there happened to be hanging some of Westall’s
�ON GOING A JOURNEY
83
drawings, which I compared triumphantly (for a
theory that I had, not for the admired artist)
with the figure of a girl who had ferried me over
the Severn standing up in a boat between me and
the twilight. At other times I might mention
luxuriating in books, with a peculiar interest in
this way, as I remember sitting up half the night
to read Paul and Virginia, which I picked up at an
inn at Bridgewater, after being drenched in the
rain all day ; and at the same place I got through
two volumes of Madam D’Arblay’s Camilla.
It was on the 10th of April 1798 that I sat down
to a volume of the New Eloise, at the inn at Llan
gollen, over a bottle of sherry and a cold chicken.
The letter I chose was that in which St. Preux
describes his feelings as he first caught a glimpse
from the heights of the Jura of the Pays de baud,
which I had brought with me as a bon bouche to
crown the evening with. It was my birthday,
and I had for the first time come from a place in
the neighbourhood to visit this delightful spot.
The road to Llangollen turns off between Chirk
and Wrexham ; and on passing a certain point
you come all at once upon the valley, which
opens like an amphitheatre, broad, barren hills
rising in majestic state on either side, with “ green
upland swells that echo to the bleat of the flocks ”
below, and the river Dee babbling, over its stony
bed in the midst of them. The valley at this
time “ glittered green with sunny showers,” and
a budding ash-tree dipped its tender branches in
the chiding stream.
How proud, how glad I was to walk along the
highroad that overlooks the delicious prospect,
repeating the lines which I have just quoted from
Mr. Coleridge’s poems ! But besides the prospect
�84
IN PRAISE OF WALKING
which opened beneath my feet, another also opened
to my inward sight, a heavenly vision on which
were written in letters large as Hope could
make them, these four words, Liberty, Genius,
Love, Virtue, which have since faded into the
light of the common day, or mock my idle gaze.
“ The beautiful is vanished, and returns not.”
Still, I would return some time or other to this
enchanted spot; but I would return to it alone.
What other self could I find to share that influx
of thoughts, of regret, and delight, the fragments
of which I could hardly conjure up to myself, so
much have they been broken and defaced ? I
could stand on some tall rock, and overlook the
precipice of years that separates me from what I
then was. I was at that time going shortly to
visit the poet whom I have above named. Where
is he now ? Not only I myself have changed;
the world, which was then new to me, has become
old and incorrigible. Yet will I turn to thee in
thought, O sylvan Dee, in joy, in youth and gladness,
as thou then wert; and thou shall always be to
me the river of Paradise, where I will drink of the
waters of life freely !
There is hardly anything that shows the short
sightedness or capriciousness of the imagination
more than travelling does. With change of place
we change our ideas; nay, our opinions and feel
ings. We can by an effort, indeed, transport
ourselves to old and long forgotten scenes, and
then the picture of the mind revives again; but
we forget those that we have just left. It seems
that we can think but of one place at a time. The
canvas of the fancy is but of a certain extent, and
�ON GOING A JOURNEY
85
if we paint one set of objects upon it, they imme
diately efface every other. We cannot enlarge
our conceptions, we only shift our point of view.
The landscape bares its bosom to the enraptured
eye; we take our fill of it, and seem as if we
could form no other image of beauty or grandeur.
We pass on, and think no more of it: the horizon
that shuts it from our sight also blots it from our
memory like a dream. In travelling through a
wild, barren country, I can form no idea of a
woody and cultivated one. It appears to me
that all the world must be barren, like what I see
of it. In the country we forget the town, and in
town we despise the country. “ Beyond Hyde
Park,” says Sir Topling Flutter, “ all is desert.”
All that part of the map that we do not see before
us is blank. The world in our conceit of it is not
much bigger than a nutshell. It is not one prospect
expanded into another, county joined to county,
kingdom to kingdom, land to seas, making an
image voluminous and vast; the mind can form
no larger idea of space than the eye can take in at
a single glance. The rest is a name written in a
map, a calculation of arithmetic.
For instance, what is the true signification of
that immense mass of territory and population
known by the name of China to us ? An inch of
pasteboard on a wooden globe, of no more account
than a china orange ! Things near us are seen
of the size of life ; things at a distance are dimin ished to the size of the understanding. We measure
the universe by ourselves, and even comprehend
the texture of our beings only piecemeal. In
this way, however, we remember an infinity of
things and places. The mind is like a mechanical
instrument that plays a great variety of tunes,
�86
IN PRAISE OF WALKING
but it must play them in succession. One idea
recalls another, but it at the same time excludes all
others. In trying to renew old recollections, we
cannot as it were unfold the web of our existence;
we must pick out the single threads. So in coming
to a place where we have formerly lived, and
with which we have intimate associations, every
one must have found that the feeling grows more
vivid the nearer we approach the spot, from the
mere anticipation of the actual impression : we
remember circumstances, feelings, persons, faces,
names that we had not thought of for years ; but
for the time all the rest of the world is forgotten !
To return to the question I have quitted above—
I have no objection to go to see ruins, aqueducts,
pictures, in company with a friend or a party, but
rather the contrary, for the former reason reversed.
They are intelligible matters, and will bear talking
about. The sentiment here is not tacit, but com
municable and overt. Salisbury Plain is barren
of criticism, but Stonehenge will bear a discussion
antiquarian, picturesque, and philosophical. In
setting out on a party of pleasure, the first con
sideration always is where we shall go to; in
taking a solitary ramble, the question is what we
shall meet with by the way. “ The mind is its
own place ” ; nor are we anxious to arrive at the
end of our journey. I can myself do the honours
indifferently well to works of art and curiosity.
I once took a party to Oxford,| with no mean eclat—
showed them that seat of the Muses at a distance,
“ With glistering spires and pinnacles adorn’d,”
descanted on the learned air that breathes from
the grassy quadrangles and stone walls of halls
�ON GOING A JOURNEY
87
and colleges ; was at home in the Bodleian ; and at
Blenheim quite superseded the powdered cicerone
that attended us, and that pointed in vain with
his wand to commonplace beauties in matchless
pictures.
As another exception to the above reasoning,
I should not feel confident in venturing on a
journey in a foreign country without a companion.
I should want at intervals to hea the sound of my
own language. There is an invol ntary antipathy
in the mind of an Englishman to foreign manners
and notions that requires the assistance of social
sympathy to carry it off. As the distance from
home increases, this relief, which was at first a
luxury, becomes a passion and an appetite. A
person would almost feel stifled to find himself in
the deserts of Arabia without friends and country
men : there must be allowed to be something in
the view of Athens or old Rome that claims the
utterance of speech ; and I own that the Pyramids
are too mighty for any single contemplation. In
such situations, so opposite to all one’s ordinary
train of ideas, one seems a species by one’s self, a
limb torn off from society, unless one can meet
with instant fellowship and support.
Yet I did not feel this want or craving very
pressing once, when I first set my foot on the
laughing shores of France. Calais was peopled
with novelty and delight. The confused, busy
murmur of the place was like oil and wine poured
into my ears ; nor did the mariners’ hymn, which
was sung from the top of an old crazy vessel in
the harbour, as the sun went down, send an alien
sound into my soul. I only breathed the air of
general humanity. I walked over “ the vinecovered hills and gay regions of France,” erect and
�88
’
IN PRAISE OF WALKING
satisfied ; for the image of man was not cast down
and chained to the foot of arbitrary thrones : I
was at no loss for language, for that of all the great
schools of painting was open to me. The whole
is vanished like a shade. Pictures, heroes, glory,
freedom, all are fled; nothing remains but the
Bourbons and the French people !
There is undoubtedly a sensation in travelling
into foreign parts that is to be had nowhere else ;
but it is more pleasing at the time than lasting.
It is too remote from our habitual associations to
be a common topic of discourse or reference, and,
like a dream or another state of existence, does not
piece into our daily modes of life. It is an animated
but a momentary hallucination. It demands an
effort to exchange our actual for our ideal identity ;
and to feel the pulse of our old transports revive
very keenly, we must “ jump ” all our present
comforts and connections. Our romantic and
itinerant character is not to be domesticated.
Dr. Johnson remarked how little foreign travel
added to the facilities of conversation in those who
had been abroad. In fact, the time we have
spent there is both delightful and, in one sense,
instructive ; but it appears to be cut out of our
substantial downright existence, and never to
join kindly unto it. We are not the same, but
another, and perhaps more enviable, individual
all the time we are out of our own country. We
are lost to ourselves as well as to our friend. So
the poet somewhat quaintly sings :
“ Out of my country and myself I go.”
Those who wish to forget painful thoughts do
well to absent themselves for a while from the ties
�ON GOING A JOURNEY
o<
and objects that recall them : but we can be said
only to fulfil our destiny in the place that gave us
birth. I should on this account like well enough
to spend the whole of my life in travelling abroad,
if I could anywhere borrow another life to spend
afterwards at home
I
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Victorian Blogging
Description
An account of the resource
A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Conway Hall Library & Archives
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018
Publisher
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
Pamphlet
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
In praise of walking : Thoreau, Whitman, Burroughs, Hazlitt
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Thoreau, Henry David [1817-1862]
Whitman, Walt [1819-1892]
Burroughs, John [1837-1921]
Hazlitt, William [1778-1830]
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: London
Collation: 89, [7] p. ; 17 cm.
Series title: Simple life series
Series number: No. 20
Notes: Part of the NSS pamphlet collection. Signature on half-title page: 'E.J. Taylor'. Publisher's list on unnumbered pages at the end. Annotations in pencil. Printed by Butler & Tanner, Selwood Printing Works, Frome and London.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Arthur C. Fifield
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1905
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
N640
Subject
The topic of the resource
Walking
Nature
Health
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (In praise of walking : Thoreau, Whitman, Burroughs, Hazlitt), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
Format
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application/pdf
Type
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Text
Language
A language of the resource
English
NSS
Walking