As morning grew towards noon, and the sun gained power, that

[Transcriber's Note: In the following text underlines are used as

delimiter for _italics_ and # as delimiter for #bold#.

The original text has been kept, except the following modifications:

Page 40 "inchaote" has been changed to "inchoate".

Page 83 "maestoso" has been set in italics.

Page 123 "ennui" has been set in italics.]

OF WALKS AND

WALKING TOURS

[Illustration]

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

#GOLDWIN SMITH#

#His Life and Opinions#

Illustrated with many Important Portraits

Demy 8vo, cloth gilt. #18#s. net

"A thoroughly readable book."--_London Times._

"Of its human and literary interest we could hardly speak too

highly."--_Birmingham Post._

UNIFORM WITH THE ABOVE

#THE CORRESPONDENCE OF GOLDWIN SMITH#

Illustrated with many Important Portraits

Demy 8vo, cloth gilt. #18#s. net.

_All Rights Reserved_

[Illustration: ON THE BANKS OF THE RHONE.]

OF WALKS AND

WALKING TOURS

_An Attempt to find a Philosophy

and a Creed_

BY

ARNOLD HAULTAIN

Author of "Hints for Lovers"

"The Mystery of Golf"

"Goldwin Smith: His Life and Opinions"

Etc.

[Illustration]

LONDON

T. WERNER LAURIE LTD.

8 ESSEX STREET, STRAND

1914

"_De naturâ Rationis est res sub quâdam

aeternitatis specie percipere._"

--Spinoza, _Ethics_, Part II.,

Proposition xliv., Corollary ii.

PREFACE

The writing of this little book has given me a great deal of pleasure.

That is why I hope that, here and there, it may give pleasure to others.

And yet it was not an easy task. Nature's lessons are hard to learn.

Harder still is it to translate Nature's lessons to others. Besides, the

appeal of Nature is to the Emotions; and words are weak things (save in

the hands of a great Poet) by which to convey or to evoke emotion. Words

seem to be the vehicles rather of ratiocination than of emotion. Is not

even the Poet driven to link words to music? And always _le mot juste_,

the exact word, is so difficult to find! Yet found it must be if the

appeal is to avail.

* * * * *

If, in these pages, there are scattered speculations semi-mystical,

semi-intelligible, perhaps even transcending the boundaries of rigid

logic, I must simply aver that I put in writing that only which was

given me to say. How or whence it came, I do not know.--And this,

notwithstanding (or, perhaps, in a way, corroborative of) my own belief

that no thought is autogenous, but has parents and a pedigree.

I have tried, quite humbly, to follow, as motto, the sentence chosen

from Spinoza. Yet, with that sentence always should be read this

other, taken from Pascal: "_La dernière démarche de la raison,

c'est de reconnaître qu'il y a une infinité de choses qui la

surpassent._"--Always emotion, imagination, feeling, faith, try to soar

above reason; and always they feel the inadequacy of words.

I have incorporated in this book some parts of my "Two Country Walks in

Canada"--now long out of print (itself comprising an article from _The

Nineteenth Century_ and another from _Blackwood's_); also (with the

permission of the editor) an article in _The Atlantic Monthly Magazine_;

and Sections 22 and 23 first appeared in _The Canadian Magazine_.

Geneva, 1914.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

I. Golf and Walking 1

II. The Essence of a Walk 5

III. Notable Walkers 9

IV. My Earliest Walks 15

V. India 17

VI. English Byways 21

VII. A Spring Morning in England 25

VIII. Autumn Reveries 29

IX. Spirituality of Nature 34

X. Practical Transcendentalism 40

XI. Spring in Canada 45

XII. Autumn in Canada 53

XIII. Winter in Canada 59

XIV. The Mood for Walking 72

XV. Evening Meditations 78

XVI. The Unity of Nature 91

XVII. The Instinct for Walking 103

XVIII. A Woeful Walk 105

XIX. Autumn in Canada again 107

XX. The Walking Tour 133

XXI. The Tramp's Dietary 140

XXII. Practical Details 152

XXIII. The Beauty of Landscape 159

XXIV. Warnings to the Over-Zealous 180

XXV. How that all points to the

Infinite 188

XXVI. The Pleasures of Walking 198

XXVII. Is Walking Selfish? 216

XXVIII. The Pæan of Being 223

Index 227

OF WALKS AND WALKING TOURS

I

Golf and Walking

§ 1

Many are the indictments which are brought against Golf: that it is a

deplorable waster of time; that it depletes the purse; that it divorces

husband and wife; that it delays the dinner-hour, freckles fair feminine

faces, upsets domestic arrangements, and unhinges generally the mental

balance of its devotees. Yet perhaps to each of such charges Golf can

enter a plea. It repays expenditure of time and money with interest

in the form of health and good spirits. If it acts the part of

co-respondent it is always open to the petitioner to espouse the game.

If it keeps men and women away from work and home, at least it keeps

them out on the breezy links and dispels for a time the cares of the

office or the kitchen. If it tans--well, it tans, and a tanned face

needs no paint, and is, moreover, beautiful to look upon. Nevertheless,

one indictment there is against which it is not in the power of Golf

to enter a plea. It has killed the country walk. "A country walk!"

exclaimed a fellow-golfer to me the other day. "I have not taken a

country walk since I began to play."

There are, I know, who affect to believe that Golf consists of country

walks, diversified and embellished by pauses made for the purpose of

impelling little round balls into little round holes; that mind and eye

are occupied chiefly with the beauties of Nature, and that the impulsion

of the insignificant sphere into the insignificant void is, as it were,

but a sop to Cerberus, or a cock sacrificed to the Æsculapius of

this sporting age. "How greatly," said to me once a fair and innocent

stranger to my links--"how greatly this beautiful landscape must enhance

the pleasure of your game!" _O sancta simplicitas!_ Far be it from me to

explain that as a rule the horrid golfer only drank in the beauties of

that landscape when the game was over, and he was, perchance, occupied

in performing a similar operation upon the contents of a tumbler at his

elbow as he reclined in an arm-chair on the verandah.--And yet, and yet,

our links _are_ beautiful, and one and all of us their frequenters know

and appreciate to the full their beauty; but _not_, I think, at the

moment of "addressing the ball."--No; Golf is Golf; a country walk is

quite another thing; and the one, I maintain, has killed the other.

II

The Essence of a Walk

§ 2

For, mark you, the essence of a country walk is that you shall have no

object or aim whatsoever. The frame of mind in which one ought to set

out upon a rural peregrination should be one of absolute mental vacuity.

Almost one ought to rid oneself, if so be that were possible, even of

the categories of time and place: for to start with a determination to

cover a certain distance within a specified time is to take, not a walk,

but a "constitutional"; and of all abortions or monstrosities of country

walks, commend me to the constitutional. The proper frame of mind is

that of absolute and secure passivity; an openness to impressions; a

giving-up of ourselves to the great and guiding influences of benignant

Nature; a humble receptivity of soul; a wondering and childlike

eagerness--not a restless and too inquisitive eagerness--to learn all

that great Nature may like to teach, and to learn it in the way that

great Nature would have us learn.

Yet, true, though we take with us a vacuous mind, it must be a plenable

mind (if I may coin the word), a serenely responsive mind; otherwise we

shall not reap the harvest of a quiet eye.

"How bountiful is Nature! he shall find

Who seeks not; and to him who hath not asked

Large measure shall be dealt,"

sings Wordsworth; and of Nature and of Nature's ways no one had a

greater right to sing. Wordsworth must have been an ideal country

walker. "The Excursion" is the harvest of innumerable walks, and when

Wordsworth depicts the Wanderer he depicts himself:

"In the woods

A lone Enthusiast, and among the fields,

Itinerant in this labour, he had passed

The better portion of his time; and there

Spontaneously had his affections thriven

Amid the bounties of the year, the peace

And liberty of Nature; there he kept,

In solitude and solitary thought,

His mind in a just equipoise of love."

Only, "the w . . . w . . . worst of W . . . W . . . Wordsworth is," as a

stammering friend of mine once remarked, "is, he is so d . . . d . . .

d . . . desperate p . . . pensive." (I was expecting a past participle,

not an ungrammatical adverb for the "d.")--He is; and like, yet unlike,

Falstaff, he is not only pensive in himself, but he is the cause of

pensiveness in other things--to wit, his "stars," his "citadels," and

what not; and certainly his diary of "A Tour in Scotland" makes the

driest reading I know.--Nevertheless, Wordsworth must have been an ideal

country walker. He was

"A lover of the meadows and the woods,

And mountains; and of all that we behold

From this green earth";

and if we would understand him, we ourselves must

"Let the moon

Shine on us in our solitary walk;

And let the misty mountain winds be free

To blow against us."

III

Notable Walkers

§ 3

All great souls, I venture to think, were at some period of their

lives walkers in the country. Jesus of Nazareth spent forty days in the

wilderness, and the three years of his mission were, we know, spent

in unceasing wandering. And whose heart does not burn within him as he

reads the moving narrative of that seven-mile country walk which he took

with two of his disciples to the village called Emmaus? It was after a

forty days' solitary sojourn on Mount Sinai, too, so we are told, that

Moses came down armed with the Decalogue; and was it not after a similar

Ramadan retreat that Mohammed returned with the novel doctrine that

there was no God but God? Enoch, we know, walked with God; and it is a

childish fancy of mine which I am loath to relinquish that God took him,

and that he was not, for because he was so delectable a companion. Of a

surety the Sweet Singer of Israel must have wandered much in the green

pastures and by the still waters; he who kept his father's sheep; who

slew both the lion and the bear; who sang the high hills, a refuge for

the wild goats, and the rocks for the conies.--Indeed, if one comes to

think of it, how much literature owes to the country walk! It was to

that long walk outside the wall of Athens, and to the long talk that

Socrates held with Phædrus under the plane-tree by the banks of the

Ilissus, that we owe one of the most beautiful of the Dialogues of

Plato. There had been no Georgics had not Virgil loved the country.

Horace must as often have circumambulated his Sabine farm as he

perambulated the Via Sacra. Chaucer must sometimes have pilgrimed afoot,

and Spenser, trod as well as pricked o'er the plain. Shakespeare's

poaching episode gives us a glimpse into his youthful pursuits. Milton

"oft the woods among wooed Philomel to hear her evensong"; and even

after his blindness "not the more ceased he to wander where the Muses

haunt clear spring, or shady grove, or sunny hill." "The Traveller"

of Goldsmith was the outcome of a walking tour; so was Robert Louis

Stevenson's "Travels in the Cévennes with a Donkey". To how many minds

walks about the green flat meads of Oxford have been a quiet stimulant

we may get a hint from more than one of Matthew Arnold's poems. Was

it to Newman that Jowett, meeting him alone and afoot, put the query:

"_Nunquam minus solus quam quum solus?_" Of Jowett's walks many a tale

is told. Of De Quincey, who spent his youth in wanderings; of William

Cowper, the gentle singer of the "Winter Walk"; of Thoreau[1]; of

Mr John Burroughs[2]; of Richard Jefferies[3]; of Mr Hamilton Wright

Mabie,[4] the discoverer of the Forest of Arden; of Mr Henry Van Dyke[5]

who would be, I warrant me, an incomparable companion for a walk,

and whose books make the pent-up sigh for the open; of "A Son of the

Marshes"[6]; of Dr Charles C. Abbott,[7] that indefatigable Wasteland

Wanderer; of Mr Charles Goodrich Whiting,[8] the Saunterer; of that

prince of walkers, of whom _The Spectator_ said it was "half a pity

that such a man could not go walking about for ever, for the benefit of

people who are not gifted with legs so stout and eyes so discerning,"

I mean that erudite nomad, George Borrow[9]; of Senancour, who in his

journeys afoot experienced _illusions imposantes_[10]; of Sir Leslie

Stephen[11]--of these and many another lover of outdoor Nature it is

needless to speak.

IV

My Earliest Walks

§ 4

The earliest walks which my own memory recalls were rather curious ones.

We were in Burma, a country in which, in the dry season, exercise must

be taken about daybreak or sundown, or not at all. We walked--and before

breakfast; and always we were accompanied by a pet cat, a sharp-nosed

"toddy-cat" (so they called him), indigenous to the country, and not

unlike the American raccoon, very affectionate and very cleanly. But

the cat was not our only companion, for just overhead, screaming

threateningly, were always also, and all the way, a flock of kites--the

mortal enemies, so I must suppose, of Hokey-Pokey (thus was named our

'coon-cat pet).--Now I come to think of it, it must have been a funny

sight: a family afoot; in the rear an impudent cat with tail erect;

overhead irate and clamorous kites.

V

India

§ 5

My next walks were on the Nilgiris, the Blue Mountains of India.

Ah, they were beautiful! The seven or eight thousand feet of

altitude tempered the tropical sun, the mornings were fresh and

invigorating--your cold bath was really cold, and spring seemed

perennial. Hedges of cluster-roses bloomed the whole year round; on the

orange-trees were leaf, bud, bloom and ripening fruit, also the whole

year round. Heliotrope grew in gigantic bushes that were pruned with

garden clippers. Through the grounds about the house flowed a babbling

brook, widening here and there into quiet ponds, from the sedgy edges

of which green-stemmed arums raised their graceful cups. In the deep

valleys grew the tree-fern; here and there a playful waterfall gushed

from the hill; and everything was green.--No; two things were not green:

the one, the hot and hazy plains, shimmering in yellow dust as seen from

the shoulder of a hill; the other, the gigantic Droog, a mighty mountain

mass rearing its head, sombre and silent, on the other side of a deep

ravine. The Droog was purple: not with the pellucid purple of a petal,

but with the misty blue-black purple of the bloom of a plum.--Ah, it was

all very good. Never shall I forget the convolvulus that decorated

the northern verandah before the heat of day shrivelled the delicate

corollas. There were rich bass purples that stirred one like the tones

of an organ. There were soprano pinks so exquisite that a _pianissimo_

trill on a violin seemed crude in comparison. Their beauty was all but

audible: it penetrated the senses and reached in to some inner subtile

psychic centre, there to move emotions which must remain unsaid.--This

was in India.--There is something perfervid in the fascination of the

East. The West may clutch the thrilled heart with a steely clasp; the

East holds the soul in a passionate embrace.--Ah, India, beloved

India, my first nurse and I trust my last; "not were that submarine,

gem-lighted city mine" would I relinquish hope of seeing thee again,

adored India: old majestic land; land of ancient castes and alien

creeds; land of custom, myth, and magic; land of pungent odours,

stinging tastes, and colours dazzling as the sun; land of mystery, of

pageant, and of pain! Ah, subtile, thralling, luring India!--India

is like Samson's lion: it has been conquered by the young and lusty

Occident, and in its old carcass its conqueror finds both meat and

sweetness;--and it serves for a riddle to others. To complete the

analogy, there are those who are trying to plough with Samson's heifer.

VI

English Byways

§ 6

My next walks were in England. For their size, the British Isles

probably afford the most varied tramping ground of any country in the

world. Within a few hundred miles of radius you get infinite variety:

the rolling downs; the quiet weald; hilly Derbyshire; mountainous Wales;

Devonshire's lanes; the Westmorland or the Cumberland lakes--these for

the seeker of quiet. For the more emprising there is the wild and broken

scenery of the northern isles; and the lover of the homeless sea can

choose any shore to his liking.

§ 7

There is an impression abroad that in England you must confine your

steps to the high-road. That has not been my experience. True, you

must not expect everywhere to be allowed to stalk anywhere across

country--unless you are following the beagles; but, so numerous are the

byways and bridle-paths; so easy has access been made, through centuries

of hereditary ownership, from one field or stile or farm to another; so

generous, too, are so many landlords, that one can travel for many and

many a mile without doing more than cross and recross the road. But true

it is also that, in order to do this, you must know something of the

locality.

* * * * *

One much-hidden entrance to a most sequestered spot I hope I do no wrong

in revealing here.--London stretches out north-west almost to Uxbridge,

nearly twenty miles out--that is, habitations line almost every inch

of the way. After Uxbridge, the road is hard, dry, and comparatively

uninteresting. But, near a cross-road, where is a house on either side,

if you look carefully to the right you will dimly discern, beneath

the shade of low-bending boughs, and almost hidden by these, a simple,

unpretending stile. I recommend you to climb over it, for it is the

entrance to a great, quiet, secluded spot, several acres in extent,

thickly wooded with superb beeches and firs, so thickly wooded that

the sky is invisible and the earth wholly in shade. But for the extreme

kemptness of the underbrush (and the fact that you have just stepped out

of the London road), you might be in a primæval forest of the West. Nor

is this the sum of its beauty. High though it is above the surrounding

country, embosomed in this forest is a lovely lake, exquisite in its

colouring, reflecting, as it does, the cloud-flecked sky, and, all round

its rim, the bending boughs of the beech. Typical of England are this

lake and park. They are private property, of course; but the owner gives

every wayfarer leave of access. Typical of England: tenacious of rights,

yet just, nay, generous, to all.

VII

A Spring Morning in England

§ 8

He who knows not England I will here permit to peep into a page of a

diary giving a glimpse of a morning dawdle on the Sussex Downs:

"Royal Oak Inn,

"Village of Poynings,

"_27th March 18--_, 11.30 A.M.

"The little maid is laying the other half of this table to supply me

with eggs and bacon....

"I got me out of Brighton early, walked through Hassocks and

Hurstpierpoint, and strolled on in any direction that invited (for I had

the whole lovely day to myself), choosing chiefly byways and sequestered

paths approached by stiles.

"The day was superb. The sky, after a rainy night, was a rich deep

blue, and across it sailed great white-grey clouds, the shadows of which

chased each other--albeit solemnly and with dignity--over field

and meadow. The fields, sown with corn already tall, were burnished

green--they shone in the sunlight. The meadows were deeper in colour.

The slopes of the downs changed their hues every moment; every acre

changed, according as it caught the light direct, or through a thin

cloud, or was immersed in shade by a big and thick one. The ditches and

the little banks by the road, out of which the trim hedgerows sprang,

were green with a hundred little plants and weeds--the dock, the nettle,

groundsel, stick-a-bobs, ivy of every hue and shape, mullein, the alder

well in leaf, and the hawthorn here and there in flower.--

"Breakfast over. The most delicious bacon, the freshest of eggs, milk

that might have masqueraded as cream; and all served with the extremity

of respectful civility. A fire smouldering in the hearth; a terrier

longing to make friends; otherwise they shut the door and leave me to

quiet privacy.

"The greenness of the hedges was exquisite. And here and there the

primroses in profusion--and the violets--and birds. England teems with

life. I heard the thrush--'It _is_ Spring! It _is_ Spring! O the joy!

I tell you it is--is--is!' And the blackbirds screaming out of a bush,

pretending to be frightened, but only looking for an excuse to shout.

The ring-doves, really disturbed and rising with noisy wings. The rooks,

lost in real wonderment that anyone should stop and look at them for

five minutes, and 'cawing' and 'cahing' in vociferous interrogation.

Querulous tits, chirping hedge-sparrows, cheeping linnets and

finches--by the hundreds and hundreds."

* * * * *

A mere peep (but a peep photographed on the spot), and giving but a poor

glimpse of a scene the exact like of which you will not get elsewhere

the wide world over.--And, by the way, shouldst ever find thyself

at this self-same village of Poynings, omit not to examine the Early

Perpendicular church;--the alms-box is an ancient thurible.

VIII

Autumn Reveries

§ 9

This was in the spring. Autumn in England is equally lovely. In the new

world--at least in the northern regions--there is a chill in the fall of

the year. The cold north-western winds, cradled amidst palæocrystic ice,

and blowing over tundra and prairie, are untempered by Gulf Stream or

ocean. Untempered, too, by cloud and moisture, they cut keen, and reveal

the leafless landscape in all its bareness. And it may be that they

bring with them the thought that for many months to come that landscape

will be bare indeed--unless covered with a shroud of snow.

Far different is autumn in England--I write (this time) situate in the

basin of the Thames, and for many weeks I have been watching summer

slowly give up its glowing glories in order that other glories, not

less wonderful in colour, may take their place. For England is never

colourless; nay, in England, all through the year, the colours are warm

and sweet and comforting. The very trunks and twigs of the trees are

warm with browns and greens and purples, the result of the mosses and

lichens, minute epiphytic and parasitic vegetation which the humid

climate so greatly fosters. Even brick walls, the stepping-stones in

brooks, wooden palings--everything constructed by man, Nature soon

mellows with a gentle hand; so that, in place of stark and staring

edifices where the bare boards or the dull paint form blotches on the

scene, you have everywhere a great harmony of colour--violets shading

into green; greens gliding into softest yellows; and these again

deepening into warm and beautiful orange and gold and red.

A long, long tramp through beechy Buckinghamshire one day revealed at

every step beauties that filled the eye--and filled the heart. No pen

could do them justice; and, among painters, only the brush of a Corot

could attempt their depicture without depriving them of their exquisite,

their almost evanescent, softness. A great mist lay over the land;

a gentle, noiseless mist that hid from you the horizon and the outer

world; that shut you in from the outer world; lured you into that mood

of quiet reverence in the presence of quiet, wonder-working Nature;

and revealed to you ... I cannot tell all that was revealed. I can only

point to this and that beautiful little thing or vision, themselves but

emblems of a Beauty and a Mystery invisible.

Again I saw the little ivies in the ditches. Again I saw unnumbered

little leaves and stalks and tendrils in the hedges; all, of shape and

texture and colour actually and positively divine. The hedges, a tangle

of twigs thick with a hundred growths, were mighty marvels that no human

clipping and pruning and trimming could diminish. And at every few paces

rose out of these hedges, on either hand, old majestic elms, great in

girth, tall of stature, interlacing their branches high overhead and

making for pygmy me, who walked that winding lane, a wondrous fane in

which to worship.--It was not exactly what one saw with one's bodily eye

that roused worship in that fane. What was it?...

As morning grew towards noon, and the sun gained power, that gentle

mist--so noiseless, like an angel's hand laid soothingly on me and on

all that hemmed me in--the mist mysteriously withdrew itself. But only

to show fresh loveliness. On either hand were meadows, still lush with

grass; or brown and furrowed fields, shot through with the myriad tips

of growing corn; and here and there in scattered heaps lay the rich

leaves of the oak and the elm and the beech, brilliant in their orange

and russet, and here and there lit up, like burnished gold, by glints of

sunshine from between the clouds.

For miles, quiet little scenes like this filled the eye and the

heart--entrancing, exalting, humbling.

Wherein lay the secret of their appeal? Why is it that field and

hedgerow, winding lane and interlacing boughs, strike upon the emotions

of man?

IX

Spirituality of Nature

§ 10

One thing at least is certain. Of this human race, of which each of us

frail and wailing mortals is a fragment, this kindly or unkindly thing

we call "external Nature" is at once the mother, the cradle, and the

home: out of it we came; in it we play; from it we delve our livelihood;

and--to it we go. For it is also our grave. But, unlike the mournful

mounds, so pitilessly ranged in regular rows--as if, 'fore God, to

accentuate the fact that in Death this impotent thing called sapient

man meets at last a uniforming and levelling foe--unlike those mournful

mounds we see in cemeteries, external Nature is a grave out of which

there is a perpetual and unceasing resurrection. Nature is at once the

tomb and the womb of life. What was once soil and rain and sunshine

becomes grass--then hay--then beef or mutton or milk--and, in time,

the very bone and muscle, the very laughter and tears of the child that

plays in those fields. And when bone and muscle lay down that subtle

thing called Life, give up the spirit and lie inert, they enter once

again into the tomb and womb of Nature, and the mighty cycle begins

afresh.

§ 11

And this "spirit" is not a thing apart, a thing outside Nature; breathed

into man at his birth, and wafted to some mythical heaven--or hell--at

his death. Actually and actively in great Nature, manifesting itself as

soil and herb and sunshine, is immanent that which, when metamorphosed

into so-called human Life, manifests itself as feeling, imagination,

emotion, faith. There cannot be anything _in esse_ in Man that was not

aforetime _in posse_ in Nature.

§ 12

Never shall I forget the day upon which--and the walk during

which--there flared upon me like a great and sudden light the fact that

the whole cosmos was _alive_--was Life; that it was not composed of

two dissimilar things: (_a_) a gross and ponderable "matter"; and (_b_)

an immaterial imponderable "mind." There is no such dichotomy in Nature.

All is immaterial, spiritual, living. Every particle in me is alive;

but every particle in me came from Nature; and, as I cannot create

life, life must have existed potentially in those particles. My bodily

mechanism is merely a transmutation of one form of life into another.

What we call "life" is a process; a process kept agoing by (_a_) the

ingestion of surrounding material; and (_b_) the reproduction of the

individual which so ingests.

Look at that field of oats growing there to the right. You will admit,

will you not, that those little green blades just springing from the

soil are actually and veritably the matter of the field in which they

grow? The silicon and phosphorus and oxygen and nitrogen and carbon and

what-not, which were in the air or soil, will by next July be gluten

and protein. If you and I should haggle over the origin of the first

oat-seed, at least if it did not spring from this particular field, it

had not, I take it, any ultra-terrestrial origin.--Or granted it had,

as, I think, Arrhenius argues, that origin was not extra-cosmic: it

came, certainly, from somewhere within this our visible universe. Good!

Let us go back.--The oats then--that is, the gluten and the protein--are

but the matter of soil and air and sunshine in another form. So, then,

is the porridge in your plate. So, then, are _you_, surely. You and I

_are_ this external Nature in another shape; and if we had _n_ senses

and a mind endowed with powers of discernment and of comprehension

_n_thly more powerful than at present, we might be able, not only to

see the process of transformation in its every stage, but--to understand

that matter is immaterial, is spiritual (whatever that word may

connote); and that ourselves, the porridge, the oats, the soil, the

earth--the Cosmos, are, is ... one and a Mystery. In Nature, as in

Man, resides that Spirit of Eternal Things which we call Life: a thing

incomprehensible and divine; transcending thought; one and a unit; one

with the thing that is, and one with that which asks itself what it

is and whence it came; revealing itself under the aspects of time and

space, yet unbounded by time or space; manifesting itself under an

infinitude of forms, yet remaining one and the same; at once the

revealer and the revealed; the thing thought of and the thing that

thinks.

X

Practical Transcendentalism

§ 13

But of what avail are transcendental themes like these for the conduct

and comfort of life? What light are they to our path? To what goal do

they point?

It is not a question that needs to be asked. Were no investigation to be

undertaken, no theories formed, save for some definite and preconceived

purpose, it may be that no new path would be found, no more distant goal

discerned.

And yet these meditations, such as they were, crude in matter, inchoate

in form, mere adumbrations of a truth all too dimly perceived, brought

comfort. Once more they took me away from the trivial and the ephemeral.

Above all, they took me away from the geocentric. So many creeds, so

many religions, pin me down to this little planet. How many earths are

there in the visible heavens? Are there terrestrial sinners on each and

all? If so, for how many deaths did the vicarious mercy of the Almighty

call? And even if we travel outside the realm of Christendom, still we

find our little earth regarded as the centre of thought, the only scene

upon which the great drama of Being is enacted: for so many philosophies

and religions accentuate the isolated existence of individual human

beings, and limit their application to the periphery of this speck in

space.

I like the larger aspect. When we look up to the stars and remember that

they are suns about which probably revolve an infinitude of habitable

earths--earths of every conceivable and inconceivable kind, and peopled

probably with an infinitude of beings--also of every conceivable and

inconceivable kind--some perhaps as gross as we, others breathing airs

of heaven, requiring neither senses nor anatomical organs, enjoying "the

communion of saints" by powers and processes outside the ken of touch or

speech or vision ... we link ourselves with the immensity of Being;

we are not separate little entities trudging a few miles of earth, but

particles of Omnipresent Life, partakers in the history and destiny of

All that Is.

§ 14

There is a practical side, too, to these transcendental themes. For what

is Conscience, that inward monitor which, whatever your creed, bids you

walk thus and not otherwise, that applauds you when you do right, and

shames you when you go wrong? From one point of view, Conscience is the

evolved consensus of mankind, that inherited instinct which declares

that only such actions as subserve the welfare of the race are right,

and that all others are wrong; and that distributes its sanctions

accordingly. From another, and perhaps a rather fanciful, point of view

(and yet one that may appeal to those who look forward to a life after

death and cling to a possibility of communication between dead and

living)--from another point of view, Conscience may be the inaudible

voice of myriads of fellow-creatures like unto ourselves, who, having

passed through the trials and temptations of this life, and viewing this

life from the plane of a life supernal, shout spiritually, warningly,

in our psychic ears when they see us doing the things that brought them

ill. But from another and cosmic point of view, it is that absolute and

categorical imperative which dictates that each attenuated portion of

the All shall act in Unison with the All, in the history and destiny of

which each attenuated portion partakes.

But I digress.

XI

Spring in Canada

§ 15

My next walks were in quite another hemisphere--to wit, in the great and

growing colony of Canada.--From many points of view Canada is one of

the most interesting of countries. From the rank of a somewhat humble

dependency, made up of a heterogeneous collection of provinces, she

has sprung within the last few decades into the rank of a proud and

self-conscious nation. The contrast is notable. Indeed the country is

one of contrasts. Her climate, her scenery, her sentiments, her people,

her politics, all exhibit extremes the most extraordinary. A winter

of Arctic severity is followed by a tropical summer. Within sight of

luxuriant pastures glide stupendous glaciers. Flattest prairies spread

to the feet of mountain ranges the rivals of the Alps; prim fields,

orchards, and vineyards encroach upon primæval forests. Along with the

hardy apple and the far-famed No. 1 Manitoba wheat, this land produces

strawberries, peaches, grapes, and melons. Constitutionally content with

British connexion, her people are intimately influenced by ideas and

manners American. Indeed, her people are as heterogeneous as herself.

The Maritime Provinces of the extreme east hardly call themselves

Canadian; Quebec is French; Ontario is Canadian to the core; so is

Manitoba; in the North-West Territories are settlers from almost every

nationality in Europe; British Columbia, in the extreme west,

again, fights shy of the cognomen Canadian. Newfoundland holds aloof

altogether. A rude and toilsome social life goes hand in hand with

patches of refinement and culture unmistakable. Canadian cheese took

the prize at Chicago; Canadian poetry has been crowned by the Academy.

Lauding democratic institutions to the skies, Radical to the last

degree, Canada nevertheless contains within herself castes and cliques

in their horror of such principles almost rabid. With a political

system the counterpart of the British, her politics are rife with

personalities, election protests, corruption trials.

However, I am not here concerned with political or social tendencies or

delinquencies.

§ 16

Soon after I arrived I betook me, one spring, in my canoe, down the

banks of the River Otonabee. Pitching a tent, I made this a focus from

which I radiated in any direction I chose--dawdling and sauntering and

lounging and seeing what there was to be seen.

And what is there to be seen? Well, let me give you here another little

photograph.

I write, sitting ensconced, sheltered from sun and wind, between two

huge roots of the stump of a burned pine on a bare hill overlooking the

river. Not a place in which to see much, you would say. Pardon me,

you are wrong. You, shut in between four superficies of wall-paper,

a whitewashed ceiling, and a carpet, know absolutely nothing of the

clouded sky as I know it, gazing at it unconfined from horizon to

zenith. Far overhead, the delicatest vapoury cirri fleck the purest

blue; in the distance, bold, rounded, white cumuli rise above a misty

haze of grey, against which as a background rise in points and

curves and lines dark green firs and round-topped birches and emerald

hill-sides; and below these, and nearer, comes the water--in no two

spots the same--ruffled and unruffled, wavy and still, dark blue and

lead-grey, in eddies and in currents; here dimpled, there like a

mirror; now dazzling you with a thousand flashing, floating stars; there

sullenly bearing up the reflections and shadows of the great, dark trees

above it--at one moment thus, and while you say it, otherwise.--For

a symbol of God--serene, shapeless, profound, in eternal repose,

unchanging, all-embracing, majestic--give me the blue sky; for a

symbol of Man--tossed, shapen, ever at strife, changeful, unresting,

evanescent, with dark depths and foul weeds, sombre and woeful when

deprived of the light of heaven, and beautiful only when beautified by

skyey tints--give me the water. And after the water, and closer, comes

my foreground--tufted grass and brown soil, with dandelions and clover

and mullein, and here and there a piece of glistering granite or a

quaint-shaped, rotting tree trunk. Amongst these hops fearless, while I

sit still and silent with half-closed eyes, the thrush or the grey-bird,

chasing insects a few feet from my foot; while above me, on the

very stump against which I lean, perches the various-coloured

high-holder.--Truly, it seems as if Nature had taken me to be one with

her, recognised me as part of her manifold immensity, looked upon me as

a consort, a co-mate.

And am I not a part of her? It needs not to comprehend the harmonious

workings of mighty natural laws to perceive the unity of all things.

Each minutest spot on this earth verifies the truth. I need not move a

step to find evidences of it. I look at my blackened stump, and not

one square inch can I find which is not instinct with evidences of life

within life; life interfused with, dependent on, correlated with other

life, with signs of the ceaseless being born, growing, dying--with

processes interlinked with processes. It is a universe of processes,

this in which we live; not a universe _in which_ this, that, and

the other separate thing exists for a time, but a universe _of_

subsistences, made up wholly of interdependent existences. Wherever I

look on my trunk I see mosses and lichens and creeping ants and beetles,

and the holes of boring worms, and the marks of woodpeckers' beaks,

chrysalises, seeds, twigs. To each of these the stump is its universe:

they regard it as we do the solar system, as a place, a locality, made

for them to inhabit. They do not understand that the tree is itself but

part of a greater whole of life, of thought; a link in an endless chain

of existence. And so we often forget that this infinitely various

and changing universe which we call ours, which we look upon as our

habitation, our dwelling-house, in which we move about as lords and

masters, is after all but an infinitesimal fragment of the real demesne

of the true Lord of the Manor. And what if after all we were not even

bailiffs of this manor? What if we were but the furniture in some small

attic--mirrors, it may be--and that what we call our universe prove to

be nothing more than the small part of this attic which is reflected in

us!

XII

Autumn in Canada

§ 17

This was in the spring. But I remember an autumn walk in Canada that was

very different from this, both in the locality chosen and in the scenes

viewed.

Late in October once, a friend and myself had three whole days'

holiday!--rare and joyous boon! We took a train to the little Ontarian

town of Stayner. From Stayner to the shores of the Georgian Bay was a

little trudge of about three miles. But a trudge it was; for the train

had been late; our knapsacks were heavy; the sun had set; and both

darkness and hunger came on apace. But at last the shore was reached.

And what a shore it was! For, beating on it from far away to the north

was a wealth of waters--oceanic in magnitude, sombre as the sea and, as

the sea, mysterious.

As we walked, the night closed in, the northern night, so beautiful,

so clear, so immense. But it was chill and dark, and either we must

advance, or we must seek shelter where we were. Shall it be a leafy

"lean-to" under a pine, constructed of heaped-up boughs, or shall it be

a trudge to a civilised hostelry? Such were the problems discussed over

sandwiches and hard-boiled eggs (washed down with sandy water from the

bay), as we sat on a wave-washed log, the wind blowing strong in our

faces. The ground was damp as damp; the pines seemed lugubriously

incompetent to shelter from the growing gale. Blankets we had none;

night was upon us.--We decided to walk.

On the left was this rolling Georgian ocean, seemingly illimitable. In

its northern stretches it reached up to Hudson's Bay, to the Arctic;

and by its southern streams it drave down to Lake Ontario, to the St

Lawrence, to the Atlantic. It was one with this Atlantic; it was one

with the Pacific; it was first cousin to the Indian Ocean, and but once

or twice removed from all the waters of the world, since they and it had

a common origin.

The walking was superb. The sand was firm as asphalt: on the right was

dimly visible a friendly fringe of trees--pine and scrub and brushwood;

on the left there was ever that never-ceasing roll of waves--waves once

more linking me with Ostend and Hove, Rotterdam and Rangoon, St John

in New Brunswick, Ascension Isle, the Cape of Good Hope, and the

palm-fringed coast of Malabar.

We walked. And we walked fast. But not too fast to notice. There was no

moon. The stars came out, and in that pellucid northern air, where was

no dust of road nor smoke of chimney, those stars shone as assuredly

never can they shine elsewhere. It is a literal fact that, in order to

determine whether or not the great luminous patches which I gazed at

overhead were the veritable Milky Way or only drifting clouds lit up by

starlight, I had to look again and again, and to take note as to whether

there was perceptible any change of shape. There was not. It was the

Galaxy itself; but so revealed, so clearly seen, so unremote, as it

were, that once again the great portals of the Infinite seemed to open,

and to permit a glimpse into the mysterious abode of Being--inadequate

term by which we feebly connote the supreme unity of all that is. To

permit a glimpse, too, into that puzzle of puzzles, the not impossible

identification or unification or intussusception of that All with

the smallest of its integral contents. For was not that assemblage

of suns--those masses of solar systems, so numerous as to seem but a

mist--was it not actually depicted on the tiny retina of the eye? It

was; and, through this depicture, it was, as it were, intellectually

embraced in the thinking mind behind; a fact symbolical of the truth, as

yet but dimly comprehended, that in very deed the infinitesimal unit and

the mighty All are one and identical.

However, ontological speculations under an autumnal sky have their

limit; and glad indeed were we, after long search among the pines and

the hemlocks, to find, albeit it was late, a hostel in which were warmth

and shelter for the night.

XIII

Winter in Canada

§ 18

I remember me, too, of a notable winter's walk in Canada.

For some reason, one night in mid-January, Sleep forsook me. After

wooing her in vain, I rose at three and lighted an ungainly but highly

satisfactory stove. It had a draught like a Bessemer furnace, drawing

through an ugly stove-pipe which ran bolt upright, turned sharp before

it reached the ceiling, and disappeared in a hole in the wall--an

apparatus quite the most conspicuous article of furniture in the room

(it was in a hotel). On this I warmed a cup of tea, then donned all the

warm clothing I could find; and in some forty minutes was afoot.

My point of departure was a little Ontarian country town of some ten

thousand inhabitants--we will call it Dummer. Dummer stood in a slightly

higher latitude than the parallels which run through the belt of country

skirting the northern shore of the Great Lakes, along which are dotted

most of the centres of population; and accordingly it was exposed to

a slightly severer wintry climate. At the time of my visit it was

enveloped in snow. Snow lay deep over the whole land, thick on

every roof, over the edges of which it protruded itself in irregular

curves--solid cataracts suspended in air, and vainly endeavouring to

complete their descent by long six-foot icicles. Snow-white was every

road, save for the two dirty grooves beaten down by the hoofs of horses.

Snow covered the country, far as the eye could reach; glistening like

glaciers on the hill-sides, deep purple and blue in the patches shaded

by the pines; only the woods showing black against the dazzling white,

the perpendicular walls of the wooden farm buildings, the solitary trees

and shrubs, and the straggling snake-fences--long, unshaped logs of

split timber, their ends placed zigzag the one over the other, to keep

the structure erect--relieved the white monotony. And yet this belt of

country is almost in the same latitude with the south of France, with

the Riviera, whence but a few days before I had received in a letter a

violet!