In Praise of Walking

"Sunbeams upon distant hills gliding apace"—

the best sort of day for mountain scenery—that ripple of light and shadow brings out the forms and the depths of the hills far better than a cloudless sky; and the horizon is generally wider.

Before us and far away was the round flat head of Minchmoor, with a dark, rich bloom on it from the thick, short heather—the hills around being green. Near the top, on the Tweed side, its waters trotting away cheerily to the glen at Bold, is the famousCheese Well—always full, never overflowing. Here every traveler—Duchess, shepherd, or houselessmugger—stops, rests, and is thankful; doubtless so did Montrose, poor fellow, and his young nobles and their jaded steeds, on their scurry from Lesly and his Dragoons. It is called the Cheese Well from those who rest there dropping in bits of their provisions, as votive offerings to the fairies whose especial haunt this mountain was. After our rest and drink, we left the road and made for the top. When there we were well rewarded. The great round-backed, kindly, solemn hills of Tweed, Yarrow, and Ettrick lay all about like sleeping mastiffs—too plain to be grand, too ample and beautiful to be commonplace.

There, to the north-east, is the place—Williamhoperidge—where Sir Walter Scott bade farewell to his heroic friend Mungo Park.They had come up fromAshestiel, where Scott then lived, and whereMarmionwas written and its delightful epistles inspired—where he passed the happiest part of his life—leaving it, as Hogg said, "for gude an' a'"; for his fatal "dreams about his cottage" were now begun. He was to have "a hundred acres, two spare bed-rooms, with dressing rooms, each of which will on a pinch have a couch-bed." We all know what the dream, and the cottage, and the hundred acres came to—the ugly Abbotsford; the over-burdened, shattered brain driven wild, and the end, death, and madness. Well, it was on the ridge that the two friends—each romantic, but in such different ways—parted never to meet again. There is the ditch Park's horse stumbled over and all but fell. "I am afraid, Mungo, that's a bad omen," said the Sheriff; to which he answered, with a bright smile on his handsome, fearless face—"Freits(omens) follow those who look to them." With this expression, he struck the spurs into his horse, and Scott never saw him again. He had not long been married to a lovely and much-loved woman, and had been speaking to Scott about his new African scheme, and how he meant to tell his family he had some business in Edinburgh—send them his blessing, and be off—alas! never to return! Scott used to say, when speakingof this parting, "I stood and looked back, but he did not." A more memorable place for two such men to part in would not easily be found.

Where we are standing is the spot Scott speaks of when writing to Joanna Baillie about her new tragedies—"Were it possible for me to hasten the treat I expect in such a composition with you, I would promise to read the volumeat the silence of noonday upon the top of Minchmoor. The hour is allowed, by those skilful in demonology,to be as full of witchingas midnight itself; and I assure you I have felt really oppressed with a sort of fearful loneliness when looking around the naked towering ridges of desolate barrenness, which is all the eye takes in from the top of such a mountain, the patches of cultivation being hidden in the little glens, or only appearing to make one feel how feeble and ineffectual man has been to contend with the genius of the soil. It is in such a scene that the unknown and gifted author ofAlbaniaplaces the superstition which consists in hearing the noise of a chase, the baying of the hounds, the throttling sobs of the deer, the wild hollos of the huntsmen, and the 'hoof thick beating on the hollow hill.' I have often repeated his verses with some sensations of awe, in this place." The lines—and they are noble, and must have sounded wonderful with his voice and look—are asfollows. Can no one tell us anything more of their author?—

"There oft is heard, at midnight, or at noon,Beginning faint, but rising still more loud,And nearer, voice of hunters, and of hounds;And horns, hoarse-winded, blowing far and keen!Forthwith the hubbub multiplies; the galeLabours with wilder shrieks, and rifer dinOf hot pursuit; the broken cry of deerMangled by throttling dogs; the shouts of men,And hoofs thick beating on the hollow hill.Sudden the grazing heifer in the valeStarts at the noise, and both the herdman's earsTingle with inward dread—aghast he eyesThe mountain's height, and all the ridges round,Yet not one trace of living wight discerns,Nor knows, o'erawed and trembling as he stands,To what or whom he owes his idle fear—To ghost, to witch, to fairy, or to fiend;But wonders, and no end of wondering finds."

"There oft is heard, at midnight, or at noon,

Beginning faint, but rising still more loud,

And nearer, voice of hunters, and of hounds;

And horns, hoarse-winded, blowing far and keen!

Forthwith the hubbub multiplies; the gale

Labours with wilder shrieks, and rifer din

Of hot pursuit; the broken cry of deer

Mangled by throttling dogs; the shouts of men,

And hoofs thick beating on the hollow hill.

Sudden the grazing heifer in the vale

Starts at the noise, and both the herdman's ears

Tingle with inward dread—aghast he eyes

The mountain's height, and all the ridges round,

Yet not one trace of living wight discerns,

Nor knows, o'erawed and trembling as he stands,

To what or whom he owes his idle fear—

To ghost, to witch, to fairy, or to fiend;

But wonders, and no end of wondering finds."

We listened for the hunt, but could only hear the wind sobbing from the blind "Hopes."[3]

[3]The native word for hollows in the hills: thus, Dryhope, Gameshope, Chapelhope, &c.

The view from the top reaches from the hugeHarestane Broadlaw—nearly as high as Ben Lomond—whose top is as flat as a table, and would make a race-course of two miles, and where the clouds are still brooding, to theCheviot; and from theMaiden Papsin Liddesdale, and that wild huddle of hills atMoss Paul, toDunse Law, and the weirdLammermoors. There isRuberslaw, always surly and dark. TheDunion, beyond which lies Jedburgh. There are theEildons, with their triple heights; and you can get a glimpse of the upper woods of Abbotsford, and the top of the hill above Cauldshiels Loch, that very spot where the "wondrous potentate,"—when suffering from languor and pain, and beginning to break down under his prodigious fertility,—composed those touching lines:—

"The sun upon the Weirdlaw HillIn Ettrick's vale is sinking sweet;The westland wind is hushed and still;The lake lies sleeping at my feet.Yet not the landscape to mine eyeBears those bright hues that once it bore,Though evening, with her richest dye,Flames o'er the hills of Ettrick's shore.With listless look along the plainI see Tweed's silver current glide,And coldly mark the holy faneOf Melrose rise in ruined pride.The quiet lake, and balmy air,The hill, the stream, the tower, the tree,Are they still such as once they were,Or is the dreary change in me?Alas! the warped and broken board,How can it bear the painter's dye!The harp of strained and tuneless chord,How to the minstrel's skill reply!To aching eyes each landscape lowers,To feverish pulse each gale blows chill;And Araby or Eden's bowersWere barren as this moorland hill."

"The sun upon the Weirdlaw Hill

In Ettrick's vale is sinking sweet;

The westland wind is hushed and still;

The lake lies sleeping at my feet.

Yet not the landscape to mine eye

Bears those bright hues that once it bore,

Though evening, with her richest dye,

Flames o'er the hills of Ettrick's shore.

With listless look along the plainI see Tweed's silver current glide,And coldly mark the holy faneOf Melrose rise in ruined pride.The quiet lake, and balmy air,The hill, the stream, the tower, the tree,Are they still such as once they were,Or is the dreary change in me?

With listless look along the plain

I see Tweed's silver current glide,

And coldly mark the holy fane

Of Melrose rise in ruined pride.

The quiet lake, and balmy air,

The hill, the stream, the tower, the tree,

Are they still such as once they were,

Or is the dreary change in me?

Alas! the warped and broken board,How can it bear the painter's dye!The harp of strained and tuneless chord,How to the minstrel's skill reply!To aching eyes each landscape lowers,To feverish pulse each gale blows chill;And Araby or Eden's bowersWere barren as this moorland hill."

Alas! the warped and broken board,

How can it bear the painter's dye!

The harp of strained and tuneless chord,

How to the minstrel's skill reply!

To aching eyes each landscape lowers,

To feverish pulse each gale blows chill;

And Araby or Eden's bowers

Were barren as this moorland hill."

There, too, isMinto Hill, as modest and shapely and smooth as Clytie's shoulders, andEarlston Black Hill, with Cowdenknowes at its foot; and there, standing stark and upright as a warder, is the stout oldSmailholme Tower, seen and seeing all around. It is quite curious how unmistakable and important it looks at what must be twenty and more miles. It is now ninety years since that "lonely infant," who has sung its awful joys, was found in a thunderstorm, as we all know, lying on the soft grass at the foot of the grey old Strength, clapping his hands at each flash, and shouting, "Bonny! bonny!"

We now descended into Yarrow, and forgathered with a shepherd who was taking his lambs over to the great Melrose fair. He was a fine specimen of a border herd—young, tall, sagacious, self-contained, and free in speech and air. We got his heart by praising his dogJed, a very fine collie, black and comely, gentle and keen—"Ay, she's a fell yin; she can do a' but speak." On asking him if the sheep dogs needed much teaching—"Whyles ay and whyles no; her kind (Jed's) needs nane. She sooks't in wi' her mither's milk." On askinghim if the dogs were ever sold, he said—"Never, but at an orra time. Naebody wad sell a gude dowg, and naebody wad buy an ill ane." He told us with great feeling, of the death of one of his best dogs by poison. It was plainly still a grief to him. "What was he poisoned with?" "Strychnia," he said, as decidedly as might Dr Christison. "How do you know?" "I opened him, puir fallow, and got him analeezed!"

Now we are on Birkindale Brae, and are looking down on the same scene as did

"James Boyd (the Earle of Arran, his brother was he),"

when he crossed Minchmoor on his way to deliver James the Fifth's message to

"Yon outlaw Murray,Surely whaur bauldly bideth he.""Down Birkindale Brae when that he camHe saw the feir Foreste wi' his ee."

"Yon outlaw Murray,Surely whaur bauldly bideth he."

"Yon outlaw Murray,

Surely whaur bauldly bideth he."

"Down Birkindale Brae when that he camHe saw the feir Foreste wi' his ee."

"Down Birkindale Brae when that he cam

He saw the feir Foreste wi' his ee."

How James Boyd fared, and what the outlaw said, and what James and his nobles said and did, and how the outlaw at last made peace with his King, and rose up "Sheriffe of Ettricke Foreste," and how the bold ruffian boasted,

"Fair Philiphaugh is mine by right,And Lewinshope still mine shall be;Newark, Foulshiels, and Tinnies baithMy bow and arrow purchased me.And I have native steads to meThe Newark Lee o' Hangingshaw.I have many steads in the Forest schaw,But them by name I dinna knaw."

"Fair Philiphaugh is mine by right,And Lewinshope still mine shall be;Newark, Foulshiels, and Tinnies baithMy bow and arrow purchased me.

"Fair Philiphaugh is mine by right,

And Lewinshope still mine shall be;

Newark, Foulshiels, and Tinnies baith

My bow and arrow purchased me.

And I have native steads to meThe Newark Lee o' Hangingshaw.I have many steads in the Forest schaw,But them by name I dinna knaw."

And I have native steads to me

The Newark Lee o' Hangingshaw.

I have many steads in the Forest schaw,

But them by name I dinna knaw."

And how King James snubbed

"The kene Laird of Buckscleuth,A stalwart man and stern was he."

"The kene Laird of Buckscleuth,

A stalwart man and stern was he."

When the Laird hinted that,

"For a king to gang an outlaw tillIs beneath his state and dignitie.The man that wins yon forest intillHe lives by reif and felony.""Then out and spak the nobil King,And round him cast a wilie ee.'Now haud thy tongue, Sir Walter Scott,Nor speak o' reif or felonie—For, had every honest man his awin kye,A richt puir clan thy name wud be!'"

"For a king to gang an outlaw tillIs beneath his state and dignitie.The man that wins yon forest intillHe lives by reif and felony."

"For a king to gang an outlaw till

Is beneath his state and dignitie.

The man that wins yon forest intill

He lives by reif and felony."

"Then out and spak the nobil King,And round him cast a wilie ee.

"Then out and spak the nobil King,

And round him cast a wilie ee.

'Now haud thy tongue, Sir Walter Scott,Nor speak o' reif or felonie—For, had every honest man his awin kye,A richt puir clan thy name wud be!'"

'Now haud thy tongue, Sir Walter Scott,

Nor speak o' reif or felonie—

For, had every honest man his awin kye,

A richt puir clan thy name wud be!'"

(by-the-bye, why did Professor Aytoun leave out this excellent hit in his edition?)—all this and much more may you see if you take upThe Border Minstrelsy, and read "The Song of the Outlaw Murray," with the incomparablenotes of Scott. But we are now well down the hill. There to the left, in the hollow, isPermanscore, where the King and the outlaw met:—

"Bid him mete me at Permanscore,And bring four in his companie;Five Erles sall cum wi' mysel',Gude reason I sud honoured be."

"Bid him mete me at Permanscore,

And bring four in his companie;

Five Erles sall cum wi' mysel',

Gude reason I sud honoured be."

And there goes our Shepherd with his long swinging stride. As different from his dark, wily companion, the Badenoch drover, as was Harry Wakefield from Robin Oig; or as the big, sunny Cheviot is from the lowering Ruberslaw; and there isJedtrotting meekly behind him—may she escape strychnia, and, dying at the fireside among the children, be laid like

"Paddy Tims—whose soul at aise is—With the point of his noseAnd the tips of his toesTurn'd up to the roots of the daisies"—

"Paddy Tims—whose soul at aise is—

With the point of his nose

And the tips of his toes

Turn'd up to the roots of the daisies"—

unanaleezed, save by the slow cunning of the grave. And may her master get the top price for his lambs!

Do you see to the left that little plantation on the brow of Foulshiels Hill, with the sunlight lying on its upper corner? If you were there you might find among the brackensand foxglove a little headstone with "I. T." rudely carved on it. That isTibbie Tamson's grave, known and feared all the country round.

This poor outcast was a Selkirk woman, who, under the stress of spiritual despair—that sense of perdition, which, as in Cowper's case, often haunts and overmasters the deepest and gentlest natures, making them think themselves

"Damn'd below Judas, more abhorred than he was,"—

committed suicide; and being, with the gloomy, cruel superstition of the time, looked on by her neighbours as accursed of God, she was hurried into a rough white deal coffin, and carted out of the town, the people stoning it all the way till it crossed the Ettrick. Here, on this wild hillside, it found its rest, being buried where three lairds' lands meet. May we trust that the light of God's reconciled countenance has for all these long years been resting on that once forlorn soul, as His blessed sunshine now lies on her moorland grave! For "the mountains shall depart, and the hills be removed; but my kindness shall not depart from thee, neither shall the covenant of my peace be removed, saith the Lord that hath mercy on thee."

Now, we see down into the Yarrow—there is the famous stream twinkling in the sun.What stream and valley was ever so be-sung! You wonder at first why this has been, but the longer you look the less you wonder. There is a charm about it—it is not easy to say what. The huge sunny hills in which it is embosomed give it a look at once gentle and serious. They are great, and their gentleness makes them greater. Wordsworth has the right words, "pastoral melancholy"; and besides, the region is "not uninformed with phantasy and looks that threaten the profane"—the Flowers of Yarrow, the Douglas Tragedy, the Dowie Dens, Wordsworth's Yarrow Unvisited, Visited, and Re-Visited, and, above all, the glamour of Sir Walter, and Park's fatal and heroic story. Where can you find eight more exquisite lines anywhere than Logan's, which we all know by heart:—

"His mother from the window looked,With all the longing of a mother;His little sister, weeping, walkedThe greenwood path to meet her brother.They sought him east, they sought him west,They sought him all the forest thorough—They only saw the cloud of night,They only heard the roar of Yarrow."

"His mother from the window looked,

With all the longing of a mother;

His little sister, weeping, walked

The greenwood path to meet her brother.

They sought him east, they sought him west,

They sought him all the forest thorough—

They only saw the cloud of night,

They only heard the roar of Yarrow."

And there isNewark Toweramong the rich woods; andHarehead, that cosiest, loveliest, and hospitablest of nests. Methinks I hear certain young voices among the hazels; outthey come on the little haugh by the side of the deep, swirling stream,fabulosusas was ever Hydaspes. There they go "running races in their mirth," and is not that—an me ludit amabilis insania?—the voice ofma pauvre petite—animosa infans—the wilful, rich-eyed, delicious Eppie?

"Oh blessed vision, happy child,Thou art so exquisitely wild!"

"Oh blessed vision, happy child,

Thou art so exquisitely wild!"

And there isBlack Andro and Glowr owr'emandFoulshiels, where Park was born and bred; and there is the deep pool in the Yarrow where Scott found him plunging one stone after another into the water, and watching anxiously the bubbles as they rose to the surface. "This," said Scott to him, "appears but an idle amusement for one who has seen so much adventure." "Not so idle, perhaps, as you suppose," answered Mungo, "this was the way I used to ascertain the depth of a river in Africa." He was then meditating his second journey, but had said so to no one.

We go down byBroadmeadows, now held by that Yair "Hoppringle"—who so well governed Scinde—and into the grounds of Bowhill, and passingPhiliphaugh, see where stout David Lesly crossed in the mist at daybreak with his heavy dragoons, many of them old soldiers of Gustavus, and routed the gallant Graeme; andthere isSlainmens Lee, where the royalists lie; and there isCarterhaugh, the scene of the strange wild story ofTamlaneand Lady Janet, when

"She prinked hersell and prinned hersellBy the ae light of the moon,And she's awa' to CarterhaughTo speak wi' young Tamlane."

"She prinked hersell and prinned hersell

By the ae light of the moon,

And she's awa' to Carterhaugh

To speak wi' young Tamlane."

Noel Paton might paint that night, when

"'Twixt the hours of twelve and yinA north windtore the bent";

"'Twixt the hours of twelve and yin

A north windtore the bent";

when "fair Janet" in her green mantle

"—— heard strange elritch soundsUpon the wind that went."

"—— heard strange elritch sounds

Upon the wind that went."

And straightway

"About the dead hour o' the nightShe heard the bridles ring;Their oaten pipes blew wondrous shrill,The hemlock small blew clear;And louder notes from hemlock largeAnd bog reed, struck the ear,"

"About the dead hour o' the night

She heard the bridles ring;

Their oaten pipes blew wondrous shrill,

The hemlock small blew clear;

And louder notes from hemlock large

And bog reed, struck the ear,"

and then the fairy cavalcade swept past, while Janet, filled with love and fear, looked out for the milk-white steed, and "gruppit it fast," and "pu'd the rider doon," the young Tamlane,whom, after dipping "in a stand of milk and then in a stand of water,"

"She wrappit ticht in her green mantle,And sae her true love won!"

"She wrappit ticht in her green mantle,

And sae her true love won!"

This ended our walk. We found the carriage at the Philiphaugh home-farm, and we drove home byYairandFernilee,AshestielandElibank, and passed the bears as ferocious as ever, "the orange sky of evening" glowing through their wild tusks, the old house looking even older in the fading light. And is not this a walk worth making? One of our number had been at the Land's End and Johnnie Groat's, and now on Minchmoor; and we wondered how many other men had been at all the three, and how many had enjoyed Minchmoor more than he.

Dr John Brown.

As a man grows old, he is told by some moralists that he may find consolation for increasing infirmities in looking back upon a well-spent life. No doubt such a retrospect must be very agreeable, but the question must occur to many of us whether our life offers the necessary materials for self-complacency. What part of it, if any, has been well spent? To that I find it convenient to reply, for my own purposes, any part in which I thoroughly enjoyed myself. If it be proposed to add "innocently," I will not quarrel with the amendment. Perhaps, indeed, I may have a momentary regret for some pleasures which do not quite deserve that epithet, but the pleasure of which I am about to speak is obtrusively and pre-eminently innocent. Walking is among recreations what ploughing and fishing are among industrial labours: it is primitive and simple; it brings us into contact with mother earth and unsophisticated nature; it requires no elaborate apparatus and no extraneous excitement. It is fit even for poets and philosophers, and he who can thoroughlyenjoy it must have at least some capacity for worshipping the "cherub Contemplation." He must be able to enjoy his own society without the factitious stimulants of the more violent physical recreations. I have always been a humble admirer of athletic excellence. I retain, in spite of much head-shaking from wise educationalists, my early veneration for the heroes of the river and the cricket-field. To me they have still the halo which surrounded them in the days when "muscular Christianity" was first preached and the whole duty of man said to consist in fearing God and walking a thousand miles in a thousand hours. I rejoice unselfishly in these later days to see the stream of bicyclists restoring animation to deserted highroads or to watch even respected contemporaries renewing their youth in the absorbing delights of golf. While honouring all genuine delight in manly exercises, I regret only the occasional admixture of lower motives which may lead to its degeneration. Now it is one merit of walking that its real devotees are little exposed to such temptations. Of course there are such things as professional pedestrians making "records" and seeking the applause of the mob. When I read of the immortal Captain Barclay performing his marvellous feats, I admire respectfully, but I fear that his motives included a greater admixture ofvanity than of the emotions congenial to the higher intellect. The true walker is one to whom the pursuit is in itself delightful; who is not indeed priggish enough to be above a certain complacency in the physical prowess required for his pursuit, but to whom the muscular effort of the legs is subsidiary to the "cerebration" stimulated by the effort; to the quiet musings and imaginings which arise most spontaneously as he walks, and generate the intellectual harmony which is the natural accompaniment to the monotonous tramp of his feet. The cyclist or the golf-player, I am told, can hold such intercourse with himself in the intervals of striking the ball or working his machine. But the true pedestrian loves walking because, so far from distracting his mind, it is favourable to the equable and abundant flow of tranquil and half-conscious meditation. Therefore I should be sorry if the pleasures of cycling or any other recreation tended to put out of fashion the habit of the good old walking tour.

For my part, when I try to summon up remembrance of "well-spent" moments, I find myself taking a kind of inverted view of the past; inverted, that is, so far as the accidental becomes the essential. If I turn over the intellectual album which memory is always compiling, I find that the most distinct pictureswhich it contains are those of old walks. Other memories of incomparably greater intrinsic value coalesce into wholes. They are more massive but less distinct. The memory of a friendship that has brightened one's whole life survives not as a series of incidents but as a general impression of the friend's characteristic qualities due to the superposition of innumerable forgotten pictures. I remember him, not the specific conversations by which he revealed himself. The memories of walks, on the other hand, are all localised and dated; they are hitched on to particular times and places; they spontaneously form a kind of calendar or connecting thread upon which other memories may be strung. As I look back, a long series of little vignettes presents itself, each representing a definite stage of my earthly pilgrimage summed up and embodied in a walk. Their background of scenery recalls places once familiar, and the thoughts associated with the places revive thoughts of the contemporary occupations. The labour of scribbling books happily leaves no distinct impression, and I would forget that it had ever been undergone; but the picture of some delightful ramble includes incidentally a reference to the nightmare of literary toil from which it relieved me. The author is but the accidental appendage of the tramp. My daysare bound each to each not by "natural piety" (or not, let me say, by natural piety alone) but by pedestrian enthusiasm. The memory of school days, if one may trust to the usual reminiscences, generally clusters round a flogging, or some solemn words from the spiritual teacher instilling the seed of a guiding principle of life. I remember a sermon or two rather ruefully; and I confess to memories of a flogging so unjust that I am even now stung by the thought of it. But what comes most spontaneously to my mind is the memory of certain strolls, "out of bounds," when I could forget the Latin grammar, and enjoy such a sense of the beauties of nature as is embodied for a child in a pond haunted by water-rats, or a field made romantic by threats of "mantraps and spring-guns." Then, after a crude fashion, one was becoming more or less of a reflecting and individual being, not a mere automaton set in movement by pedagogic machinery.

The day on which I was fully initiated into the mysteries is marked by a white stone. It was when I put on a knapsack and started from Heidelberg for a march through the Odenwald. Then I first knew the delightful sensation of independence and detachment enjoyed during a walking tour. Free from all bothers of railway time-tablesand extraneous machinery, you trust to your own legs, stop when you please, diverge into any track that takes your fancy, and drop in upon some quaint variety of human life at every inn where you put up for the night. You share for the time the mood in which Borrow settled down in the dingle after escaping from his bondage in the publishers' London slums. You have no dignity to support, and the dress-coat of conventional life has dropped into oblivion, like the bundle from Christian's shoulders. You are in the world of Lavengro, and would be prepared to take tea with Miss Isopel Berners or with the Welsh preacher who thought that he had committed the unpardonable sin. Borrow, of course, took the life more seriously than the literary gentleman who is only escaping on ticket-of-leave from the prison-house of respectability, and is quite unequal to a personal conflict with "blazing Bosville"—the flaming tinman. He is only dipping in the element where his model was thoroughly at home. I remember, indeed, one figure in that first walk which I associate with Benedict Moll, the strange treasure-seeker whom Borrow encountered in his Spanish rambles. My acquaintance was a mild German innkeeper, who sat beside me on a bench while I was trying to assimilate certain pancakes, the only dinner he could provide,still fearful in memory, but just attackable after a thirty-miles' tramp. He confided to me that, poor as he was, he had discovered the secret of perpetual motion. He kept his machine upstairs, where it discharged the humble duty of supplying the place of a shoe-black; but he was about to go to London to offer it to a British capitalist. He looked wistfully at me as possibly a capitalist in (very deep) disguise, and I thought it wise to evade a full explanation. I have not been worthy to encounter many of such quaint incidents and characters as seem to have been normal in Borrow's experience; but the first walk, commonplace enough, remains distinct in my memory. I kept no journal, but I could still give the narrative day by day—the sights which I dutifully admired and the very state of my bootlaces. Walking tours thus rescue a bit of one's life from oblivion. They play in one's personal recollections the part of those historical passages in which Carlyle is an unequalled master; the little islands of light in the midst of the darkening gloom of the past, on which you distinguish the actors in some old drama actually alive and moving. The devotee of other athletic sports remembers special incidents: the occasion on which he hit a cricket-ball over the pavilion at Lord's, or the crab which he caught as his boatwas shooting Barnes Bridge. But those are memories of exceptional moments of glory or the reverse, and apt to be tainted by vanity or the spirit of competition. The walks are the unobtrusive connecting thread of other memories, and yet each walk is a little drama in itself, with a definite plot with episodes and catastrophes, according to the requirements of Aristotle; and it is naturally interwoven with all the thoughts, the friendships, and the interests that form the staple of ordinary life.

Walking is the natural recreation for a man who desires not absolutely to suppress his intellect but to turn it out to play for a season. All great men of letters have, therefore, been enthusiastic walkers (exceptions, of course, excepted). Shakespeare, besides being a sportsman, a lawyer, a divine, and so forth, conscientiously observed his own maxim, "Jog on, jog on, the footpath way"; though a full proof of this could only be given in an octavo volume. Anyhow, he divined the connection between walking and a "merry heart"; that is, of course, a cheerful acceptance of our position in the universe founded upon the deepest moral and philosophical principles. His friend, Ben Jonson, walked from London to Scotland. Another gentleman of the period (I forget his name) danced from London toNorwich. Tom Coryate hung up in his parish church the shoes in which he walked from Venice and then started to walk (with occasional lifts) to India. Contemporary walkers of more serious character might be quoted, such as the admirable Barclay, the famous Quaker apologist, from whom the great Captain Barclay inherited his prowess. Every one, too, must remember the incident in Walton'sLife of Hooker. Walking from Oxford to Exeter, Hooker went to see his godfather, Bishop Jewel, at Salisbury. The Bishop said that he would lend him "a horse which hath carried me many a mile, and, I thank God, with much ease," and "presently delivered into his hands a walking staff with which he professed he had travelled through many parts of Germany." He added ten groats and munificently promised ten groats more when Hooker should restore the "horse." When, in later days, Hooker once rode to London, he expressed more passion than that mild divine was ever known to show upon any other occasion against a friend who had dissuaded him from "footing it." The hack, it seems, "trotted when he did not," and discomposed the thoughts which had been soothed by the walking staff. His biographer must be counted, I fear, among those who do not enjoy walking without the incidental stimulus of sport. Yet theCompleat Anglerand his friends start by a walk of twenty good miles before they take their "morning draught." Swift, perhaps, was the first person to show a full appreciation of the moral and physical advantages of walking. He preached constantly upon this text to Stella, and practised his own advice. It is true that his notions of a journey were somewhat limited. Ten miles a day was his regular allowance when he went from London to Holyhead, but then he spent time in lounging at wayside inns to enjoy the talk of the tramps and ostlers. The fact, though his biographers are rather scandalised, shows that he really appreciated one of the true charms of pedestrian expeditions. Wesley is generally credited with certain moral reforms, but one secret of his power is not always noticed. In his early expeditions he went on foot to save horse hire, and made the great discovery that twenty or thirty miles a day was a wholesome allowance for a healthy man. The fresh air and exercise put "spirit into his sermons," which could not be rivalled by the ordinary parson of the period, who too often passed his leisure lounging by his fireside. Fielding points the contrast. Trulliber, embodying the clerical somnolence of the day, never gets beyond his pig-sties, but the model Parson Adams steps out so vigorously that he distances thestagecoach, and disappears in the distance rapt in the congenial pleasures of walking and composing a sermon. Fielding, no doubt, shared his hero's taste, and that explains the contrast between his vigorous naturalism and the sentimentalism of Richardson, who was to be seen, as he tells us, "stealing along from Hammersmith to Kensington with his eyes on the ground, propping his unsteady limbs with a stick." Even the ponderous Johnson used to dissipate his early hypochondria by walking from Lichfield to Birmingham and back (thirty-two miles), and his later melancholy would have changed to a more cheerful view of life could he have kept up the practice in his beloved London streets. The literary movement at the end of the eighteenth century was obviously due in great part, if not mainly, to the renewed practice of walking. Wordsworth's poetical autobiography shows how every stage in his early mental development was connected with some walk in the Lakes. The sunrise which startled him on a walk after a night spent in dancing first set him apart as a "dedicated spirit." His walking tour in the Alps—then a novel performance—roused him to his first considerable poem. His chief performance is the record of an excursion on foot. He kept up the practice, and De Quincey calculates somewhere what multiple of theearth's circumference he had measured on his legs, assuming, it appears, that he averaged ten miles a day. De Quincey himself, we are told, slight and fragile as he was, was a good walker, and would run up a hill "like a squirrel." Opium-eating is not congenial to walking, yet even Coleridge, after beginning the habit, speaks of walking forty miles a day in Scotland, and, as we all know, the great manifesto of the new school of poetry, the Lyrical Ballads, was suggested by the famous walk with Wordsworth, when the first stanzas of theAncient Marinerwere composed. A remarkable illustration of the wholesome influence might be given from the cases of Scott and Byron. Scott, in spite of his lameness, delighted in walks of twenty and thirty miles a day, and in climbing crags, trusting to the strength of his arms to remedy the stumblings of his foot. The early strolls enabled him to saturate his mind with local traditions, and the passion for walking under difficulties showed the manly nature which has endeared him to three generations. Byron's lameness was too severe to admit of walking, and therefore all the unwholesome humours which would have been walked off in a good cross-country march accumulated in his brain and caused the defects, the morbid affectation and perverse misanthropy, which half ruined theachievement of the most masculine intellect of his time.

It is needless to accumulate examples of a doctrine which will no doubt be accepted as soon as it is announced. Walking is the best of panaceas for the morbid tendencies of authors. It is, I need only observe, as good for reasoners as for poets. The name of "peripatetic" suggests the connection. Hobbes walked steadily up and down the hills in his patron's park when he was in his venerable old age. To the same practice may be justly ascribed the utilitarian philosophy. Old Jeremy Bentham kept himself up to his work for eighty years by his regular "post-jentacular circumgyrations." His chief disciple, James Mill, walked incessantly and preached as he walked. John Stuart Mill imbibed at once psychology, political economy, and a love of walks from his father. Walking was his one recreation; it saved him from becoming a mere smoke-dried pedant; and though he put forward the pretext of botanical researches, it helped him to perceive that man is something besides a mere logic machine. Mill's great rival as a spiritual guide, Carlyle, was a vigorous walker, and even in his latest years was a striking figure when performing his regular constitutionals in London. One of the vivid passages in theReminiscencesdescribes hiswalk with Irving from Glasgow to Drumclog. Here they sat on the "brow of a peat hag, while far, far away to the westward, over our brown horizon, towered up white and visible at the many miles of distance a high irregular pyramid. Ailsa Craig we at once guessed, and thought of the seas and oceans over yonder." The vision naturally led to a solemn conversation, which was an event in both lives. Neither Irving nor Carlyle himself feared any amount of walking in those days, it is added, and next day Carlyle took his longest walk, fifty-four miles. Carlyle is unsurpassable in his descriptions of scenery: from the pictures of mountains inSartor Resartusto the battle-pieces inFrederick. Ruskin, himself a good walker, is more rhetorical but not so graphic; and it is self-evident that nothing educates an eye for the features of a landscape so well as the practice of measuring it by your own legs.

The great men, it is true, have not always acknowledged their debt to the genius, whoever he may be, who presides over pedestrian exercise. Indeed, they have inclined to ignore the true source of their impulse. Even when they speak of the beauties of nature, they would give us to understand that they might have been disembodied spirits, taking aerial flights among mountain solitudes, and independent of the physical machinery of legs and stomachs.When long ago the Alps cast their spell upon me, it was woven in a great degree by the eloquence ofModern Painters. I hoped to share Ruskin's ecstasies in a reverent worship of Mont Blanc and the Matterhorn. The influence of any cult, however, depends upon the character of the worshipper, and I fear that in this case the charm operated rather perversely. I stimulated a passion for climbing which absorbed my energies and distracted me from the prophet's loftier teaching. I might have followed him from the mountains to picture-galleries, and spent among the stones of Venice hours which I devoted to attacking hitherto unascended peaks and so losing my last chance of becoming an art critic. I became a fair judge of an Alpine guide, but I do not even know how to make a judicious allusion to Botticelli or Tintoretto. I can't say that I feel the smallest remorse. I had a good time, and at least escaped one temptation to talking nonsense. It follows, however, that my passion for the mountains had something earthly in its composition. It is associated with memories of eating and drinking. It meant delightful comradeship with some of the best of friends; but our end, I admit, was not always of the most exalted or æsthetic strain. A certain difficulty results. I feel an uncomfortable diffidence. I holdthat Alpine walks are the poetry of the pursuit; I could try to justify the opinion by relating some of the emotions suggested by the great scenic effects: the sunrise on the snow fields; the storm-clouds gathering under the great peaks; the high pasturages knee-deep in flowers; the torrents plunging through the "cloven ravines," and so forth. But the thing has been done before, better than I could hope to do it; and when I look back at those old passages inModern Painters, and think of the enthusiasm which prompted to exuberant sentences of three or four hundred words, I am not only abashed by the thought of their unapproachable eloquence, but feel as though they conveyed a tacit reproach. You, they seem to say, are, after all, a poor prosaic creature, affecting a love of sublime scenery as a cloak for more grovelling motives. I could protest against this judgment, but it is better at present to omit the topic, even though it would give the strongest groundwork for my argument.

Perhaps, therefore, it is better to trust the case for walking to where the external stimulus of splendours and sublimities is not so overpowering. A philosophic historian divides the world into the regions where man is stronger than nature and the regions where nature is stronger than man. The true charmof walking is most unequivocally shown when it is obviously dependent upon the walker himself. I became an enthusiast in the Alps, but I have found almost equal pleasure in walks such as one described by Cowper, where the view from a summit is bounded, not by Alps or Apennines, but by "a lofty quickset hedge." Walking gives a charm to the most commonplace British scenery. A love of walking not only makes any English county tolerable but seems to make the charm inexhaustible. I know only two or three districts minutely, but the more familiar I have become with any of them the more I have wished to return, to invent some new combination of old strolls or to inspect some hitherto unexplored nook. I love the English Lakes, and certainly not on account of associations. I cannot "associate." Much as I respect Wordsworth, I don't care to see the cottage in which he lived: it only suggests to me that anybody else might have lived there. There is an intrinsic charm about the Lake Country, and to me at least a music in the very names of Helvellyn and Skiddaw and Scawfell. But this may be due to the suggestion that it is a miniature of the Alps. I appeal, therefore, to the Fen Country, the country of which Alton Locke's farmer boasted that it had none of your "darned ups and downs" and "was asflat as his barn-door for forty miles on end." I used to climb the range of the Gogmagogs, to see the tower of Ely, some sixteen miles across the dead level, and I boasted that every term I devised a new route for walking to the cathedral from Cambridge. Many of these routes led by the little public-house called "Five Miles from Anywhere": which in my day was the Mecca to which a remarkable club, called—from the name of the village—the "Upware Republic," made periodic pilgrimages. What its members specifically did when they got there beyond consuming beer is unknown to me; but the charm was in the distance "from anywhere"—a sense of solitude under the great canopy of the heavens, where, like emblems of infinity,

"The trenched waters run from sky to sky."

I have always loved walks in the Fens. In a steady march along one of the great dykes by the monotonous canal with the exuberant vegetation dozing in its stagnant waters, we were imbibing the spirit of the scenery. Our talk might be of senior wranglers or the University crew, but we felt the curious charm of the great flats. The absence, perhaps, of definite barriers makes you realise that you are on the surface of a planet rolling through free and boundless space. One queer figurecomes back to me—a kind of scholar-gipsy of the fens. Certain peculiarities made it undesirable to trust him with cash, and his family used to support him by periodically paying his score at riverside publics. They allowed him to print certain poems, moreover, which he would impart when one met him on the towpath. In my boyhood, I remember, I used to fancy that the most delightful of all lives must be that of a bargee—enjoying a perpetual picnic. This gentleman seemed to have carried out the idea; and in the intervals of lectures, I could fancy that he had chosen the better part. His poems, alas! have long vanished from my memory, and I therefore cannot quote what would doubtless have given the essence of the local sentiment and invested such names as Wicken Fen or Swaffham Lode with associations equal to those of Arnold's Hincksey ridge and Fyfield elm.

Another set of walks may, perhaps, appeal to more general sympathy. The voice of the sea, we know, is as powerful as the voice of the mountain; and, to my taste, it is difficult to say whether the Land's End is not in itself a more impressive station than the top of Mont Blanc. The solitude of the frozen peaks suggests tombstones and death. The sea is always alive and at work. The hovering gulls and plunging gannets and the rollickingporpoises are animating symbols of a gallant struggle with wind and wave. Even the unassociative mind has a vague sense of the Armada and Hakluyt's heroes in the background. America and Australia are just over the way. "Is not this a dull place?" asked some one of an old woman whose cottage was near to the Lizard lighthouse. "No," she replied, "it is so 'cosmopolitan.'" That was a simple-minded way of expressing the charm suggested in Milton's wonderful phrase:

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