Of Walks and Walking Tours

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 corespondent, 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! ” 0 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 armchair on the veranda. — 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.

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 one’s self, 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; an 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.

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: —

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

and if we would understand him, we ourselves must

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, a narrative that Cowper has touched without spoiling? 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 Mohamed 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, 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 trode 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 with a Donkey in the Cévennes. To how many minds walks about the green flat meads of Oxford have been a quiet stimulant we may get a hint from Matthew Arnold. Was it to Newman that Jowett, meeting him alone and afoot, put the query, “ Nun-quam 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; of Mr. John Burroughs; of Richard Jefferies; of Mr. Hamilton Wright Mabie, the discoverer of the Forest of Arden; of Mr. Henry van Dyke, who, though primarily and avowedly a fisherman, would be, I warrant me, an incomparable companion for a walk, and whose books make the pentup sigh for the open; of a Son of the Marshes; of Dr. Charles C. Abbott, that indefatigable Wasteland Wanderer; of Mr. Charles Goodrich Whiting, 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 forever, for the benefit of people who are not gifted with legs so stout and eyes so discerning, ” — I mean that erudite nomad, George Borrow; of Senancour, who in his journeys afoot experienced illusions imposantes ;¹ of Louis J. Jennings; of Sir Leslie Stephen ² — of these and many another lover of outdoor Nature it is needless to speak.

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 sharpnosed “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 crows — 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 crows.

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 piains, 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 veranda before the heat of day shriveled the delicate corollas. There were rich bass blues 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 odors, stinging tastes, and colors 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 carcase 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.

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 ; Killarney’s or the Cumberland Lakes, — these for the seeker of quiet. For the more emprising there are the Grampians, the Cotswolds, and the Cheviots, and the wild and broken scenery of the northern isles. The lover of the homeless sea can choose any sort of shore.

Him 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,

March 27th, 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 bye-ways 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 whitegrey 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 hedge-rows sprang, were green with a hundred little plants and weeds — the dock, the nettle, groundsel, ' kisses, ’ 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 any one 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, should’st ever find thyself at this selfsame village of Poynings, omit not to examine the Early Perpendicular church ; — the alms-box is an ancient thurible.

A morning walk is worth the effort of getting up. Much would I give to have been of that party which, in sixteen hundred and something, “stretched their legs up Tottenham Hill towards the Thatched House in Hoddesdon on that fine fresh May morning, ” — I mean Messrs. Piscator, Venator, and Auceps. I should have been Peregrinator ; and whereas Piscator praised the water, and Venator the land, and Auceps the air, as the element in which each respectively traded, I should have praised all three, for the pedestrian’s pleasures derive from no single one. And to walking I should have applied dear old Izaak Walton’s own phrase, that it, like angling, was “most honest, ingenious, quiet, and harmless.”³ Upon quiet, Walton sets extraordinary stress. Quoting with approbation the learned Peter du Moulin, he tells us that “when God intended to reveal any future events or high notions to His prophets, He then carried them either to the deserts or the sea-shore, that having so separated them from amidst the press of people and business, and the cares of the world, He might settle their mind in a quiet repose, and there make them fit for revelation.” ⁴

It is strange that Izaak Walton, himself apparently a most quiet and contented old man (he lived to be ninety-one), should, writing at sixty years of age, and two hundred and fifty years ago, — when I suppose there was no faster or noisier thing than a galloping horse, — should so insistently preach and teach quiet. Yet, perhaps we must remember that he lived through the Great Rebellion. The last words of his book — and he puts them into his own, Piscator’s, mouth — are : —

“And [let the blessing of St. Peter’s Master be] upon all that are lovers of virtue, and dare trust in His providence, and be quiet, and go a-angling. STUDY TO BE QUIET. — 1 Thess. iv. 11.”

Why, I do not exactly know, but there is to me something straightforward, honest, and simple-minded in the idea of ending a book with the words “and go a-angling.” This and the quotation from 1 Thess. iv. 11 sum up for me the character of the man and the book.

Walking rivals angling in demanding and engendering quiet. “To make a walk successful, ” says another dear old gentleman, writing at the same time of life but in modern times, “mind and body should be free of burthen.” ⁵ The true and abiding joy of walking is in calm. “The mood,” says John Burroughs, “ in which you set out on a spring or autumn ramble or a sturdy winter walk . . . is the mood in which your best thoughts and impulses come to you. . . . Life is sweet in such moods, the Universe is complete, and there is no failure or imperfection anywhere.” ⁶ Only Nature can induce such moods: —

“ Dear Nature is the kindest mother still,” says the soul-tossed, self-torturing Byron. Books, music, art, the drama, philosophy, science, — at bottom there seems to be something disquieting in these. They come in such questionable shape. They are the works of man; and we never altogether trust the works of man. We never feel, even with the first of those who know, that our fellow man, who is, after all, like unto ourselves, has answered every question, allayed every doubt, stilled every fear. Was something of this in Matthew Arnold’s mind when he cried: —

“ One lesson, Nature, let me learn of thee,” and prayed her to calm, to compose him to the end ? — But enough in praise of calm. Calm is compatible with the highest and most exuberant spirits. Indeed, high and exuberant spirits are the first and natural outcome of a mind at peace with itself. Good old Walton is continually breaking out into pious or pastoral song — and making milkmaids and milkmaids’ mothers break out into song, too.

For many reasons, walking seems to be an ingrained instinct of mankind. I cling to the perhaps fanciful theory that no primitive instinct of man is altogether lost. It is modified, amplified, refined ; that is all. With all our culture, we are barbarians still. Man is a clothed savage. And now and again he delights in doffing the clothing and returning heartily to savagery. How delightful the feel of the briny breeze and the boisterous wave on the bare pelt! Mr. Edward Carpenter rails at the (I think) eleven layers of clothing that intervene between our skins and the airs of heaven. Walt Whitman reveled nude in his sun-bath. What a treat too, sometimes, to get away from the multicoursed dinner and to bite downright audibly into simple food in the fresh air, and to lap water noisily from the brook! Well, walking, perhaps, is the primal instinct, ancient as Eden, where the Lord God walked in the garden in the cool of the day. And, if my theory is correct, walking will persist till in recovered Paradise man walks with his Maker again. No mechanical contrivance for locomotion will extirpate the tribe of tourists, of those who walk from love of walking.

But not all walks are occasions of unmitigated pleasure. By no means. A certain trudge, which particularly lives in my memory, was one of almost unmitigated pain. — No; I will not say that, for wert not thou, L—, cheeriest of companions, with me? What a day that was! It was in Canada, in early spring. It rained the long day through, and as we walked westward, a cold, wet wind from the east caught us just where the waistcoat leaves off and the trousers don’t begin. The roads were impassable for mud ; the trees were leafless; the fields bare. Inns there were none, and at the thirteenth mile I broke a nice big flask of port wine or ere a blessed sip of the liquid (I mean a sip of the blessed liquid) had passed our lips. A woeful walk was that, and woeful pedestrians were we.—Yet, somehow, it is with the extremest pleasure that now I recall that trudge. To beguile the time and to try to forget the rain, we improvised a play, and shouted dialogues as we trudged. We covered forty miles at a stretch; and whether it was the play, or the fresh air, or the exercise, or L—’s indomitable Mark Tapleyism, or what, we limped (no, we lamely ran the last few yards) into our destination, in spirits, at least, buoyant, jubilant, and secure. — How mad and bad and sad it was! And oh, how we were stiff!

Up to the present we have considered the country walk only. The walking trip or tour is a more serious affair. If it requires as vacuous a frame of mind, it necessitates a more deliberate preparation. Much depends upon the country and the locality chosen. If inviting hostelries abound, one needs to weight one’s self with little; if they are infrequent or non-existent, food and clothing become matters of moment. This may sound a truism; but it is a truism that many a tripper wishes he had laid more earnestly to heart when, miles from house and home, he finds himself wet, hungry, and fatigued. It is better to carry a few extra pounds far than to run short soon ; for a worn-out body means a useless mind, and hunger and cold, with their attendant depression of spirits, not only rob the tour of its pleasure, but rob the tourist of his zest. Start, therefore, comfortable and comfortably provided. This is not Sybaritism; it is common sense.

For an extended trip, send on some luggage ahead, if you can; and some money (I speak of civilized regions). It is impossible, if you are alone, — unless, like Stevenson, you hire a donkey, — to transport on your own back food and clothing to keep you going for more than a few days at a stretch, — unless you shoot, or fish, or trap, — which is sport, not walking.

Your first care should be for your feet, — another truism not seldom neglected. See that your boots fit, —fit, remembering that the feet swell (I speak to tenderfoots). If you prefer shoes to boots, wear gaiters, — to keep out the wet in winter, to keep out the dust in summer. The only occasion upon which I suffered from blisters was on a sixtymile walk in tennis shoes on a dusty road in August. Take three or four changes of socks. If you walk in a populous region, carry a pair of light shoes. These will come in handy if you run across a friend who asks you to dinner. Carry also a white shirt and a collar or two: not only hosts and hostesses, but landlords and landladies look askance at flannel shirts and muddy boots: verb. sap. sat. Do not refuse an invitation to dinner. Follow Napoleon’s advice and let the country you pass through support you, falling back upon your own food-supply when necessary. Help yourself to as much fruit as you can, or as the owners thereof and their dogs permit. A too concentrated diet is unwholesome. Expatiate upon this to the owners of orchards, and back your theories with a dole.

But nothing comes up to the evening meal cooked over your own fire, — if you are not too tired to cook it. Of the cookery I shall speak later; but the fire is as invigorating as the food. Would you taste the consummation of human masculine contentment, stretch your tired legs before your own fire after a long, long walk followed by a full meal: your chamber, the forest primeval, green, indistinct in the twilight; your couch, the scented earth; your canopy, the heavens, curtained with clouds; in your nostrils the incense of burning wood; in your heart the peace which the world giveth not. — The elaborately ornamented modern hearth, with its carved oak or its sculptured marble, is the direct lineal descendant of the nomad fire, — the earliest institution of man, the first promoter of civilization, the binder-together of troglodytic families into tribes. “Hearth and Home ” is an ancient, a very ancient, sentiment. It dates back, I take it, to the Glacial Epoch, — far enough, in all conscience. — In my mind’s eye I see the shivering Cave-man, appalled at the encroaching ice, the deepening cold. He gathers wood, he huddles him in caves, the drops from his furry, ill-smelling clothing (there was no tanning then) sputtering in the flames. For self-protection and from lack of fuel, family makes alliance with family, and the first-formed human community squats silent about the first-formed human hearth. What friendships must have there been cemented, what tales told; what a strange first unburthening of human heart to human heart! What ecstatic love-makings, too, must have been enacted in the darksome corners of the sooty cave, the while the grey gorged hunters snored, and toothless beldames gesticulated dumb-crambo scandal by the smouldering brands! —No wonder pre-historic associations cluster even now about what is too often represented by a flamboyant mantelpiece with immaculate tiles and polished brasses. Pro Aris et Focis ! Is not even the smoking altar but the consecrated symbol of the lowly hearth ?

But here just a word in your ear. — If you would guard against a desperate temptation to indulge in reprehensible expletives over the lighting of this your evening fire, — and few things are more provocative of profanity than the attempt to light a fire with wet wood,— if you would guard against this, be careful to collect each evening a nice little bundle of dry twigs and to carry them with you in the driest receptacle you possess; for matches, be it remembered, in a prolonged walk, become sometimes more precious than rubies, and more to be desired than fine gold. Nothing will bring this home to a man more than to have to walk mile upon mile with a wellfilled, sweet, but unlighted pipe in his mouth.

As to food, — bacon, flour, and beans are the stand-by. The curious in the matter of concentrated and portable foods will do well to consult Nansen’s elaborate and carefully calculated lists of these.⁷ Carry some chocolate: it staves off hunger and is nourishing. Milk, if you can get it, has wonderful staying powers, and by most people — especially under stress of prolonged exertion — is easily digested. Wear wool next the skin, and wear it loose. Let everything be loose. And see that your tailor puts pockets — deep and

wide ones — in every conceivable and inconceivable part of your costume. As to books, sketching or writing materials, or a camera, — every tramp has his hobby: indulge yours to the full; what are you walking for if not to enjoy life? Lastly, do not forget that, if you are not far from the haunts of men, you will over and over again be indebted to your fellow men for little kindnesses and civilities. A pocketful of small change will make many a rough place smooth. — I might mention also sotto voce that so will a flask of good whisky. As for the rest, a pipe, a very big pouch of tobacco (many will dip into it), a stout stick, and abundance of matches ought to make you independent of everything and everybody for days together.

But, after all, one’s impediments must be chosen according to one’s tastes. Mr. Hillaire Belloc equipped himself for his seven-hundred-mile walk from Toul to Rome with “a large piece of bread, half a pound of smoked ham, a sketch-book, two Nationalist papers, and a quart of the wine of Brulé ”⁸ (but one half-pennyworth of bread to this intolerable deal of sack!); though farther on he tells us he also carried “a needle, some thread, and a flute.” ⁹ But then Mr. Belloc’s path lay through thickly peopled districts ; he rarely slept in the open; traveled in summer time; and not once, I think, lighted a fire: and certes he reached Rome in sorry plight.

And now for some hints on the practical details of walking tours of more arduous character and more extended length.¹⁰ — Suit the weight of your knapsack or pack to your strength, leaving a large margin for comfort. If you travel in regions uninhabited by man, a shelter at night is all important. Therefore carry a light blanket: a warm head and face induce sleep, — not everybody knows this; so does a change to dry underclothing at the end of the day. For really hard trips, when you walk all day and walk far, you will need, to replace used-up muscular tissue, each day,

¾ lb. of flour;

¾ lb. of bacon ;

½ lb. of beans ;

and to these you should add dried fruit or rice. The best dried fruit is a mixture in equal parts of apricots and prunes. Take an abundance of tea: nothing takes the place of tea; and supply yourself with pepper, salt, sugar, candles, and soap. Your cooking pots should fit the one into the other. These things, with a small frying-pan, an axe (to cut poles for your evening shelter and wood for your fire), a file to sharpen this, and some stout wire hooks by which to hang your pots over the fire, complete, I think, the sum total of your absolutely necessary impedimenta.

The sedulous, however sage, have little idea how large a part of active life depends on food. To stay-at-homes, who go down to the dining-room when the gong sounds, a meal seems a mere incident of life, an intermission from work, an opportunity for a family chat. The traveler on foot soon learns that a meal is of the most vital importance. Every reader of Nansen’s thrilling narrative must have noticed this. Even in Mr. Belloc’s literary Path to Rome one is struck with the intrusion of this unliterary topic, and the even more literary Inland Voyage of Robert Louis Stevenson is not free from it. — The importance of a supply of food has so often been borne in upon me that I am inclined to believe that the political community is coeval with the pantry. Even amongst animals, only those form commonwealths which form common stores of food, — as the ant and the bee. The pedestrian gains a practical insight into this wide-reaching influence of a storage of food. Not for half a dozen hours can he subsist before its importance is impressed upon him by most painful pangs. If, therefore, sedulous sage, you set out on a long hard walk without due provision for the allaying of hunger, you will come to grief. I make no apologies, accordingly, for minute instructions on that topic here.

The bread of the Western prospector — that most redoubtable of walkers — is the bannock. Dost know how to make a bannock ? You must have with you a bag containing flour (of the highest grade, made from hard wheat), baking powder, and salt, thoroughly mixed beforehand. (Use twice as much baking powder as the instructions on the tin direct. Half a cup of salt will suffice for ten pounds of flour.) Open this bag, and make a depression in the contents with your fist. Into this pour a cupful of water. Stir the sides of the depression into the water till you get a stiff dough. Spread this dough in a clean greased frying-pan. Hold the pan over the fire till the under side of the dough is slightly browned, then take the pan off the fire and set it up on edge to allow the top of the bannock to toast, and your bannock is made, —and very delicious you will find it if you are hungry, and hungry you certainly will be.

Beans are a more troublesome affair, for, unfortunately, they take from two to four hours to boil. But beans are the mainstay of life on a tour. There are two good varieties : the small white, and the larger brown. Take both, and before starting clean them thoroughly from dust and grit and stones, — thoroughly. As soon as your fire is lighted, put on your beans in cold water with no salt, and keep them boiling. As soon as they show signs of softening, add a piece of bacon or a ham bone and some pepper and salt. When ready—eat. If they are not ready for you when you are ready for them (and this coincidence is, alas, rare with beans), the pot should be filled up with water, the remains of the fire raked into a circle, in the centre of which the pot should be kept for the night: they will then make a dish for breakfast, when they may be eaten as they are, or can be fried. If drained fairly dry, they may be carried as they are and used for luncheon. — But the best thing is to make a bannock of them. Take a clean frying-pan with plenty of bacon fat in it, and mash the already boiled beans in this with a fork. Heat, with stirring, till the mass is dry enough to set; then fry on both sides. This will keep for days, “and is, ” says my authority, “the finest food I know of for emergency trips.”

Now let us see what your Bill of Fare will be.

MENU.

May I here request the reader to accompany me in a short digression ? — Few things are pleasanter than a walk in which one turns down any lane that invites.

One of the first delights of walking is the pleasure derived from the passing scene.— What is the secret of the pleasure derived from a beautiful landscape, — or, as a matter of fact, from almost any landscape ? For apparently a landscape need not be actually beautiful in order to give pleasure. ‘I would n’t give a mile of the dear old Sierras,” says Bret Harte, “with their honesty, sincerity, and magnificent uncouthness, for 100,000 Kilomètres of the picturesque Vaud.” ¹¹ And even Mary MacLane, rail as she did at the barren sands of Butte, Montana, in her Story, when she left them wrote, “I love those things the best of all. ” ¹²“ — Bret Harte and Mary MacLane may give us a clue to the secret. It is not merely the contour or the colors of a landscape that delight ; it is the associations that cling to it. — But what of a scene which is quite new to the eyes ? Still, I think, association. “Scenery soon palls,” says George Borrow, “ unless it is associated with remarkable events, and the names of remarkable men.”¹³ And Iluskin, you will remember, when gazing at the broken masses of pine forest which skirt the course of the Ain above the village of Champignole, in the Jura, found that the impressiveness of the scene Owed its source to the fact that “those ever springing flowers and ever flowing streams had been dyed by the deep colors of human endurance, valor, and virtue.” ¹⁴ Packed away in the brain and mind of man must be subtile and secret memories dating back through unknown ages of time. —A gaseous theory, perhaps, but one which Senaneour has liquefied into the pellucid sentence: — “La nature sentie n’est que dans les rapports humains, et l’éloquence des choses n’est rien que l’éloquence de l’homme. ” ¹⁵ The great fight for life, the stern joys of life, — the ferocious combat, the thrilling love-match, the myriad sensations and emotions evoked by man’s physical environment, and his struggle for existence therein, — surely these live somehow somewhere packed away in his brain to-day,—just as some migratory aud nidificatory memories must be packed away in the brain of a bird. It is these dormant memories that a great landscape revives. On how many a plain to-day does there not flow veritable human blood re-muted into sap. — Terrene Nature was man’s ancestral home, and no man can gaze upon it unmoved. The freedom of a great expanse seems to arouse primitive instincts. Idylls do not happen in drawing-rooms. The odorous glades are Hymen’s haunts. In the meads of Enna Proserpine was wooed. Zephyr won Aurora a-Maying. In the boscage Daphnis proposed.¹⁶ On Latmos top Endymion was nightly kissed. —If only Fashion would decree that honeymoons should be spent under Jove! Lovers ken the banks where amaranths blow, and poets build their altars in the fields. How actually physically exhilarating sometimes is

Perhaps the poem from which these lines come (Browning’s Two in the Campagna) is the deepest and most delicate poetical expression of this emotion.

Now, I know precisely what will happen. Some epimethean enthusiast, carried away by the anticipated delights of a walk, will suddenly make up his mind to take one; will hastily stuff some things into a bag, and will start off at four o’clock in the morning with some vague and distant goal in view. He will think to roll John Burroughs and Richard Jefferies into one in his minute observation of Nature, and to outdo Wordsworth and Amiel combined in his philosophico-poetical disquisitions on the same; he will rid his mind of the world and the worldly, and float in themes transcendental and abstruse. But I think I know what will happen. By the afternoon of that selfsame day he will be hungry, thirsty, foot-sore, and tired. His boots will be tight; his bag as heavy as his spirits; his head as empty as his stomach. Instead of observing Nature he will find Nature — in the shape of the rustics (and the rustics’ dogs)—very narrowly observing him, not always with sympathetic or benignant gaze. Instead of deep and transcendental meditations rising spontaneously to his mind, he will find curt and practical questions assailing his ear as to who he is and what he is doing there. — My dear but epimethean enthusiast, you must know that Nature is a jealous mistress. If so be you are sedulously engaged for fifty weeks in the year in the pursuit of pelf, think not to woo her by a half day’s worship at her shrine. Even if your courtship be sincere, it must be slow. Not in fortyeight hours will you brush away the cobwebs of the work-a-day world and prepare for the reception of sweet Nature’s influence a mind free from all uncharitableness : their skies, not their characters, they change who sail over-seas. From all blindness of heart, from pride, vainglory, and hypocrisy, you must seek to be delivered, else you will walk in vain. For most men walk in a vain show, and the perpetual perambulation of the streets of Vanity Fair is a poor preparation for the Delectable Mountains. — But take heart. If you will keep but a corner of your mind free from the carking cares of barter and commerce — if only by half-holiday jaunts and Sabbath-day journeys, great will be your reward. By the end of the third or fourth day’s tramp, what with the exhilarating exercise, the fresh air, the peace and loneliness, the long hours of mental quietude, the freedom from the petty distractions of social and official life, if you are humble and childlike, the world forgetting, by the world forgot, — the scales will fall from your eyes; then indeed you will see — and feel — and think. The trivial little objects at your foot, equally with the immense expanses of earth and sky, will lift you high above themselves : the wet and drooping high-road weed, the tender green of a curled frond, the soft ooziness of a summer marsh, — the sense of beauty, of the fitness of things, of their immense incomprehensibility — the wonder of it all . . . words seem useless to say how such things sink into the soul, plough up its foundations, sow there seeds which, like the Indian juggler’s plant, spring up at once and blossom into worship, reverence, awe. — Believe me, I am not extravagant or hyperbolic, nor do I beguile with empty words. If you will not hear me, hear the simple - minded Richard Jefferies: —

“I linger in the midst of the long grass, the luxury of the leaves, and the song in the very air. I seem as if I could feel all the glowing life the sunshine gives and the south wind calls to being. The endless grass, the endless leaves, the immense strength of the oak expanding, the unalloyed joy of finch and blackbird ; from all of them I receive a little. . . . In the blackbird’s melody one note is mine; in the dance of the leaf shadows the formed maze is for me, though the motion is theirs; the flowers with a thousand faces have collected the kisses of the morning. Feeling with them, I receive some, at least, of their fulness of life. Never could I have enough; never stay long enough. . . . The hours when the mind is absorbed by beauty are the only hours when we really live, so that the longer we can stay among these things so much the more is snatched from inevitable Time. . . . These are the only hours that are not wasted these hours that absorb the soul and fill it with beauty. This is real life, and all else is illusion, or mere endurance. To be beautiful and to be calm, without mental fear, is the ideal of Nature. If I cannot achieve it, at least I can think it.” ¹⁷ — Which passage has received the impri-matur of quotation by no less an authority than Lord Avebury (better known, perhaps, as Sir John Lubbock), himself not only a man of science, but a statesman and a man of affairs as well. Listen : —

“The exquisite beauty and delight of a fine summer day in the country has never perhaps been more truly, and therefore more beautifully, described. ” ¹⁸

But surely, with all deference to the learned quoter, there is something deeper in Richard Jefferies, these his dithyrambs, than a description of a fine summer day. Surely Jefferies finds himself here, in Amiel’s fine phrase, tête-à-tête with the Infinite, and tries, poor soul, in vain to find vent for his thoughts. It is not a picture, it is a poem. Nor needed it the Pageant of Summer to transport this poet thither. Jefferies was here viewing Nature through a seventh sense, — a sense more delicate than that of sight or sound, the sense that Maurice de Guérin has defined as, —

“ Un sens que nous avons tous, mais voilé, vague, et privé presque de toute activité, le sens qui recueille les beautés physiques et les livre à l’âme, qui les spiritualise, les harmonie, les combine avec les beautés idéales, et agrandit ainsi sa sphère d’amour et d’ adoration.”¹⁹

It is not Richard Jefferies his catalogue of the things he saw which moves us to admiration and delight, it is his sense sublime which enabled him to rise from the things which are seen to the things which are unseen, to rise above the hic et nunc of the parochial and to peer into the illuc et tunc of the eternal. He saw “into the life of things, ” and in him the finite stirred emotions which savored of the infinite.

Of a sober truth, could we only realize it, all things point to the infinite. Not a cobweb, not a wisp of morning mist, not a toadstool, not a gnat, but has a life-history dating hack to the dark womb of Time, or ere even meteoritic dust or incandescent nebulæ were born; dating forward, too, could we trace it, to the dark doom of Time, if: for Time there be a doom. Who can understand it? Who shall explain it? —any part of it ? Take Burns his simple line, —

To explain “green ” is not within the power of profoundest oculist and physicist combined: on the question of the color-sense alone the scientific world is divided and has for years been divided; and of the precise action of chlorophyll — the green coloring-matter of plants — it is almost equally ignorant; while of the train of connected phenomena, from the chemic action in the leaf, through the stimulation of the retina, the transmission along the optic nerve, the sensation in the corpora quadrigemina of the brain, to the concept in the mind, we know absolutely nothing. To define and classify the rushes, also; to know exactly their place in the vegetable kingdom and how they came there, — their evolution from lower forms, the modifications wrought in their structure by environment and internecine strife, — that is beyond the wit of botanist and palæophytologist in one. And as to that simple verb “to grow,” dealing, as it does, with life itself in its inmost penetralia, that has baffled, and probably will forever baffle, the whole host of physical and metaphysical experimenters and speculators world without end. When we can explain Life, we shall be within measurable distance of explaining the Life-Giver.—Tennyson saw this: —

But my song has grown too advent’rous. Let us descend th’ Aonian mount. —This, however, let me say: If to somewhat abstruse ontological speculations such as these you like to add scientific or other knowledge of the region of your walk, — something of the geology, palæontology, mineralogy, zoology, botany, archæology, history, well and good. No sort of knowledge but is profitable for doctrine. The interest and pleasure of walking are greatly enhanced by noting and being able to account for the thousand and one natural phenomena which greet the eye even in the shortest stroll; and few things sooner oust petty worries from the mind than such occupation. Happy is the man who can do this. I, alas, cannot help you here. I have but a bowing acquaintance with Science, though it is always with a deep reverence that I doff my hat to her. Nevertheless, with this I console myself: it seems to matter but little with what sort of eyes you look on Nature, provided you really look. Give her but the seeing eye and the understanding heart, and she is lavish of her gifts. — And (let me roun this in thine ear) perhaps she prefers (woman-like) the understanding heart to the seeing eye; though (woman-like again) she likes to be admired as well as understood — though never (and here most woman-like) does she like to be too curiously regarded. — Sometimes, I confess, I have envied him gifted with the scientific eye : him in whom a granite boulder in a grassy mead rouses long geological trains of thought; to whom the dwarfed horse-tails by lacustrine shores paint pictures of dense equisetaceous forests; for whom a fossil trilobite calls up visions of Silurian seas; him even have I envied who can classify common plants and tell us why the lowly daisy is superior to the lordly oak; who can expatiate on crystallographic angles, and learnedly descant on amphibole or pyroxene. For myself, I am not versed in the mechanism of Nature. I have never asked to see the wheels go round. I like to see her smile, and am not careful as to what oral or buccal muscles are brought into play for that smile. That she has an anatomy I suppose. But I bethink me of Actæn’s fate, he who saw Dian’s naked loveliness too near. So, thou, beware lest thine eye see so much that thy heart understand too little. Keep thy mind “in a just equipoise of love.” Accomplish that, and no knowledge is too high for thee.

Here, however, it is but right to enter a caveat. It must be admitted that it is not given to every one to hold high converse with Nature. Nature speaks a cryptic tongue, and unless one has paid some heed to her language her accents are apt to fall upon deaf ears. Nor can any one translate Nature’s language to those unversed in her speech. If you think to hear her voice while the din and clatter of business or mercature are ringing in your ears, you will hear nothing. Nor, for that matter, will you see anything. Trees and fields and clouds you may see, or may think you see; but they will say nothing to you, will mean nothing to you. To their mere beauty you will be blind; for beauty is a thing to be felt, not seen. Goethe declared that beauty was a primeval phenomenon which had never yet made its appearance.²⁰ So Euripides: —

KλVων µὲν aὐδῂv, ðμμa δ’oυχ όpwν τò σoóν.'²¹

To be felt. That is the clue to the secret. The appeal of natural beauty is to the heart: to the emotions, rather than to the intellect. The eyes of the wisest savant may miss what Nature will reveal to the veriest babe. This is what Mr. Edward Carpenter means when he says, albeit in somewhat extravagant language, —

“As to you O Moon —

“I know very well that when astronomers look at you through their telescopes they see only an aged and wrinkled body;

“But though they measure your wrinkles never so carefully they do not see you personal and close —

“As you disclosed yourself among the chimney-tops last night to the eyes of a child —

“When you thought no one else was looking.

“Anyhow I see plainly that like all created things you do not yield yourself up as to what you are at the first or the thousandth onset,

“And that the scientific people for all their telescopes know as little about you as any one —

“Perhaps less than most.

“How curious the mystery of creation.” ²²

The poet, bereft of words whereby to give vent to his emotion, falls back on “the mystery of creation.” — Not dissimilarly says Carlyle, “The rudest mind has still some intimation of the greatness there is in Mystery.” ²³ And again, “The mystical enjoyment of an object goes infinitely farther than the intellectual.” ²⁴—It is not alone the indescribable color of the delicate corolla, nor is it the minute knowledge of its astonishing structure that causes to blaze up in the beholder a sense of something profound; it is not alone the majestic heap of the cloud, nor the piercing radiance of the quiet stars, known to be incomputably distant, that lifts one to the contemplation of the lofty; it is the immanent, the permanent Mystery that pervades and unifies all that ever was or is or shall be.

“But what possible pleasure, what possible profit, ” I can hear the practical and common-sensible man asking, “is to be gained from walking — walking? Surely walking is the paltriest of sports. Why not write of riding, driving, rowing, bicycling, motor - caring, — any mode of locomotion rather than that of mere trudging? ”— I feel I am up against it now. Well, in a technical and paronomasiacal phrase, the question really solvitur ambulando. For one thing, horses have to be baited, boats caulked, bicycles pumped up, balloons inflated, and motor-cars eternally tinkered at. For another thing, not the least of the practical blessings incident to a walk is that you are beyond the reach of letters and telegrams and telephones. You are not likely to be served with a writ when walking; yon can laugh at capiases and injunctions; drafts at sight and judgment-summonses cannot easily overtake you on a trudge. “I have generally found,” says De Quincey, “that, if you are in quest of some certain escape from Philistines of whatsoever class, — sheriff-officers, bores, no matter what, — the surest refuge is to be found amongst hedge-rows and fields.” ²⁵ (Had De Quincey lived in the twentieth century, truly he might have added that it is amongst the fields and hedge-rows also that one gets away from that pest of civilization, the pene-ubiquitous advertisement. — And not always even amongst fields and hedge-rows, as the landscapespoiling hoardings along the routes of our railways prove. Like Nero, I sometimes wish that the erectors of sky-signs and the daubers of barns and fences had but one neck that I might . . . that I might — lay upon it a heavy yoke of taxation. — I throw out that hint to any Finance Minister that may care to act upon it.)

But far rather would I reply to my querist in other words than mine. —“I went to the woods, ” says Thoreau, “because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life. . . . I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life. . . . Our life is frittered away by detail. . . . In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and storms and quicksands and thousand-and-one items to be allowed for, that a man has to live, if he would not founder and go to the bottom and not make his port at all, by dead reckoning, and he must be a great calculator indeed who succeeds.” ²⁶

Hear, too, Henri-Frédéric Amiel: — “1st February, 1854.—A walk. The atmosphere incredibly pure — a warm, caressing gentleness in the sunshine— joy in one’s whole being. . . . I became young again, wondering, and simple, as candour and ignorance are simple. I abandoned myself to life and to nature, and they cradled me with an infinite gentleness. To open one’s heart in purity to this ever pure nature, to allow this immortal life of things to penetrate into one’s soul, is at the same time to listen to the voice of God. Sensation may be a prayer, and self-abandonment an act of devotion.” ²⁷

Or hear a greater man than these, — hear the great Jean-Jacques Rousseau, he who divided with Voltaire the intellectual realm of the eighteenth century : —

“ What I regret most in the details of my life which I have forgotten is that I did not keep a diary of my travels. Never have I thought so much, never have I realized my own existence so much, been so much alive, been so much myself if may so say, as in those journeys which I have made alone and afoot. Walking has something in it which animates and heightens my ideas: I can scarcely think when I stay in one place; my body must be set a-going if my mind is to work. The sight of the country, the succession of beautiful scenes, the great breeze, the good appetite, the health which I gain by walking, the getting away from inns, the escape from everything which reminds me of my lack of independence, from everything which reminds me of my unlucky fate — all this releases my soul, gives me greater courage of thought, throws me as it were into the midst of the immensity of the objects of Nature, which I may combine, from which I may choose at will, which I may make my own carelessly and without fear. I make use of all Nature as her master ; my heart, surveying one object after another, unites itself, identities itself with those in sympathy with it, surrounds itself with delightful images, intoxicates itself with emotions the most exquisite. If, in order to seize these, I amuse myself by describing them to myself, what a vigorous pencil, what bright colours, what energy of expression they need! Some have, so they say, discerned something of these influences in my writings, though composed in my declining years. Ah! if only those of my early youth had been seen ! those which I have composed but never written down! ” ²⁸

Thus wrote the great Jean-Jacques in the calm of his declining years. Those walking inspirations must have been potent indeed to have left so lasting an impression.²⁹

But Thoreau and Amiel and JeanJacques Rousseau are perhaps counsels of perfection ; exemplars too remote for our purpose. Permit me then to resort to an argumentum ad hominem.— I knew a man who one summer tried to do twoand-half men’s work in one. For five days in the week it took him from early in the morning of one day till early in the morning of the next. On Saturday afternoon he was free, and on Saturday he took the boat to a village twenty-one miles distant. Sunday afternoon was devoted (alas, necessarily) again to work, — but in the open air. At twothirty on Monday morning he started on his return journey — afoot; breakfasted halfway in; and was at his desk in as good time as spirits.— Profit? That early morning walk picked him up for the week. Pleasure? My dear practical sir, would you had been with him ! Would you had felt the quiet, the serenity, the calming influence of unsullied Nature; the supreme repose in those early morning hours, the solitude, the vastness, the expansion of soul and spirit beneath the silent stars, the quiet dawn. He saw the full moon pale and set; he saw great Nature slowly wake; the sleepy cows knee-deep in clover; the fields begemmed with dew; the little pools — pools which at noon would be muddy puddles — glistering like emeralds and garnets in the morn. By degrees, growing things were individualized. Each shrub, each creeping thing, had a life of its own. The veriest weed was exalted into a vegetable personality which had dealings with the Infinite and the Divine; and all flowers in field or forest which unclose their trembling eyelids to the kiss of day spake to him. — He was alone, — alone with unhurrying, uncareful Nature. The peace of untold æons entered his soul and couraged him to battle with the petty and the trivial for five more wearing days without a qualm. — Profit? Pleasure ? — What nag, what buggy, what skiff, what bike, what motor, what dirigible balloon, would have got him that? In simple truth, of all that he learned and did during those arduous weeks, only those lovely lonely walks live in that man’s memory to-day. — Would that oftener we bathed our thirsty souls in the dews of the dawn ! Would that oftener men gat them away from offices and counters and desks, — nay, from balls and bats and cleeks, —away into the quiet country, where nor strife nor struggle, noble or ignoble, has place or worth! The world is too much with us. Call-loans — narrow margins, with a slump in the market — killing races with a dark horse — quickly changing quotations — prolonged ill luck at pontifical or pokerian games — anthracite coal out of sight — unstable tariffs — strikes and rumors of strikes — such things perturb the human mind. Well, I know few more efficacious antidotes to mental perturbation than an early morning walk. It is a psychic as well as a pecuniary investment.

It is also a mental tonic, — even in homœopathic doses. — I took last Sunday in a northern clime a little four-mile stroll before breakfast, and its calming and beneficent influence is with me still. No one was about; I had the whole country to myself, and I bathed a tired head in the spacious quietude of earth and sky. From a height I looked over a great and restful country, across the sleeping town, and far away over the peaceful lake. Above it all stretched the benevolent heavens, brooding over this pendent world. — I thought I saw fixity in the midst of motion; substance beneath evanescence ; unity in multiplicity ; a sort of goal where everything was cyclical; an end where all things seemed only means ; infinity lurking in finitude; a divine inhering in the natural. After the treadmill of the week it was uplifting, exalting. T inhaled great drafts of air from ultra-planetary spaces; I fed on manna fallen from the highest heavens. This tiny planet, with its trivial cares and duties, vanished from my eyes, and I cooled my brow in the clouds of the Holy of Holies. — But none the less did I recognize the all-importance, to it and to me, of earth’s small cares and duties. Were they not part of that infinite multiplicity in which lurked that infinite unity ? Did they not go to make up the “spiritual economy ” of the cosmos ? But I saw them in a newer light, —a larger light than merely solar, and they took on a new aspect, and declared themselves integral portions of that divine All without which that divine All would cease to be.

There is something strangely pure and purifying about early morning air. It is Nature’s great sterilizer. It is aseptic; and none breathes it but is more or less cleansed of the taint of noontide life. The noxious germs of care and anxiety cannot live in it. It is a magnificent bactericide. Nature is herself then. Even the denizens of Nature seem to know this, for never is bird or beast more blithesome than at dawn.

For lonely souls, for luckless souls, there is, perhaps, after all is said and done, but one source of solace. “Nothing human, ” said Eugénie de Guérin, “ nothing human comforts the soul, nothing human supports it: —

Well, those who think their God has revealed Himself in the Canonical Books will go to their Bible ; those who think He has chosen the channel of a Church will derive ghostly strength from their spiritual counselors; but those who think the Nameless has nowhere so plainly shown himself as in his works will seek in the face and lineaments of Nature that consoling smile which every lonely soul so miserably craves; and fortunate it is that not over his works, but only over his words, theologians so wrathfully wrangle.—Art thou cast down, and is thy soul disquieted within thee? Dost distrust thyself ? Has love grown cold ? And hast thou caught on thy leman’s lips a sigh not meant for thee ? Is there none to whom thou canst go, on whose bosom to rain out the heavy mist of tears? — Go thou to Pan; betake thee to the fields ; betake thee to the woods; pour out thy contrite heart at the altar of the Universe, and thou shalt be comforted. What matters it the petty perturbations of the mind ? What signify the paltry upheavings of the heart ? Lay thy tired head on Nature’s breast. Friendship may fade, ideals vanish, passion wane, the darling desire upon which thou hast staked thine all may prove to have been snatched from thee before thy very eyes. — Take heart. Always there is at hand the Infinite and the Eternal: about thee, above thee, in presence of which the petty and the paltry flee away.

I know no more comfortable medicament than the quiet companionship of Nature. The trees breathe a salutary air. The fields invite to repose. A calming influence pervades unwalled, unceilinged earth, and there the crumpled soul has room in which to smooth itself out: the noxious bacilli which infest its folds are swept away; ill-natured thoughts take flight. How paltry seems a passing quarrel beneath the boughs of a hoary oak that has witnessed a hundred fights! How puny a callous rage while the somnolent clouds roll by!

For, believe me, Great Pan is not dead. Nor, believe me, are any that go to him in any wise cast out. He cares not of what Church thou art a child, nor does he fence his tables. Worship at whatsoever shrine thou choosest, always he will welcome thee to his, for Pan is beloved of all the gods.

Ach! There comes a time when nothing seems worth while ; when gayety palls, and even sorrow dulls instead of stirs; when nothing seems of any use, and one feels inclined to give up, to give up. —To such I would say, pull on thick boots, clutch a stout stick, and go for a country walk — rain or shine. — It sounds a preposterous remedy, but try it. Nature never gives up. Not a pigmy weed, trodden under foot of man and covered up and overwhelmed with rival growths, but battles for its life with vim. Nor does it ask for what it battles. Neither does it question why more favored plants are so carefully nurtured, and it, poor thing, is dragged up by the roots. —Take a country walk, and look at the weeds if at nothing else.

And remember, this is a legitimate remedy, preposterous though it may sound. So many prescriptions for the heartache are illegitimate — stimulants, or narcotics, or stimulant-narcotics : sport, work, play, hazardous adventure, the gaming-table or the bettingring, to say nothing of the cup that inebriates but does not cheer. A country walk is but “letting Nature have her way, ” is but a giving an opportunity for the vis medicatrix naturæ. Try it; do not, like Naaman, prate of Abana and Pharpar, rivers of Damascus, but go wash in Jordan seven times.

But is it not a selfish pleasure, this that is to be gained by rural peregrination? I shall be asked. Bluntly I answer, No. A country walk makes one blithesome; and than blithesomeness there is no greater foe to selfishness. Had Bacon not declared that gardening was the purest of human pleasures, I should be inclined to give the palm to walking. —Yet no; Bacon was right.

We are too gregarious. We live too much in herds, and we consider too much what the herd will think of our petty individual ways. Civilization is not an unmixed boon, and artificial combinations of men taint the natural simplicity of the race. In combining together for mutual protection against a common foe we forget that sometimes a man’s foes are those of his own household. Each feels that the eyes of the world are upon him, and always he is subconsciously occupied in conforming himself to the world. A political community not only curtails the individual’s freedom of action for the good of the whole, it curtails also his freedom of thought and manner. What is the result ? The result is that “self-consciousness ” has taken on a new and sinister meaning. Instead of denoting the especial and distinguishing characteristic of emancipated reason, self-consciousness has come to denote a painful cognizance of the fetters that our fellow reasoners have put upon reason. We are the slaves of ourselves. Only the child and the savage are free to “live deliberately,” to “live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.” Long before the child has developed into the grown, and the savage into the civilized, man, that silent and unseen but tireless architect Convention builds about him an invisible but infrangible wall of reserve; his spontaneous emotions, his natural affections, his aspirations and ambitions, must filter through crevices and peepholes instead of exhaling from him as a rich and original aura.

Already the taint is perceptible in our literature. The centripetal tendency is not a purely economic one. Commerce and industry draw the crowds to the cities, and immediately there arises a set of writers who write only of the city. How large a proportion of our fiction portrays only the wretched drawing-room intrigue, the wretched rivalries of wretched citizens. The Epic was buried two hundred years ago. The Ode is dead. The Lyric is dying. Now we have the Novel and the Problem Play, the sensational Newspaper and the Picture Magazine. In time, I suppose, we shall come to the Snap-shot and the Paperette. Already we are almost there. — Was it for this that the mighty Areopagitical pleader for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing strove?

I wish the whole population of crowded cities could be turned out hebdomadally to take long week-end walks in the country, there to mew its mighty youth and kindle its undazzled eyes at the full midday beam; there to slough off the skin of daily toil, cleanse itself from the dross of money-getting, and learn that there is something in life more worth living for than the weekly wage, and other joys than those of panem et circenses. — But this is a wild dream. As well try to rehabilitate the Bacchic dance and Chian in place of Baseball and Peanuts. Yet methinks I have heard of wilder. What did Jean-Jacques and his school really mean by “back to nature ” ?

To me, I confess, this polipetal or city-seeking tendency in modern life (if I may so call it) wears a most serious, a most sinister aspect. So, I am inclined to think, it did to Ruskin. “I had once purposed, ” wrote Ruskin a quarter of a century ago, “ to show what kind of evidence existed respecting the possible influence of country life on men; it seeming to me, then, likely that here and there a reader would perceive this to be a grave question, more than most which we contend about, political or social, and might care to follow it out with me earnestly. The day will assuredly come when men will see that it is a grave question, ” ³⁰

If we read history aright, always the bloated city succumbs to the pagan horde. It is in the crowded city that all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life,³¹ have most free play. And it is in the city, where division of labor is daily carried to greater extremes, that men’s activities as a whole have least free play. The result is twofold : the nobler emotions are stunted; the baser passions are stimulated. Socialism (whatever the precise prescription so labeled may be) is no remedy for this. Perhaps Rousseau reasoned better than he knew.

In a sense, however, — thanks to whatever gods may be! — as a matter of fact there is quietly going on a constant recurrence to Nature. The United States of America, Canada, Australia, South Africa, — what but wholesale emigration from over-populous or overpragmatical centres is the source and origin of these? Colonization is the protest against the social, political, economical, or religious constrictions of the crowd. — It is precisely these constrictions, my practical querist, that I am tempting thee now and again to flee. De te fabula.

Have I too much belauded the country walk ? I do not thereby decry the outdoor sport. The thorough sportsman is the noblest work of God (apologies to the shade of Alexander Pope!). Athletics, says that acute philosophical historian, Mr. Goldwin Smith, “wash the brain.” Well, sometimes I think a really good country walk cleans the soul. You get away from rivalries and trivialities; from scandal, gossip, and paltriness; you get away from your compeers and your neighbors, — perhaps you learn for the first time who your neighbor is, namely, your fellow farer in distress, as the Good Samaritan long ago taught; you get away from barter and commerce, from manners and customs, from forms and ceremonies; from the thousand and one complications that arise when a multitude of hearts that do not beat as one try to live in a too close contiguity. It was only when the inevitable third party appeared upon the scene (as I think some one must have said) that Adam and Eve ceased to be good, put on clothes, and hid themselves from the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden. It is easy to be generous amongst trees and grass and running water; one feels good ’neath the blue firmament on the open earth; ghosts vanish that scent the morning air, and glow-worms pale their uneffectual fire. For to every one, I care not whether theist, deist, or atheist, — to every one Nature instinctively, spontaneously, proclaims herself an infinitely adorable Mystery. If there is anything above and beyond the ephemeral and the fleeting; if there is somewhere some immensity of Being, some source of All, would it not be well sometimes to make haste and bow the head toward the earth and worship ? ³² Some immensity of Being. It is to this that in reality all Nature points. The clouds, the skies, the greenery of earth, the myriad forms of vegetation at our feet, stir as these may the soul to its depths, they are but single chords in the orchestra of Life. It is the great paean of Being that Nature chants. By them it is that we perceive “the immense circulation of life which throbs in the ample bosom of Nature, a life which surges from an invisible source and swells the veins of this universe. ”³³ “ Through them it is that we detect the enormous but incomprehensible unity which underlies this incommensurable multiplicity. The wavelet’s plash; the purl of the rill; the sough of the wind in the pines, — these are but notes in the divine diapason of Life, of Life singing its cosmic song, unmindful who may hear. — Alas, that so few hear aught but a thin and scrannel sound!

Arnold Haultain.