The gauger walked with willing foot,
And aye the gauger played the flute:
And what should Master Gauger play
But OVER THE HILLS AND FAR AWAY?
Whene’er I buckle on my pack
And foot it gaily in the track,
O pleasant gauger, long since dead,
I hear you fluting on ahead.
You go with me the selfsame way--
The selfsame air for me you play;
For I do think and so do you
It is the tune to travel to.
For who would gravely set his face
To go to this or t’other place?
There’s nothing under Heav’n so blue
That’s fairly worth the travelling to.
On every hand the roads begin,
And people walk with zeal therein;
But wheresoe’er the highways tend,
Be sure there’s nothing at the end.
Then follow you, wherever hie
The travelling mountains of the sky.
Or let the streams in civil mode
Direct your choice upon a road;
For one and all, or high or low,
Will lead you where you wish to go;
And one and all go night and day
OVER THE HILLS AND FAR AWAY!
*****
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.
*****
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.
*****
Nor does the scenery any more affect the thoughts than the thoughts
affect the scenery. We see places through our humours as through
differently-coloured glasses. We are ourselves a term in the equation, a
note of the chord, and make discord or harmony almost at will. There is
no fear for the result, if we can but surrender ourselves sufficiently
to the country that surrounds and follows us, so that we are ever
thinking suitable thoughts or telling ourselves some suitable sort of
story as we go. We become thus, in some sense, a centre of beauty; we
are provocative of beauty, much as a gentle and sincere character is
provocative of sincerity and gentleness in others.
*****
There is nobody under thirty so dead but his heart will stir a little
at sight of a gypsies’ camp. ‘We are not cotton-spinners all;’ or, at
least, not all through. There is some life in humanity yet; and youth
will now and again find a brave word to say in dispraise of riches, and
throw up a situation to go strolling with a knapsack.
*****
I began my little pilgrimage in the most enviable of all humours: that
in which a person, with a sufficiency of money and a knapsack, turns his
back on a town and walks forward into a country of which he knows only
by the vague report of others. Such an one has not surrendered his will
and contracted for the next hundred miles, like a man on a railway. He
may change his mind at every finger-post, and, where ways meet, follow
vague preferences freely and go the low road or the high, choose the
shadow or the sunshine, suffer himself to be tempted by the lane that
turns immediately into the woods, or the broad road that lies open
before him into the distance, and shows him the far-off spires of some
city, or a range of mountain-tops, or a run of sea, perhaps, along a low
horizon. In short, he may gratify his every whim and fancy, without a
pang of reposing conscience, or the least jostle of his self-respect.
It is true, however, that most men do not possess the faculty of free
action, the priceless gift of being able to live for the moment only;
and as they begin to go forward on their journey, they will find that
they have made for themselves new fetters. Slight projects they may have
entertained for a moment, half in jest, become iron laws to them, they
know not why. They will be led by the nose by these vague reports of
which I spoke above; and the mere fact that their informant mentioned
one village and not another will compel their footsteps with
inexplicable power. And yet a little while, yet a few days of this
fictitious liberty, and they will begin to hear imperious voices calling
on them to return; and some passion, some duty, some worthy or unworthy
expectation, will set its hand upon their shoulder and lead them back
into the old paths. Once and again we have all made the experiment. We
know the end of it right well. And yet if we make it for the hundredth
time to-morrow, it will have the same charm as ever; our hearts will
beat and our eyes will be bright, as we leave the town behind us, and
we shall feel once again (as we have felt so often before) that we are
cutting ourselves loose for ever from our whole past life, with all its
sins and follies and circumscriptions, and go forward as a new creature
into a new world.
*****
Herein, I think, lies the chief attraction of railway travel. The speed
is so easy, and the train disturbs so little the scenes through which it
takes us, that our heart becomes full of the placidity and stillness of
the country; and while the body is borne forward in the flying chain
of carriages, the thoughts alight, as the humour moves them, at
unfrequented stations; they make haste up the poplar alley that leads
towards town; they are left behind with the signalman as, shading his
eyes with his hand, he watches the long train sweep away into the golden
distance.
*****
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. ... If the evening be fine and warm, there is nothing better in
life than to lounge before the inn door in the sunset, or lean over the
parapet of the bridge, to watch the weeds and the quick fishes. It is
then, if ever, that you taste joviality to the full significance of that
audacious word. Your muscles are so agreeably slack, you feel so clean
and so strong and so idle, that whether you move or sit still, whatever
you do is done with pride and a kingly sort of pleasure. You fall in
talk with any one, wise or foolish, drunk or sober. And it seems as if
a hot walk purged you, more than of anything else, of all narrowness and
pride, and left curiosity to play its part freely, as in a child or a
man of science. You lay aside all your own hobbies to watch provincial
humours develop themselves before you, now as a laughable farce, and now
grave and beautiful like an old tale.
*****
It is almost as if the millennium were arrived, when we shall throw our
clocks and watches over the housetops, 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 fete 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!
*****
The bed was made, the room was fit,
By punctual eve the stars were lit;
The air was still, the water ran;
No need there was for maid or man,
When we put us, my ass and I,
At God’s green caravanserai.
*****
To wash in one of God’s rivers in the open air seems to me a sort of
cheerful solemnity or semi-pagan act of worship. To dabble among dishes
in a bedroom may perhaps make clean the body; but the imagination takes
no share in such a cleansing.
*****
I own I like definite form in what my eyes are to rest upon; and if
landscapes were sold, like the sheets of characters of my boyhood, one
penny plain and twopence coloured, I should go the length of twopence
every day of my life.
*****
There should be some myth (but if there is, I know it not) founded on
the shivering of the reeds. There are not many things in nature more
striking to man’s eye. It is such an eloquent pantomime of terror; and
to see such a number of terrified creatures taking sanctuary in every
nook along the shore is enough to infect a silly human with alarm.
Perhaps they are only a-cold, and no wonder, standing waist deep in the
stream. Or, perhaps, they have never got accustomed to the speed and
fury of the river’s flux, or the miracle of its continuous body. Pan
once played upon their forefathers; and so, by the hands of his river,
he still plays upon these later generations down all the valley of the
Oise; and plays the same air, both sweet and shrill, to tell us of the
beauty and the terror of the world.
The reeds might nod their heads in warning, and with tremulous gestures
tell how the river was as cruel as it was strong and cold, and how death
lurked in the eddy underneath the willows. But the reeds had to stand
where they were; and those who stand still are always timid advisers.
*****
The wholeday was showery, with occasional drenching plumps. We were
soaked to the skin, then partially dried in the sun, then soaked once
more. But there were some calm intervals, and one notably, when we were
skirting the forest of Mormal, a sinister name to the ear, but a
place most gratifying to sight and smell. It looked solemn along the
riverside, drooping its boughs into the water, and piling them up aloft
into a wall of leaves. What is a forest but a city of nature’s own, full
of hardy and innocuous living things, where there is nothing dead and
nothing made with the hands, but the citizens themselves are the houses
and public monuments? There is nothing so much alive and yet so quiet
as a woodland; and a pair of people, swinging past in canoes, feel very
small and bustling by comparison.
I wish our way had always lain among woods. Trees are the most civil
society. An old oak that has been growing where he stands since before
the Reformation, taller than many spires, more stately than the greater
part of mountains, and yet a living thing, liable to sicknesses and
death, like you and me: is not that in itself a speaking lesson in
history? But acres on acres full of such patriarchs contiguously
rooted, their green tops billowing in the wind, their stalwart
younglings pushing up about their knees; a whole forest, healthy and
beautiful, giving colour to the light, giving perfume to the air; what
is this but the most imposing piece in nature’s repertory?
*****
But indeed it is not so much for its beauty that the forest makes a
claim upon men’s hearts, as for that subtle something, that quality of
the air, that emanation from the old trees, that so wonderfully changes
and renews a weary spirit.
*****
With all this in mind, I have often been tempted to put forth the
paradox that any place is good enough to live a life in, while it is
only in a few, and those highly favoured, that we can pass a few hours
agreeably. For, if we only stay long enough, we become at home in
the neighbourhood. Reminiscences spring up, like flowers, about
uninteresting corners. We forget to some degree the superior loveliness
of other places, and fall into a tolerant and sympathetic spirit which
is its own reward and justification.
*****
For when we are put down in some unsightly neighbourhood, and especially
if we have come to be more or less dependent on what we see, we must set
ourselves to hunt out beautiful things with all the ardour and patience
of a botanist after a rare plant. Day by day we perfect ourselves in
the art of seeing nature more favourably. We learn to live with her, as
people learn to live with fretful or violent spouses: we dwell lovingly
on what is good, and shut our eyes against all that is bleak or
inharmonious. We learn, also, to come to each place in the right spirit.
The traveller, as Brantome quaintly tells us, ‘fait des discours en soi
pour se soutenir en chemin.’
*****
There is no end, indeed, to making books or experiments, or to travel,
or to gathering wealth. Problem gives rise to problem. We may study
for ever, and we are never as learned as we would. We have never made a
statue worthy of our dreams. And when we have discovered a continent,
or crossed a chain of mountains, it is only to find another ocean or
another plain upon the farther side. In the infinite universe there is
room for our swiftest diligence and to spare. It is not like the works
of Carlyle, which can be read to an end. Even in a corner of it, in a
private park, or in the neighbourhood of a single hamlet, the weather
and the seasons keep so deftly changing that although we walk there for
a lifetime there will be always something to startle and delight us.
*****
It is in virtue of his own desires and curiosities that any man
continues to exist with even patience, that he is charmed by the look
of things and people, and that he wakens every morning with a renewed
appetite for work and pleasure. Desire and curiosity are the two eyes
through which he sees the world in the most enchanted colours: it is
they that make women beautiful or fossils interesting: and the man
may squander his estate and come to beggary, but if he keeps these two
amulets he is still rich in the possibilities of pleasure.
*****
To look on the happy side of nature is common, in their hours, to all
created things. Some are vocal under a good influence, are pleasing
whenever they are pleased, and hand on their happiness to others, as a
child who, looking upon lovely things, looks lovely. Some leap to the
strains with unapt foot, and make a halting figure in the universal
dance. And some, like sour spectators at the play, receive the music
into their hearts with an unmoved countenance, and walk like strangers
through the general rejoicing. But let him feign never so carefully,
there is not a man but has his pulses shaken when Pan trolls out a stave
of ecstasy and sets the world a-singing.
*****
Science writes of the world as if with the cold finger of a starfish;
it is all true; but what is it when compared to the reality of which
it discourses? where hearts beat high in April, and death strikes, and
hills totter in the earthquake, and there is a glamour over all the
objects of sight, and a thrill in all noises for the ear, and Romance
herself has made her dwelling among men? So we come back to the old
myth, and hear the goat-footed piper making the music which is itself
the charm and terror of things; and when a glen invites our visiting
footsteps, fancy that Pan leads us thither with a gracious tremolo; or
when our hearts quail at the thunder of the cataract, tell ourselves
that he has stamped his hoof in the nigh thicket.
*****
The Greeks figured Pan, the god of Nature, now terribly stamping his
foot, so that armies were dispersed; now by the woodside on a summer
noon trolling on his pipe until he charmed the hearts of upland
ploughmen. And the Greeks, in so figuring, uttered the last word of
human experience. To certain smoke-dried spirits matter and motion and
elastic ethers, and the hypothesis of this or that other spectacled
professor, tell a speaking story; but for youth and all ductile and
congenial minds, Pan is not dead, but of all the classic hierarchy alone
survives in triumph; goat-footed, with a gleeful and an angry look, the
type of the shaggy world: and in every wood, if you go with a spirit
properly prepared, you shall hear the note of his pipe.
*****
To leave home in early life is to be stunned and quickened with
novelties; but when years have come, it only casts a more endearing
light upon the past. As in those composite photographs of Mr. Galton’s,
the image of each new sitter brings out but the more clearly the central
features of the race; when once youth has flown, each new impression
only deepens the sense of nationality and the desire of native places.
So may some cadet of Royal Ecossais or the Albany Regiment, as he
mounted guard about French citadels, so may some officer marching his
company of the Scots-Dutch among the polders, have felt the soft rains
of the Hebrides upon his brow, or started in the ranks at the remembered
aroma of peat-smoke. And the rivers of home are dear in particular
to all men. This is as old as Naaman, who was jealous for Abana and
Pharpar; it is confined to no race nor country, for I know one of
Scottish blood but a child of Suffolk, whose fancy still lingers about
the hued lowland waters of that shire.
*****