"constitutional"; and of all abortions or monstrosities of country walks, commend me to the constitutional. The proper frame of mind is that of absolute and secure passivity; an openness to impressions; a giving-up of ourselves to the great and guiding influences of benignant Nature; a humble receptivity of soul; a wondering and childlike eagerness—not a restless and too inquisitive eagerness—to learn all that great Nature may like to teach, and to learn it in the way that great Nature would have us learn.

Yet, true, though we take with us a vacuous mind, it must be a plenable mind (if I may coin the word), a serenely responsive mind; otherwise we shall not reap the harvest of a quiet eye.

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

III
Notable Walkers

§ 3

All great souls, I venture to think, were at some period of their lives walkers in the country. Jesus of Nazareth spent forty days in the wilderness, and the three years of his mission were, we know, spent in unceasing wandering. And whose heart does not burn within him as he reads the moving narrative of that seven-mile country walk which he took with two of his disciples to the village called Emmaus? It was after a forty days' solitary sojourn on Mount Sinai, too, so we are told, that Moses came down armed with the Decalogue; and was it not after a similar Ramadan retreat that Mohammed returned with the novel doctrine that there was no God but God? Enoch, we know, walked with God; and it is a childish fancy of mine which I am loath to relinquish that God took him, and that he was not, for because he was so delectable a companion. Of a surety the Sweet Singer of Israel must have wandered much in the green pastures and by the still waters; he who kept his father's sheep; who slew both the lion and the bear; who sang the high hills, a refuge for the wild goats, and the rocks for the conies.—Indeed, if one comes to think of it, how much literature owes to the country walk! It was to that long walk outside the wall of Athens, and to the long talk that Socrates held with Phædrus under the plane-tree by the banks of the Ilissus, that we owe one of the most beautiful of the Dialogues of Plato. There had been no Georgics had not Virgil loved the country. Horace must as often have circumambulated his Sabine farm as he perambulated the Via Sacra. Chaucer must sometimes have pilgrimed afoot, and Spenser, trod as well as pricked o'er the plain. Shakespeare's poaching episode gives us a glimpse into his youthful pursuits. Milton "oft the woods among wooed Philomel to hear her evensong"; and even after his blindness "not the more ceased he to wander where the Muses haunt clear spring, or shady grove, or sunny hill." "The Traveller" of Goldsmith was the outcome of a walking tour; so was Robert Louis Stevenson's "Travels in the Cévennes with a Donkey". To how many minds walks about the green flat meads of Oxford have been a quiet stimulant we may get a hint from more than one of Matthew Arnold's poems. Was it to Newman that Jowett, meeting him alone and afoot, put the query: "Nunquam minus solus quam quum solus?" Of Jowett's walks many a tale is told. Of De Quincey, who spent his youth in wanderings; of William Cowper, the gentle singer of the "Winter Walk"; of Thoreau[1]; of Mr John Burroughs[2]; of Richard Jefferies[3]; of Mr Hamilton Wright Mabie,[4] the discoverer of the Forest of Arden; of Mr Henry Van Dyke[5] who would be, I warrant me, an incomparable companion for a walk, and whose books make the pent-up sigh for the open; of "A Son of the Marshes"[6]; of Dr Charles C. Abbott,[7] that indefatigable Wasteland Wanderer; of Mr Charles Goodrich Whiting,public@vhost@g@gutenberg@html@files@46030@[email protected]#Footnote_08" class="fnanchor pginternal" id="FNanchor_08"