Walking : Complete

I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute Freedom and Wildness, ascontrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil,-to regard man as an inhabitant,or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society.

I wish to make anextreme statement, if so I may make an emphatic one, for there are enoughchampions of civilization: the minister and the school committee and every one ofyou will take care of that.I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understoodthe art of Walking, that is, of taking walks-who had a genius, so to speak, forsauntering, which word is beautifully derived "from idle people who roved about thecountry, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretense of going a la SainteTerre," to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, "There goes a Sainte-Terrer," aSaunterer, a Holy-Lander.

They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as theypretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they who do go there aresaunterers in the good sense, such as I mean.

Some, however, would derive the wordfrom sans terre without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean,having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere.

For this is the secret ofsuccessful sauntering. He who sits still in a house all the time may be the greatestvagrant of all; but the saunterer, in the good sense, is no more vagrant than themeandering river, which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course to thesea.

But I prefer the first, which, indeed, is the most probable derivation.

For everywalk is a sort of crusade, preached by some Peter the Hermit in us, to go forth andreconquer this Holy Land from the hands of the Infidels.It is true, we are but faint-hearted crusaders, even the walkers, nowadays, whoundertake no persevering, never-ending enterprises.

Our expeditions are but tours,and come round again at evening to the old hearth-side from which we set out.

Halfthe walk is but retracing our steps. We should go forth on the shortest walk,perchance, in the spirit of undying adventure, never to return,-prepared to send backour embalmed hearts only as relics to our desolate kingdoms.

If you are ready to leavefather and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and neversee them again,-if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all youraffairs, and are a free man; then you are ready for a walk.To come down to my own experience, my companion and I, for I sometimes havea companion, take pleasure in fancying ourselves knights of a new, or rather an old,order-not Equestrians or Chevaliers, not Ritters or Riders, but Walkers, a still moreancient and honorable class, I trust.

The chivalric and heroic spirit which oncebelonged to the Rider seems now to reside in, or perchance to have subsided into, theWalker-not the Knight, but Walker Errant.

He is a sort of fourth estate, outside ofChurch and State and People.