Thoreau's life was a search for the wild. He was the great disciple of
the Gospel of Walking. He elevated walking into a religious exercise.
One of his most significant and entertaining chapters is on "Walking."
No other writer that I recall has set forth the Gospel of Walking so
eloquently and so stimulatingly. Thoreau's religion and his philosophy
are all in this chapter. It is his most mature, his most complete and
comprehensive statement. He says:
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....
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.
Thoreau was the first man in this country, or in any other, so far as
I know, who made a religion of walking--the first to announce a Gospel
of the Wild. That he went forth into wild nature in much the same
spirit that the old hermits went into the desert, and was as devout in
his way as they were in theirs, is revealed by numerous passages in
his Journal. He would make his life a sacrament; he discarded the old
religious terms and ideas, and struck out new ones of his own:
What more glorious condition of being can we imagine than
from impure to become pure? May I not forget that I am
impure and vicious! May I not cease to love purity! May I go
to my slumbers as expecting to arise to a new and more
perfect day! May I so live and refine my life as fitting
myself for a society ever higher than I actually enjoy!
To watch for and describe all the divine features which I
detect in nature! My profession is to be always on the alert
to find God in nature, to know his lurking-place, to attend
all the oratorios, the operas, in nature.
Ah! I would walk, I would sit, and sleep, with natural
piety. What if I could pray aloud or to myself as I went
along the brooksides a cheerful prayer like the birds? For
joy I could embrace the earth. I shall delight to be buried
in it.
I do not deserve anything. I am unworthy the least regard,
and yet I am made to rejoice. I am impure and worthless, and
yet the world is gilded for my delight and holidays are
prepared for me, and my path is strewn with flowers. But I
cannot thank the Giver; I cannot even whisper my thanks to
the human friends I have.
In the essay on "Walking," Thoreau says that the art of walking "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." "I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits,
unless I spend four hours a day at least,--it is commonly more than
that,--sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields,
absolutely free from all worldly engagements."
Thoreau made good his boast. He was a new kind of walker, a
Holy-Lander. His walks yielded him mainly spiritual and ideal results.
The fourteen published volumes of his Journal are mainly a record of
his mental reactions to the passing seasons and to the landscape he
sauntered through. There is a modicum of natural history, but mostly
he reaps the intangible harvest of the poet, the saunterer, the
mystic, the super-sportsman.
With his usual love of paradox Thoreau says that the fastest way to
travel is to go afoot, because, one may add, the walker is constantly
arriving at his destination; all places are alike to him, his harvest
grows all along the road and beside every path, in every field and
wood and on every hilltop.
All of Thoreau's books belong to the literature of Walking, and are as
true in spirit in Paris or London as in Concord. His natural history,
for which he had a passion, is the natural history of the walker, not
always accurate, as I have pointed out, but always graphic and
interesting.
Wordsworth was about the first poet-walker--a man of letters who made
a business of walking, and whose study was really the open air. But he
was not a Holy-Lander in the Thoreau sense. He did not walk to get
away from people as Thoreau did, but to see a greater variety of them,
and to gather suggestions for his poems. Not so much the wild as the
human and the morally significant were the objects of Wordsworth's
quest. He haunted waterfalls and fells and rocky heights and lonely
tarns, but he was not averse to footpaths and highways, and the
rustic, half-domesticated nature of rural England. He was a
nature-lover; he even calls himself a nature-worshiper; and he appears
to have walked as many, or more, hours each day, in all seasons, as
did Thoreau; but he was hunting for no lost paradise of the wild; nor
waging a war against the arts and customs of civilization. Man and
life were at the bottom of his interest in Nature.
Wordsworth never knew the wild as we know it in this country--the
pitilessly savage and rebellious; and, on the other hand, he never
knew the wonderfully delicate and furtive and elusive nature that we
know; but he knew the sylvan, the pastoral, the rustic-human, as we
cannot know them. British birds have nothing plaintive in their
songs; and British woods and fells but little that is disorderly and
cruel in their expression, or violent in their contrasts.
Wordsworth gathered his finest poetic harvest from common nature and
common humanity about him--the wayside birds and flowers and
waterfalls, and the wayside people. Though he called himself a
worshiper of Nature, it was Nature in her half-human moods that he
adored--Nature that knows no extremes, and that has long been under
the influence of man--a soft, humid, fertile, docile Nature, that
suggests a domesticity as old and as permanent as that of cattle and
sheep. His poetry reflects these features, reflects the high moral and
historic significance of the European landscape, while the poetry of
Emerson, and of Thoreau, is born of the wildness and elusiveness of
our more capricious and unkempt Nature.
The walker has no axe to grind; he sniffs the air for new adventure;
he loiters in old scenes, he gleans in old fields. He only seeks
intimacy with Nature to surprise her preoccupied with her own affairs.
He seeks her in the woods, the swamps, on the hills, along the
streams, by night and by day, in season and out of season. He skims
the fields and hillsides as the swallow skims the air, and what he
gets is intangible to most persons. He sees much with his eyes, but he
sees more with his heart and imagination. He bathes in Nature as in a
sea. He is alert for the beauty that waves in the trees, that ripples
in the grass and grain, that flows in the streams, that drifts in the
clouds, that sparkles in the dew and rain. The hammer of the
geologist, the notebook of the naturalist, the box of the herbalist,
the net of the entomologist, are not for him. He drives no sharp
bargains with Nature, he reads no sermons in stones, no books in
running brooks, but he does see good in everything. The book he reads
he reads through all his senses--through his eyes, his ears, his nose,
and also through his feet and hands--and its pages are open
everywhere; the rocks speak of more than geology to him, the birds of
more than ornithology, the flowers of more than botany, the stars of
more than astronomy, the wild creatures of more than zoölogy.
The average walker is out for exercise and the exhilarations of the
road, he reaps health and strength; but Thoreau evidently impaired his
health by his needless exposure and inadequate food. He was a
Holy-Lander who falls and dies in the Holy Land. He ridiculed walking
for exercise--taking a walk as the sick take medicine; the walk itself
was to be the "enterprise and adventure of the day." And "you must
walk like a camel, which is said to be the only beast which ruminates
while walking."