WALKING

[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 enterprizes. 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 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 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 shot

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 or 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

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 housebred 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 civilisation 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 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.

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.