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 been near you I believe you have imparted to
yourselves, and now would impart the same secretly to me,
From the living and the dead I think you have peopled your
impassive surfaces, and the spirits thereof would be evident and
amicable with me.
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.
O highway I travel! O public road! 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?
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 conceived in the open air,
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.
From this hour, freedom!
From this hour I ordain myself loosed of limits and imaginary
lines!
Going where I list--my own master, total and absolute,
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 air,
The east and the west are mine, and the north and the south are
mine.
I am larger 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,
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.
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 overwhelms 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,
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 eyeballs?
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?
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?
The efflux of the soul is happiness, here is happiness.
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 themselves, than it sprouts fresh and sweet
continually 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.
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 beautiful 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.
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 elements,
Health, defiance, gaiety, self-esteem, curiosity;
Allons! from all formulas!
From your formulas, O bat-eyed and materialistic priests.
The stale cadaver blocks up the passage--the burial waits no
longer.
Allons! 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.)
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 destin'd, you hardly
settle yourself to satisfaction 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.
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,
HabituÈs of many distant countries, habituÈs 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 baby-days,
Journeyers gaily with their own youth, journeyers with their
bearded and well-grain'd manhood,
Journeyers with their womanhood, ample, unsurpass'd, content,
Journeyers with their own sublime old age, of manhood or womanhood,
Old age, calm, expanded, broad with the haughty breadth of the
universe,
Old age, flowing free with the delicious near-by freedom of death.
Allons! to that which is endless as it was beginningless,
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 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.
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, proud, fond, sick, accepted by men, rejected by men,
They go! they go! I know that they go, but I 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.
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 upright, 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.
Allons! through struggles and wars!
The goal that was named cannot be countermanded.
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 something 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.
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?
_Walt Whitman._
Walking Tours
It must not be imagined that a walking tour, as some would have us
fancy, is merely a better or worse way of seeing the country. There
are many ways of seeing landscape quite as good; and none more vivid,
in spite of canting dilettantes, than from a railway train. But
landscape on a walking tour is quite accessory. He who is indeed of the
brotherhood does not voyage in quest of the picturesque, but of certain
jolly humours--of the hope and spirit with which the march begins at
morning, and the peace and spiritual repletion of the evening's rest.
He cannot tell whether he puts his knapsack on, or takes it off, with
more delight. The excitement of the departure puts him in key for that
of the arrival. Whatever he does is not only a reward in itself, but
will be further rewarded in the sequel; and so pleasure leads on to
pleasure in an endless chain. It is this that so few can understand;
they will either be always lounging or always at five miles an hour;
they do not play off the one against the other, prepare all day for the
evening, and all evening for the next day. And, above all, it is here
that your overwalker fails of comprehension. His heart rises against
those who drink their curaÁoa in liqueur glasses, when he himself can
swill it in a brown john. He will not believe that the flavour is more
delicate in the smaller dose. He will not believe that to walk this
unconscionable distance is merely to stupefy and brutalise himself,
and come to his inn, at night, with a sort of frost on his five wits,
and a starless night of darkness in his spirit. Not for him the mild
luminous evening of the temperate walker! He has nothing left of man
but a physical need for bedtime and a double nightcap; and even his
pipe, if he be a smoker, will be savourless and disenchanted. It is
the fate of such an one to take twice as much trouble as is needed to
obtain happiness, and miss the happiness in the end; he is the man of
the proverb, in short, who goes further and fares worse.
Now, to be properly enjoyed, a walking tour should be gone upon alone.
If you go in a company, or even in pairs, it is no longer a walking
tour in anything but name; it is something else and more in the nature
of a picnic. A walking tour should be gone upon alone, because freedom
is of the essence; because you should be able to stop and go on, and
follow this way or that, as the freak takes you; and because you must
have your own pace, and neither trot alongside a champion walker, nor
mince in time with a girl. And then you must be open to all impressions
and let your thoughts take colour from what you see. You should be as a
pipe for any wind to play upon. "I cannot see the wit," says Hazlitt,
"of walking and talking at the same time. When I am in the country,
I wish to vegetate like the country," which is the gist of all that
can be said upon the matter. There should be no cackle of voices at
your elbow, to jar on the meditative silence of the morning. And so
long as a man is reasoning he cannot surrender himself to that fine
intoxication that comes of much motion in the open air, that begins in
a sort of dazzle and sluggishness of the brain, and ends in a peace
that passes comprehension.
During the first day or so of any tour there are moments of bitterness,
when the traveller feels more than coldly towards his knapsack, when he
is half in a mind to throw it bodily over the hedge and, like Christian
on a similar occasion, "give three leaps and go on singing." And yet
it soon acquires a property of easiness. It becomes magnetic; the
spirit of the journey enters into it. And no sooner have you passed
the straps over your shoulder than the lees of sleep are cleared from
you, you pull yourself together with a shake, and fall at once into
your stride. And surely, of all possible moods, this, in which a man
takes the road, is the best. Of course, if he _will_ keep thinking of
his anxieties, if he _will_ open the merchant Abudah's chest and walk
arm in arm with the hag--why, wherever he is, and whether he walk fast
or slow, the chances are that he will not be happy. And so much the
more shame to himself! There are perhaps thirty men setting forth at
that same hour, and I would lay a large wager there is not another dull
face among the thirty. It would be a fine thing to follow, in a coat of
darkness, one after another of these wayfarers, some summer morning,
for the first few miles upon the road. This one, who walks fast, with
a keen look in his eyes, is all concentrated in his own mind; he is up
at his loom, weaving and weaving, to set the landscape to words. This
one peers about, as he goes, among the grasses; he waits by the canal
to watch the dragon-flies; he leans on the gate of the pasture, and
cannot look enough upon the complacent kine. And here comes another
talking, laughing, and gesticulating to himself. His face changes from
time to time, as indignation flashes from his eyes or anger clouds his
forehead. He is composing articles, delivering orations, and conducting
the most impassioned interviews, by the way. A little farther on, and
it is as like as not he will begin to sing. And well for him, supposing
him to be no great master in that art, if he stumble across no stolid
peasant at a corner; for on such an occasion, I scarcely know which
is the more troubled, or whether it is worse to suffer the confusion
of your troubadour or the unfeigned alarm of your clown. A sedentary
population, accustomed, besides, to the strange mechanical bearing of
the common tramp, can in no wise explain to itself the gaiety of these
passers-by. I knew one man who was arrested as a runaway lunatic,
because, although a full-grown person with a red beard, he skipped as
he went like a child. And you would be astonished if I were to tell you
all the grave and learned heads who have confessed to me that, when on
walking tours, they sang--and sang very ill--and had a pair of red ears
when, as described above, the inauspicious peasant plumped into their
arms from round a corner. And here, lest you think I am exaggerating,
is Hazlitt's own confession, from his essay "On going a Journey," which
is so good that there should be a tax levied on all who have not read
it:--
"Give me the clear blue sky over my head," says he, "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."
Bravo! After that adventure of my friend with the policeman, you would
not have cared, would you, to publish that in the first person? But
we have no bravery nowadays, and, even in books, must all pretend to
be as dull and foolish as our neighbours. It was not so with Hazlitt.
And notice how learned he is (as, indeed, throughout the essay) in the
theory of walking tours. He is none of your athletic men in purple
stockings, who walk their fifty miles a day: three hours' march is his
ideal. And then he must have a winding road, the epicure!
Yet there is one thing I object to in these words of his, one thing
in the great master's practice that seems to me not wholly wise.
I do not approve of that leaping and running. Both of these hurry
the respiration; they both shake up the brain out of its glorious
open-air confusion; and they both break the pace. Uneven walking is
not so agreeable to the body, and it distracts and irritates the mind.
Whereas, when once you have fallen into an equable stride, it requires
no conscious thought from you to keep it up, and yet it prevents you
from thinking earnestly of anything else. Like knitting, like the work
of a copying clerk, it gradually neutralises and sets to sleep the
serious activity of the mind. We can think of this or that, lightly and
laughingly, as a child thinks, or as we think in a morning doze; we
can make puns or puzzle out acrostics, and trifle in a thousand ways
with words or rhymes; but when it comes to honest work, when we come to
gather ourselves together for an effort, we may sound the trumpet as
loud and long as we please; the great barons of the mind will not rally
to the standard, but sit, each one, at home, warming his hands over his
own fire and brooding on his own private thought!
In the course of a day's walk, you see, there is much variance in
the mood. From the exhilaration of the start, to the happy phlegm of
the arrival, the change is certainly great. As the day goes on, the
traveller moves from the one extreme towards the other. He becomes more
and more incorporated with the material landscape, and the open-air
drunkenness grows upon him with great strides, until he posts along
the road, and sees everything about him, as in a cheerful dream. The
first is certainly brighter, but the second stage is the more peaceful.
A man does not make so many articles towards the end, nor does he
laugh aloud; but the purely animal pleasures, the sense of physical
well-being, the delight of every inhalation, of every time the muscles
tighten down the thigh, console him for the absence of the others, and
bring him to his destination still content.
Nor must I forget to say a word on bivouacs. You come to a milestone on
a hill, or some place where deep ways meet under trees; and off goes
the knapsack, and down you sit to smoke a pipe in the shade. You sink
into yourself, and the birds come round and look at you, and your smoke
dissipates upon the afternoon under the blue dome of heaven; and the
sun lies warm upon your feet, and the cool air visits your neck and
turns aside your open shirt. If you are not happy, you must have an
evil conscience. You may dally as long as you like by the roadside. It
is almost as if the millennium were arrived, when we shall throw our
clocks and watches over the housetop, and remember time and seasons no
more. Not to keep hours for a lifetime is, I was going to say, to live
for ever. You have no idea, unless you have tried it, how endlessly
long is a summer's day, that you measure out only by hunger, and bring
to an end only when you are drowsy. I know a village where there are
hardly any clocks, where no one knows more of the days of the week
than by a sort of instinct for the _fÍte_ on Sundays, and where only
one person can tell you the day of the month, and she is generally
wrong; and if people were aware how slow Time journeyed in that
village, and what armfuls of spare hours he gives, over and above the
bargain, to its wise inhabitants, I believe there would be a stampede
out of London, Liverpool, Paris, and a variety of large towns, where
the clocks lose their heads, and shake the hours out each one faster
than the other, as though they were all in a wager. And all these
foolish pilgrims would each bring his own misery along with him, in a
watch-pocket! It is to be noticed, there were no clocks and watches in
the much-vaunted days before the flood. It follows, of course, there
were no appointments, and punctuality was not yet thought upon. "Though
ye take from a covetous man all his treasure," says Milton, "he has
yet one jewel left; ye cannot deprive him of his covetousness." And
so I would say of a modern man of business, you may do what you will
for him, put him in Eden, give him the elixir of life--he has still a
flaw at heart, he still has his business habits. Now, there is no time
when business habits are more mitigated than on a walking tour. And so
during these halts, as I say, you will feel almost free.