[1862.]
I 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 champions of civilization: the
minister and the school-committee, and every one of you will take care
of that.
I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who
understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks,—who had a
genius, so to speak, for _sauntering_: which word is beautifully
derived “from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle
Ages, and asked charity, under pretence of going _à la Sainte Terre_”
to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, “There goes 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
vagabonds; but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense,
such as I mean. Some, however, 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
expeditions 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, perchance, 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 companion 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 honorable 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, moat of my townsmen would fain walk sometimes, as I do, but
they cannot. No wealth can buy the requisite leisure, freedom, and
independence, 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 townsmen, 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 reminiscence of a previous state of existence, when
even they were foresters and outlaws.
“When he came to grene wode,
In a mery mornynge,
There he herde the notes small
Of byrdes mery syngynge.
“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 sometimes 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 neighbors who confine
themselves 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 can sit down cheerfully at this hour in the afternoon 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 antiquated 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 probably
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 forever 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 an hour.
But the walking of which I speak has nothing in it akin to taking
exercise, as it is called, as the sick take medicine at stated
hours,—as the swinging 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 labor 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 experience. There will be so much the more air and sunshine
in our thoughts. The callous palms of the laborer are conversant with
finer tissues of self-respect and heroism, whose touch thrills the
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 morning 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 together,
I have not yet exhausted them. An absolutely new prospect is a great
happiness, and I can still get this any afternoon. Two or three hours’
walking will carry me to as strange a country as I expect ever to see.
A single farmhouse 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 capabilities 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 post-hole 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 Darkness 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 their burrows. Man
and his affairs, church and state and school, trade and commerce, and
manufactures 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 got 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 themselves.
Some do not walk at all; others walk in the highways; a few walk across
lots. Roads are 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 Atnericus 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.
However, there are a few old roads that may be trodden with profit, as
if they led somewhere now that they are nearly discontinued. There is
the Old Marlborough Road, which does not go to Marlborough now,
methinks, unless that is Marlborough where it carries me. I am the
bolder to speak of it here, because I presume that there are one or two
such roads in every town.